Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

It wasn't that long ago, historically speaking, that you might put on your tuxedo or floor-length evening gown to go out and hear a live opera or symphony. But today's world is faster, more technologically connected, and casual. Is there still a place for classical music in the contemporary environment? Max Richter, whose new album In a Landscape releases soon, proves that there is. We talk about what goes into making modern classical music, how musical styles evolve, and why every note should count. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/09/09/288-max-richter-on-the-meaning-of-classical-music-today/ Max Richter trained in composition and piano at Edinburgh University, at the Royal Academy of Music, and with Luciano Berio in Florence. He was a co-founder of the ensemble Piano Circus. His first solo album, "Memoryhouse," was released in 2002. He has since released numerous solo albums, as well as extensive work on soundtracks for film and television, ballet, opera, and collaborations with visual artists. Web site YouTube Spotify Wikipedia

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I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Sometimes I wonder what Henry David Thoreau would have thought of the modern world. You know, Thoreau, among other things, wrote Walden about, his experience sort of escaping from the hustle and bustle of modern life back in the mid-19th century. Our modern life is a lot more hustly and bustly than that, not just in terms of what we're doing, but in terms of what we're hearing and seeing, all of the buzzing, blooming confusion around us is amplified in our modern world of electronics and streaming and cell phones and so forth. what is the role of something like classical music in an environment like that? Popular music famously

can interrupt into your attention, right? It can be catchy, it can be loud, it can be fast-paced, and maybe you hear it in the background or in a store, and you get a little bit of it, and you recognize the song, and it contributes to the atmosphere. But at least the stereotype of classical music is you're supposed to sit and listen to it. You're supposed to give your attention over to this intricately constructed, careful piece of music. Do we really have time for things like that anymore? Some people do, of course, but maybe fewer people than did before. Someone who has very, very successfully pushed against this worry about modern classical music is today's guest, Max Richter. Max is a classical composer in a very real sense, but someone who has completely embraced the modern world

rather than trying to fight against it. You can go to his Wikipedia page and find that he has passed one billion streams for his music and over a million album sales. Very, very good by the standards of modern classical music. But he's a composer who works in a variety of media. He has solo albums. He does commissions for classical ensembles.

He also works with the ballet and scores, TV shows, and films, films like Arrival, TV shows like The Leftovers on HBO, Black Mirror from the UK. And he's even been very successful at crafting little pieces of music that can be used as ringtones on your phone. So I love this ability to stretch from the ability to do a major performance at the Sydney Opera House, but also really vibe with how people are living today. And in this conversation, we get to what this kind of music means today, you know, how it fits in with the history of music. music, how it fits in with how people listen to music right now, how the process of composing and creativity goes, and how it can be the case that music that is essentially non-vocal, right,

almost purely instrumental music. He's done some vocal music things, but most of his music is just the instruments doing their part. How can that have a message? How can that have a theme? How can that resonate with what we're thinking about something in the modern world? He has a new solo album called In a Landscape. It's a solo album, so it's just him constructing all of the sounds, recorded in his new home studio that he and his partner have put together. And it's sort of a back and forth between these constructed pieces of music in a more or less traditional sense and little bits of found sounds, everyday life, the human world, the natural world, all fitting it together in a new way. It gives us hope, this kind of interview you're just about to hear,

that classical music is not going away, that it can be super vibrant and absolutely part of the world moving forward. So with that, let's go. Max Richter, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Hi, great to be here. I do appreciate you coming on. I understand that you are preparing for a world tour. And what is that about?

What is that like? I mean, I think of world tours as being done by performers, and I think of you as a composer, but of course you're a bit of both. Yeah. I mean, playing music live is really in a way the most authentic, the realist, most direct musical experience we have. It's a setting where you really get to experience the conversational aspect of music in real time. You know, you're there in the room. It's a one-time thing. It's a unique occasion. So it's super exciting, and I think we all love doing it. So, yeah, you know, I have a new record coming.

In fact, it's out in a couple of days. So, yeah, we thought, you know, we'll take it on the road and see what happens. So are you, what about the actual mechanics here? Are you playing piano? I know that you have electronic instruments in your music? Yes, I play, I mean, I play piano. I'm playing various keyboards, computers. Gizmos of all sorts.

And then there's a string ensemble. Okay. And yeah. And you've, correct me if I'm wrong, not done a world tour before. You've done plenty of individual performances, but this is like the Rolling Stones going on tour. Yeah, this is the first time we've really put it together in a kind of a planned way. I mean, I've played a, you know, a lot of concerts over the years. But we've never really, you know, gone out on a tour.

tour like a band. So that's what I'm doing now. Yeah. So exciting, intimidating, different? Yeah, I'm excited about it, actually. I love, you know, putting the music out into the real world and seeing what happens because I think it's a little bit like testing a theory. You know, I'll write a bunch of stuff on a piece of paper and I have ideas about what that might be and what it might turn into. part one of learning what it is is the recording process. But really part two, and maybe the most important part, is finding out what happens when you put it in a room with human beings. And also, actually, audiences are different around the world.

They really are. There's different energies, different enthusiasms. And yeah, it's always a really fun thing to do. Well, I was going to ask about that. I mean, how much do you feel you are feeling the emotional, emotions or reactions of the audience in real time. How much does that come across? Yeah, you really get a sense of it. You really get a sense when people are listening, when they're engaged, you know, when they're already connected. You really feel it.

And yeah, it's this moment-to-moment experience for us as performance and for the audience. I once went to a concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall, which I think is on your tour, right? Yeah. So I went to a recital by Andres Schiff playing piano. And I don't know whether this is going to affect you or not, but the acoustics are very, very good in that hall. And for some reason, it was the time of year where everyone started coughing in the audience. And it got so bad because once one person starts coughing, everyone else catches on, that Schiff actually stopped playing and stormed off of the stage. He got across.

He did. Well, yeah, there's a weird thing with coughing, isn't there? Yeah. We've had it a few times. You know, and sometimes you think, you know, as you say, one person will start coughing. And then it sort of sets off this sort of ripple of like, it's like a permission has been given, you know, and then everyone starts doing it. But also, I wonder whether coughing isn't, you know, sometimes like you'll get loads of coughing between numbers. And it's almost like a substitute for a flaw.

You know, where people are like, no, we're not allowed to clap because it's like not finished. It's between movements, but we will cough. So you get this sort of huge, it's a strange thing. Well, that's a great segue because I want to give the audience a chance to just think about the idea of classical music. One of the ideas of classical music is that you don't clap when you're still in the middle of a chain of pieces that are connected together. I mean, how do you think about, what is your definition of classical music? Let's ask it that way. Well, there's a few different ones, I guess.

I mean, strictly speaking, classical music is, you know, the sort of common practice area, sort of 18th century music, so Mozart Hayden. That's classical music. When we say classical music now, we really mean instrumental music played by an orchestra written by somebody in the past. Probably a sort of dead guy, you know. So there is that perception. So it's something, I think, in the sort of public consciousness, it's a bit like a museum.

It's this thing that comes from history. But really, it's a living thing. It's a thing human beings, you know, telling stories with sound, writing things they're passionate about trying to communicate those things, telling stories, responding to the world around them via the medium of music. I personally think classical music now is something which is really borderless. You know, we've got to a position now

where it isn't really just about, you know, adding to the canon, you know, or, you know, sort of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, you know, it isn't about that. Even though, you know, in a way, all music is about other music, but we've sort of escaped this idea of a sort of building on a canon. And there's this kind of wonderful multiplicity, this sort of wide openness of influence going on in music culture right now,

so that ideally we would kind of stop talking about classical music. just be talking about music. That would be great. It's never going to happen. I don't think we're too fond of putting things into boxes, right? It does help us think about things. It's convenient, right? It is convenient. And of course, you know, marketing people and, you know, it's just kind of gives people a frame of reference. It's quite simple, you know, you know, here's your latest symphony cycle. Here's this, you know, whatever it might be, concerto, say, or, you know. And it's, yeah, I guess, I get why people kind of gravitate to that, but, you know, human beings are, you know,

we don't exist in boxes, you know, we're multidimensional and we change our minds and we turn into other people and music is really like that by nature, I think. Well, I grew up enjoying bands like Emerson Lake and Palmer who would play the occasional Prokofia or Holster or whatever, and there's also always been classical orchestras doing kind of gimmicky, kind of covers of popular music. But from what you're saying, it sounds like there's a bit more seriousness to the erasure of the boundaries. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things that happened. The first is that, you know, musicians of all kinds are now working with the computer. So we've all got the same tools. You know, whether you're a conservatoire

studying composition, you know, you'll be working. working with a notation program and maybe some samplers and to make mockups or, you know, Max MSP or something like that. You know, there are many tools which you might use. But also if you're coming from, you know, like a dance music perspective or an EDM perspective, or, you know, there's a kind of interpenetration of like tools. So everyone's using the same things And that I think has has led to a kind of an openness

To materials and methods And the other thing I think is that streaming has happened Okay So you know unlike when I was a kid If I heard something that I loved and wanted to know more about I had to like Open up my piggy bank Get the pocket money out

Take the risk go to the record store You know this is a whole chain of actions and processes and like investment and commitment to hear that sound. Whereas now, you literally just click your mouse and there it is, you know, all the music in the world. So that's meant that people have no risk in terms of just following their enthusiasms through the musical universe. And that's meant that people are listening much more widely, I think. I guess, yeah, I've never really thought of that impact, but that feeds into the idea that the boundaries should come down. There's no reason why someone can't make a

playlist with Taylor Swift followed by something classical. Exactly. Absolutely right. Yeah. And you also, the other thing about your music, so that the audience knows, is that you're pretty eclectic in terms of instrumentation, and not only conventionally understood instruments, but ambient sounds, electronic instruments, etc. I mean, how, how, what role do those things play, would you say? Well, for me, you know, as a kid, I was going, did a very straightforward sort of composer education, you know, piano lessons as a kid and then university and conservatory and all of those things. But I had a simultaneous kind of enthusiasm for the, the music I was hearing, you know, from the

charts, which at that time was, you know, early. the early punk, early electronic music and the sort of tail end of Prague and, you know, experimental, whatever, wasn't really post-rock in those days, but, you know, can and nigh and the sort of, that kind of stuff. So a lot of different languages. And it seemed to me always quite natural that I should, you know, be working with those tools as well. I see it really as simply a, a continuation of the process that's happened to the orchestra from the beginning, really, all through the 18th and 19th century. The orchestra, you know, grows both in size and in terms of available colors, different instruments get added. And composers have always pushed against, you know, the possible and tried to go into new spaces.

You have to look at what happens to the piano keyboard in Beethoven's lifetime, you know, just longer and longer and longer. Right? So, you know, we're always looking for new things, new colors, new possibilities. And for me, the electronics are really just, you know, the palette getting bigger. All right, quick quiz for the hiring managers out there. What's worse? Being understaffed or being poorly staffed? Well, that's a trick question, because both are recipes for chaos. Either way, just say to yourself, this is a job for indeed sponsored jobs. You'll get matched with candidates that meet the skills, certifications, and everything else you're looking for. Or go a different way and get no traction.

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When people turn to telehealth or weight loss, they're looking for real support. That's why more people are choosing orderly meds.com. Orderly meds connection with real doctors and access to proven GLP1 medications like. semaglutide and terseptatide. No guessing, just a more supportive experience, and all shift directly to your door in discrete packaging. Do your research, ask questions, then visit orderlymeds.com slash podcast for an exclusive offer. That's orderly meds.com slash podcast. Individual results may vary not medical advice, eligibility required seaside for details. And am I right that these formative years where you were looking for vinyl records? Was that in Germany? No, I grew up in the UK. I was born in Germany. We moved to the UK when I was really very young. I was like three.

Because Germany obviously has been in the vanguard of electronic music and experimental music. Sure, of course, yeah. I mean, for me, you know, here in Kraftwerk for the first time, which was when I was about 12 or 13, absolutely

blew my mind and was completely formative for me. I heard this music on a TV show. It was the opening of Autobahn. And I just had never heard any like it. Yeah. And I was intoxicated and, you know, I wrote a letter to the BBC and said, please tell me what the music is this program. I posted it in the postbox, waited six weeks, got a reply back, it's craft track ultaban, right. So then I know what it is. So then I get my,

you know, I get my pocket money out, get on the bus into town, get to the record shop. I mean, sounds crazy now, right? It does. It's very different, different world. Anyway, so, you know, days and weeks later, I get this record, put it on a record player. And, you know, hearing their bass line at the beginning of Autobahn, it's like my life has changed, you know, absolutely transformed. And, yeah, you know, from then on, I just knew I wanted to get my hands on a synthesizer. Were you already in love with classical music at this time? Oh, yeah. No, I was, you know, practicing the piano and I was into music.

Okay, very good. Let's do our best to give the audience an idea of what your music sounds like, given that if we try to actually play some music for them, there are rights issues and lawyers will come in. So I will link to it, absolutely. But how would you describe your own approach within this eclectic musical universe? Yeah. Okay, so maybe I need to sort of do this kind of chronologically. So basically I trained. at a time, you know, at university and then at the Academy in London,

and then I went to Florence and studied with Berrio there. So a very sort of straightforward academic composed training. And at that time, there was an orthodoxy about the kind of music you should write. And this was kind of complexity, basically. It was sort of post-Boulat's, you know, total serialism, plus plus plus. And if you were interested in tonal music, it just meant you were stupid. Literally, that was the attitude. You can write that, but you are stupid.

Let me just interrupt to ask for an explanation of tonal versus the alternative. Okay, so tonal music is what we're used to hearing in pop music, or most of the music around us. It's music based around the tonal system, which is a structure of truble. riots. It comes from, well, it was codified really by Bach. But tonality itself, the tonal system is really like a cultural elaboration of the harmonic series. The harmonic series is something from physics and it's to do with numerical physical relationships. And the tonal system is like an expression of that. So, does that make any? sense? That's what the tonal system is. I think it kind of makes sense. You know, probably a lot of people have seen those videos where people play the same three chords, right? The, you know, the root, the fourth and the fifth, and it fits half the songs they've ever heard in their lives, right? Exactly. Right. So it's like this amazing resource, kind of lexicon of musical possibility where we're saturated

with it, you know? That doesn't mean it's exhausted. There's lots to come from tonality. But in your schools, this was looked down upon. Well, yeah. So what happened is that there was this sort of, there was like a historical view of like musical inverted commerce progress. And what happens is that as music history goes along from, it moves from Bach into the romantics. And the romantics basically add dissonance. Dissinance is like tones which are foreign to the chords that we're hearing, foreign to the key that we're hearing. So you get a piling up of dissonance.

And then towards the very end of the 19th century, early 20th century, you get this kind of, it's like a big wave of dissonance that sort of breaks. And you get into a situation where you take away the tonal center. and various people start to try and think of ways of writing music, which are not to do with tonality. And it's kind of bracing slash terrifying, slash confusing, slash interesting. It's kind of all of those things. And you get one of the ways that people try to organize music

in the absence of a tonal center. So, you know, we don't have our familiar chords anymore. how do we organise those sounds? So one of the ways of organising it was a thing called serialism, which Schoenberg comes up with, around 1988, 9, 10, around there. And actually slightly later, sorry, more like 12, 13, 15. And he, and this is to do with like putting tones in a predetermined order

and building sort of geometrical structures out of tones. It sounds very abstract, and that's because it is. It's actually nothing to do with like the sensation and feeling of music. From the head, not the heart. Taking music and turning it into this kind of abstract system. Basically, that's the 20th century. It gets more and more of that. Schoenberg starts off making series of pitches,

and then you get duration and rhythm, and dynamics and all kinds of things. So everything is like systematized. And it becomes this really weird sort of arms race of abstraction. So that's what I was supposed to be writing when I was a kid. And I was like, I did do that for a while. You know, very complex, very abstract sort of music, you know, very hard to understand or love.

and then I just I'd got to study with Berrio and I showed him this piano piece of mine which is in the tradition of like student composers piano pieces which are impossible to play really hard

you know just so dead so difficult and he looked at it and he was just like is this actually what you want to be doing really with your time what is music for? Why are you doing this? You know, asking sort of really profound questions, really, you know, basic fundamental questions about what music was.

And so that kind of, in a way, unsettled me. And then around the same time, we were starting to hear the music of the kind of new tonal music coming out of the Baltic states. So this is Arveh Pert and these sorts of composers. Plus, I had been playing loads of Minutes. music as part of a six piano group. So we played, you know, Steve Reich, six pianos, the early Philip Glass things, lots of kind of pulsy sort of minimal music.

And all these things kind of piled up on me, really. And just, so I just kind of thought, hang on a minute. Why am I doing this other stuff? Here's an alternative. Here's a potential new language, for me, new language, which can where I can be very direct about what I'm trying to say

and that to me ultimately made much more sense it sounds like an amazingly familiar kind of story not just in music but in art literature maybe even like science and politics where there's some super successful paradigm

tonal music and so successful that it just gets done to death and people react against it and maybe they go too far reacting against it so there becomes more room for experimenting in some perpendicular direction. Yeah, yeah, I think that happens a lot in culture, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And it's part of the historic aspect of it, right? Like when you write a piece of music, the audience has heard other pieces of music, right? They've heard some of these things and they put it in that context, whether consciously or otherwise. That's right, yeah.

I mean, every listener is bringing, well, put it this way, they're listening through the prism of their biography, right? Yeah. Every piece of music they've heard informs the way they hear what they're hearing in that moment. And there's something really beautiful about that. So would you, and again, this is labels and I know they're never perfect, but again, the audience has to go out and find the music for themselves.

So until then, would you count yourself as a minimalist composer? I don't know. I'm certainly trying to do the maximum with the minimum. Every note is there for a reason. And I try to, you know, I try very hard to make things, to make the things I'm writing come over or connect in as direct a way as possible. And that means they are quite sort of, they're sort of low information zones in a way.

I'm trying to sort of achieve a kind of a very lean, direct expression. I think if we minimalism in music, we think of like the early glass and Reich pieces which are very pattern-based.

I mean, I work a lot with patterns because there's something very fundamental in music to do with patterns. It goes all. the way back. Well, all the way back. Sure. I'm talking of Mozart. It's all made of patents. You know, it's just it's, you know, it's how I'm the bar for the same. So, you know, I do

work with those things, but it's, that isn't my sort of main thing. Yeah. Or rather it's not a thing in itself. Is there, but it is a little bit in there. Are there explicitly geometric or mathematical ideas that go into your head when you're composing a piece of music? Yes, no. I would rather, if I can tell the story in a way where the kind of technical aspect of the music also expresses what I'm trying to say, then I will do that because that enriches the experience of the listener. You know, I mean, like, I don't know, I mean, sort of imagine like a trivial example. Say I read a piece called Falling, say.

Yeah. And it was just made out of lines of notes which descended, you know, something like that. I mean, you could imagine a piece like that. And if you could make something satisfying musically, I mean, that's, you know, kind of a mad example because it's sort of very banal. But you know what I mean? Yeah. Something, you know, if there's something about the musical text. sure itself, which can embody the subject matter, then I will definitely try and do that.

I enjoy those kinds of things. Well, I have two different completely uneducated ideas about music that I'm going to take advantage of you being here to run by you and you can tell me whether I'm right or wrong. One, dealing with what we were just talking about, is that a lot of the pleasure of music comes from some competition between anticipation and novelty, right? Like, there's a rhythm. If you have no rhythm, if you have no structure at all, it's kind of not musical.

But of course, if it's just repeating exactly the same thing over and over again, it's not musical either. So finding that sweet spot is a lot of the part of success story. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I work a lot with, I suppose you call redundancy, redundant information, you know? I mean, that's something I've taken from the minimalist.

You know, this idea of continually, how could you describe it? You know, if you work, say, with repeated material, in a sense, you're sort of always in the same place. You're re-experiencing the same moment. And so if you make small shifts and changes, you get the experience of novelty, but within an unknown space. I mean, for me, one of the things I like to do is I like the listener to, in a sense, learn the territory of a piece while the piece is happening. Okay. And then once you've, once you've sort of marked out the basic terrain, then you can then you can sort of make changes which will be very affecting you know say for example a piece of piece of mind like say the dream

music in sleep this is very very simple music you have piano chords with which are regular they happen absolutely regularly you have a subsonic bass tone which happens absolutely regularly. The piano chords themselves are a thing called a chain of suspensions which is something I borrowed from the Baroque.

So it is a kind of a known thing. So we have a lot of different things, all of which are in a way familiar to us at some level and because I repeat them they become very familiar

to us. So then when I make very small changes by introducing, for example, a melody line, it's like, you know, a character walking into a room that we know very well. So that kind of a grammar, that kind of a structure is that can be very effective. Do you think of different elements of your music as characters in a drama? I mean, for me, writing a piece of music is like trying to

it is like trying to make a space or there's an element of sort of architecture or landscape about it you know there's a kind of a it's quite hard to explain it but there's a sort of feeling of like trying to it's sort of world building a little bit

yeah okay that's great that quality so you did mention borrowing suspended cords from the Baroque and I should tell the audience you've done a whole album of reimagining Vivaldi. Yes, I have. Yeah. That's, yeah. When people turn to telehealth for weight loss,

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an exclusive offer. That's orderly meds.com slash podcast. Individual results may vary now, medical advice, eligibility required, C-Sight for details. And so it leads me to ask, so here's my other crazy theory, and this is even crazier. The first one was kind of obvious. You know, in biology or in physics, we sometimes talk about a fitness landscape. We have all different sorts of ways that DNA can be arranged or fields or particles can be arranged. And they have different energies and different possibilities of survival. And the idea is that there's kind of isolated peaks where everything is good and happy. And then in the valleys in between them, you're unstable. So, for example, elephants are very successful. Ants are very successful. But something that was

halfway in between an elephant and an ant would not be successful, right? So my crazy theory is the music is the same way, that there are different kinds of music that are individually successful and that there's reasons for internal coherence and so forth that they are successful and you can try to blend them, but it's never quite the same. So there will always be orchestral music and there will always be pop music and they will always be jazz and they'll always be talking to each other but a little bit different. That's my theory. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting, isn't it? Because was, yeah, I mean, like, for example, say in the Vivaldi project, so this is recomposed, so where I took, I basically took the four seasons, the very famous piece of Vivaldi.

And kind of did a, like an off-road trip through Vivaldi's landscape. That's kind of how I see it. And for me, this is like a personal, project, you know, I fell in love with the original when I was a kid and then I heard it, you know, on when people's trying to sell you insurance on the phone or something, you know, something ghastly or in an elevator, just depressing, you know, depressing experiences of this. So for me, it's a salvage mission to try and reconnect with the original. So really from, yeah, I was sort of faced with how to connect my language or what I was doing with the Vivaldi. And I did that via the,

we've talked about this already, via the medium of pattern. Yeah. When you look at the four seasons, the original, some of those pages, you think, well,

that kind of looks like John Adams. Or, you know, it's just like these patterns. Because it's really just patterns, sort of with jump cuts. That's how Vivaldi has made. A lot of that material. It's very modern, actually,

in kind of construct, architecturally. And I thought, these are patterns. I can get with this. So I used that kind of principle and connected my language with Vivaldi's language via that idea.

But as you say, there are plenty of other musical traditions where if you tried to connect them with the Vivaldi, they might be quite a lot less successful. Or sort of they wouldn't make as much sense. I guess I had this kind of skeleton key of the idea of pattern. And is this, you know, among people who might be thought of as classical composers of your generation, do some of them completely reject the historical perspective,

or is it very common for people to kind of be quoting and in conversation with their predecessors? I think music has always done this. I mean, you know, variation forms, the idea of a fantasia on, whatever it might be. I mean, Vivaldi did it with Vivaldi's own music, Bart rewrote, reworked, you know, so many are different of his own pieces, also Vivaldi, of course.

If you think of someone like Lists or Brahms, you know, they were writing variations, versions of other people's music. It's a process as old as composition. Because, you know, once a piece of material, is sort of out there. It just kind of floats around in the sort of global musical mind, and people catch onto these things and they think, hang on a minute, I like that. I want to do

this with it, you know. And I think it's a very natural thing. Well, we already mentioned the audience reaction in real time when you're doing a performance, but it seems like your new album. Tell us about your new album because the quote that comes with it is it is an open conversation with the audience. Yeah, I mean, for me, so this project is called In a Landscape. And the record is about kind of polarities and reconciling polarities. So I'm working with disparate means. So acoustic instruments, electronic instruments, looking at themes from the natural world, the human world,

And also, as implied in the title, which you can mishear as inner landscape, as an internal landscape, sort of deliberately playing with that idea of, you know, the external and the human and the societal. So, yeah, for me, you know, writing a piece of music and, you know, we've already mentioned this idea is sort of half of the conversation in a way. And the other half of the conversation is what that listener will bring to it. And that's actually what I'm really interested in hearing. For me, it's really fascinating to discover, you know, what people make of things. Because that actually tells me a lot about what I've done. The idea of spatial structures seems to be very common, whether it's like a landscape or, you know,

You mentioned different patterns out there in the world, walking into a room and so forth. But at the end of the day, it's sound that you're making. How much of that connection is personal versus like, oh, here is the theory of why these sounds kind of fit into this facial structure? I mean, I think, you know, ultimately music is really a feeling thing. it's such a it's such an interesting language because it's it is very conceptual you know there are a lot of there's a lot of thinking going on you know a lot of conceptualizing planning strategy architectural schemes you know ideas about structure ideas about you know how to move through time in a piece of music you know how fast is it how does it where is the energy how does it you know how much

The architecture work, very conceptual, but ultimately it's totally a feeling thing. You know, a listener doesn't go, oh, that was a 13 bath, you know, thing. And then there was a dominant preparation and blah, blah, blah. They don't think that. They go, they either kind of nod their head and go, you know, or they walk out of the room. You know, it's like there's a, you know, or they tap their feet, you know. There's something, it's completely a sort of visceral, sensory experience, it's a feeling thing. And of course, goes directly to our emotions.

So it is paradoxical in that sense. You know, I had a music teacher in junior high school, who was the one who explained to us that if you just listen to a pop song, there are things called verses and choruses and instrumental sections and guitar solos and drum solos. And that had, very embarrassed to say, that it never really occurred to me. not being a, you know, practicing performer of music myself. I just, like you say, I just sort of enjoyed the thing, the song, as a gestalt, and this idea of structure warmed my proto-physicist heart. Then I could see layers there that I hadn't seen before.

But I suspect a lot of musicians and composers don't realize the extent to which the audience doesn't appreciate some of the structural bells and board. whistles that they have. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think, and again, I guess that goes back to this idea that of trying to have a language which is very direct and plain. And in a way, not hiding those things.

Because, you know, a lot of, within music, there's a lot of artifice. There's almost like misdirection or flight of hand, you know, looks over here and now this is happening, you know. So I'm sort of, I've been trying to. to get towards a situation where the material speaks very directly and plainly. So in other words, it's not necessary to think of it in a kind of analytical way, but you can just listen to it. But that was interesting because you use the phrase speaks very directly and plainly.

But a lot of the music is instrumental, right? And when you describe it, it's clear that in your mind, there are often, you know, words or themes or things that could be expressed verbally that are attached to it. How close is that connection there when you say like a certain piece is about the Iraq war? But I wouldn't know that if I were just listening to it, right? Yeah. Well, this is one of the other paradoxes, isn't it?

I mean, when you hear a piece of music, if you, you, you sort of connect with it in any way, you do feel like you're being spoken to about something and you're sharing something of the consciousness of the person who made that piece or who played it. And this is, again, one of the great puzzles of music. You know, we feel, look, this is just air bouncing around, right? And yet, you know, there is something very profound going on. But, I mean, it's just such a paradoxical and interesting thing. And I guess now that I'm just thinking of this right now, so I might be embarrassed to say this, but it makes me think of Bruce Springsteen's song Born in the USA.

I don't know if you know it, but the music is sort of anthemic, right? And, you know, it makes you feel, given the title, that this is some patriotic anthem or whatever. But the words are telling a very different story, and so many people don't get that because they don't listen to the word. It's a very dark song. It's a song about loss and everything falling to pieces, right? Yeah. It's hilarious, right? Because I think at one point it was even used as a kind of campaign song.

Absolutely. Yeah. Over and over again, not just at one point. People love it. I can answer them. It's like, really? Are you even listening to it? No, no, they are not.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's interesting that, isn't it? I mean, he's obviously a brilliant songwriter, and it's a very clever piece of writing because it's actually the blackest irony, right? Yeah, that song. So the other thing you say about in a landscape is that it asks the audience to consider the dualities in their own life. And that was just sort of pregnant with meaning there.

I didn't want to unpack it for you. So what are the dualities we're thinking about here? Well, in the record itself, you have composed music, so instrumental music, which have been written down. and then you have essentially found objects, interludes really, between the composed music. So you've got this sort of polarity operating in the piece all the time.

And that's, I guess, sort of speaks to the idea of polarities. And this for me, I guess, leans into the societal aspect of the record and the time that we're living in. You know, we live in a very polarised. time. You know, at the moment we, we're a historical moment is a moment where people who have, you know, mild disagreements can't even speak to one another. It's a very, very sort of, very problematic. And I guess in trying to, you know, have these different kinds of objects live with one another, the electronic, the acoustic, the found

object, the intentionally written music, putting these things into a kind of fruitful unity, I guess I'm making a kind of a small plea for coexistence and listening. All right, quick quiz for the hiring managers out there. What's worse? Being understaffed or being poorly staffed? Well, that's a trick question, because both are recipes for chaos. Either way, just say to yourself, this is a job for indeed sponsored jobs. You'll get matched with candidates that meet the skills, certifications, and everything else you're looking for. Or go a different way and get no traction.

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door in discrete packaging. Do your research, ask questions, then visit orderlymeds.com slash podcast for an exclusive offer. That's orderly meds.com slash podcast. Individual results may vary not medical advice, eligibility required, C-Sight for details. Well, the listening does matter, and here is the topic I'm most interested in hearing your thoughts about. I once had a friend who was a musician who would come over to our house and if I had music playing in the background he would ask me to turn it off. He did not want there to be any music if you could not sit silently and listen to it. But I guess there's layers.

There's different approaches here. Where do you come down on the, if there's music at all, you'd better be playing close attention to it question. I can see both sides of this. I have the radio on in my kitchen, you know, during all waking hours. But it's set at such a level so that if I'm cooking, I can hear the music.

Because I like to be surprised. I like to hear things, you know, that I haven't heard or wasn't expecting to hear. On the other hand, if I, you know, listen to music, then if I put a record on, then I will sit and listen to that music with full concentration. Because that is what the artist will have intended.

So I guess that's a sort of, you know, it's like a contract. Well, usually that's what the artist intends, but you do have this famous record called Sleep, not really a record, a piece. Tell the audience about that because I just love the whole concept. Okay, so sleep comes from, I guess, about 2013, 2014, when 4G internet moved into our pockets.

So that meant we then had social media 24-7 in our pockets. And Yulia, my partner and I were talking about this and the sort of societal effects on it, of it. And, you know, of course, you know, loads of fun, very interesting, but also. significant psychological load and pressure. So I was thinking about the way that, you know, large-scale artworks, you know, a long movie, a big painting, say a big Rothko or something, a big novel, you know, Anna Karenna or something, you can use it as a way to kind of, kind of blanket out reality and just concentrate on that. an extended duration music can have that effect, right?

So I thought, okay, so I'm going to make a piece which can be like a big pause button. You'll put on and you can just like zone out for eight hours. And so that's what sleep is. It's at one level, a kind of a lullaby, at one level, a kind of a protest song. Sorry, what's being protested? Um, neoliberalism. Okay. Wow.

You know, the idea of constant productivity. Yeah. So it's a kind of like, let's just stop for a second. Yeah. So that was, yeah, that was sleep. It's a music for piano, organ, synthesizers, string quintet and soprano. But the eight hours is not chosen as a random number.

it is meant to allow you to put the music on while you are sleeping at night. Yes, exactly. So the piece isn't really to be, well, you can experience it any way you like, but I intended it really to just be inhabited, to be slept through, more like, again, like a landscape rather than, yeah, a concert. And actually for us, you know, when we started to play the piece live, it was a bit of a learning curve because we realized that we weren't really playing a concert. You know, it looked a bit like a concert, even though, of course, we had, you know, 500 people in beds in front of us.

But there were still us and an audience, and we thought, you know, we went into kind of our default setting as musicians and we tried to project this piece into the space. And actually, you know, very quickly we realized this was not what we should be doing. What we were doing is we were accompanying something that is happening in the room, which is, you know, a community of strangers, hundreds of people who don't know one another, who've come together and basically trusted one another to be sort of in this very vulnerable state and go on this journey through the night together.

And really, we were just accompanying this thing that's happening. So it's a very different dynamic. And maybe in some sense a more truthful, acknowledgement of the fact that music like anything else is just one aspect of the life that is going on all around us. So rather than insisting that you stop everything else and pay attention, work it into the fabric. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And also, yeah, to try and sort of, I guess, question the sort of hierarchical aspect of, you know, music as this, you know, again, going back to the romantics or the modernists, you know, this idea of, a,

greatness, you know. You know, you have the sort of the great composer who writes the great piece, and then we all have to listen and sort of shut up and behave and, you know, try to absorb the greatness, you know. It's just, I want to try and get away from that idea. Well, and the other manifestation of that, which I truly love, is that rather than being annoyed or frustrated that in the smartphone era, someone might use your music as a ringtone, You leaned into that. He said, all right, here's a bunch of ringtones for you. Yeah.

So, I mean, this comes, so this is the 24 postcards. Yeah, I guess really the thing that kind of prompted this was, you know, hearing that crazy frog ringtone everywhere. I don't know if anyone remembers that, but pretty traumatic. Just hearing this thing going off all the time. And I suddenly thought to myself, look, there's all right. these millions of little loudspeakers going around the world. You know, we could actually, you know, this is a space for music, music. You know, it could be a creative space.

So I wrote, yeah, all these little fragments. And just almost like treated them like polarites, you know, just little snapshots of a moment. Yeah, for people that use as are intense. Well, there's a difference between greatness and grandiosity, right? Yeah. And for, well, it reminds me of, again, completely randomly, very recently, someone pointed out that the most reproduced example of visual art in the history of the world is probably, do you want to guess? Yeah, I don't know, actually.

The portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the U.S. penny. Really? Just because there's so many pennies out there, right? Of course, right. Okay, fair enough. So little bits of art all around. Why not make it good? Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. And is it true that for sleep, you thought a little bit about sleep, about the neuroscience of sleep, about what's going on in people's brains when they're asleep? Yes. Yeah. I mean, obviously, I had sort of ideas from a purely musical point of view,

what kinds of things I should be doing. But I had no real data, you know. And actually around, you know, know, it's funny to think, but 2012, 2013 around there, there hadn't been that much research about the effects of music and sound on sleep. There's been a ton recently, but not, there wasn't an awful lot out there. I called up a friend of mine, David Eagleman, who is a neuroscientist. Former guest of the podcast. Okay, well, you know, David, he's an absolute live wire and so sort of multidimensional. So he pointed me at some stuff. And I just sort of

checked through a few things. And just to kind of, it was like a sense check, really, just to make sure that what I was planning to do would actually have some beneficial effect. I guess the big thing is, and this for me, compositionally was beautiful, is that, you know, some people that demonstrated that using like repetitive low frequency tones can, you know, elongate slow wave sleep so you get better. information processing and memory, that kind of stuff. So that for me was great, because I love the sort of low end and subsonics.

It's all over my work for decades. So I was then able to reach into that space for sleep, which was great. When you say the word subsonic, do you mean literally too low to hear? We don't know we're experiencing it? Almost, yeah. or I mean down at sort of 2530, 30, 3540 kind of thing, where you sort of hear it and sort of feel it. So has anyone done the obvious follow-up study of seeing what happens to people's brains while they're listening to your composition and they're sleeping? Well, I would love someone to do that.

Okay, good. But I don't think it's been done. Throw it out there. Yeah. I'm sure we have some neuroscience grad students who are looking for a good PhD project. That might just be it. Okay, the other thing I want to talk about, I can't let you go without asking, you know, I always have these sort of craft questions. Like, what does it like to be a composer in the way that you're doing it?

I mean, I hate asking this question, but it's the standard one. Where do you get your ideas for a tune? Is it random? Do you, like, sit down and think, okay, now I will come up with a melody or a harmony? Um, it's, there's kind of no one way, honestly. I mean, I, you know, as a, I guess this goes back to childhood really for me. You know, I've always had just music going around in my head. Um, when I was a tiny kid, I thought everyone always had music going around in their head. It just, later on, I was like, no, this is not happening to everybody. Um, um,

So I've always got sort of just little fragments, things bubbling away. I'm, you know, if I have a project a specific thing to do, then it's partly just, I guess, trying to assemble little atoms into something and seeing which things stick together and how they interrelate and then you can build structures. it's like in a way it's like any kind of process you know it's like macro and micro in parallel um i guess the big thing that i really uh and and i think probably most creative people have this that i really love is when the material starts to feel like it has a kind of intentionality you know things start to sort of happen in the material um and that is that's them very You know, then it's about following that material kind of where it wants to go. And sometimes actually it's, it actually sort of goes somewhere outside the project.

And you think, oh, no, now this is a different piece. This is not what I'm doing right now. But okay, you know, you keep going. But it's something else. So there's the writing process is like continuous, basically. And the individual projects have sort of dotted lines around them. But there's actually just writing going on. a time. Well, that's a fascinating thing to say, because I've never heard a musical composer say that,

but I've heard many, many fiction writers say that, right? Once they get characters, they go places that they had no idea. Yeah, exactly. And I do think that I am one of those people who always has music bouncing around in their heads, but it's music that has been written and recorded by other people. So I think that it would be very hard for me to break out of that and make something new, having been exposed to so many really good pieces of music already in my life. Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, in my case, it's sort of both of those. You know, if I, I don't know, when I'm making coffee in the morning, I hear something on the radio that I, that I love, you know, it will be sort of there as well. It'll be kind of, you know, it'll be around for a while.

And then in that process, once you go from, well, sorry, let me just back up and be very down to earth. do you then go to the piano or do you have other instruments you go to or do you go to a piece of paper and start writing a score? It depends. I mean, I do work on paper. So most, you know, the beginning of, at some point towards the beginning of a project, there will be a lot of writing on paper. You know, I'm a pianist. That's my sort of sketchpad, so I will also be, you know, just trying stuff. but a lot of the time I'll be sort of playing and writing. Okay, yeah. So with that kind of process. And then depending on what it is,

I will at some point probably get the computer involved, whether that's just, you know, scoring, whatever it is I've done, making sort of copies, or if it's something which is, you know, more about sound itself, then maybe working with the synthesizers or the computer in terms of like shaping material. And that always leaves you with, you know, many more ideas and paths. Ideas sketched out and paths walked down than you can possibly fit into the final piece, right?

Do those stay with you when you hear a piece of music that you have composed? Do you recall like all the things you didn't do? Definitely, yeah. The finished piece is like a negative map of the things you didn't do with it, right? Yeah. It literally describes the territory. There's another, you know, there's a million other universities out there with all the different versions. Have you or anyone else done an album or a piece around that idea?

Like, you know, the paths not walked down for this final thing that we end up with? I don't know. I mean, I guess in a way, variation forms and music fill that space a little bit. You know, they do. You know, if you listen to the Goldbergs, you know, you've got 31. different ways to make that journey. Right. You know, and of course there are many more, but that's all you had time for.

Okay. And then for someone like you, you're established. You've made a name for yourself, to say the least. Do you hand over the music to performers? Or is it, I don't know. How does it work? It depends what it is. You know, if somebody has commissioned something, say,

say an orchestral piece or ballet or whatever, it might be, then yes, then, you know, I write it all down. We make a score. Then, you know, here is the score. And then, you know, it's over to whoever it is who's playing the piece or conducting it. Other times, you know, say it's a film project, then, you know, I'll be recording it here at the studio. And there'll be a sort of a dialogue back and forth with director, editor, in terms of how it should all work. That's much more conversational kind of a process. or if it's a solo album, then it's, you know, me sitting in this room, writing away, and then recording it and then doing absolutely every aspect of it myself.

I guess that is true. I forgot to ask about this process of collaborating with a movie or TV director or what have you. I mean, that sounds very different to me than sitting down and writing a solo album or a, you know, sorry, the word went out of my head. had a commissioned symphony. Yeah, it's completely different. It's a fundamentally a collaborative thing. You know, it's music is, well, a TV show is not a symphony, right?

There are other things going on. There are actors. There's a story. So quite, you know, naturally the music has to be any part of something. But, you know, what's the best way for the music to be part of the thing? That's what we're trying to figure out. trying to figure out what is what is the music that feels innate or inevitable within the world of that story and that's something which you arrive at by you know experiment and conversation

and luck sometimes are you presented with basically the film without a without a soundtrack and you start filling in? Yeah, I mean, there's a million different ways. I mean, quite often I'll write things, you know, from the page, from the script. So then I'm just dealing with the themes, the psychology of the thing or, you know, whatever it might be, the drama. Other times, you know, you'll get scenes or a whole cut of a thing and then you're responding to the visuals. Yeah, it varies. I mean, the theme that seems to come through over and over again is that music, is not independent of the rest of our censoria, right? The rest of what we are experiencing and related to in our everyday lives.

Yeah, yeah. It is something which is involving and connected in a really deep way, I think, to, I mean, for me, you know, the experience of being a person, how we relate to one another, all of these things. It's a very, it's a very simultaneously very simple and very mysterious thing. And I really enjoy that about it, actually. The fact that it's kind of endlessly elusive in a way. All right.

Last question then. Any advice for the teenagers in the audience who have made the somewhat foolhardy decision to try to make a living, being a composer of music or a performer for that matter? Well, I think, yeah, I mean, I think for composers, I mean, probably for all musicians, ultimately, there's a few different things, aren't there? I mean, you have to just learn, learn, learn, learn. Learn everything you can learn and then keep learning. technical stuff, historical stuff, you know, just be immersed with it.

And then I think try to figure out what it is that you've got, which is the thing that really makes you, you. You know, that bit of your biography, that bit of your story, which is really, which no one else has got, right? because that's what you write from and that's your sort of origin point and that everyone has a unique version of that and I think if you know I think ultimately it's it's probably the best thing you've got

right this is great this is good advice for no matter what you're going up to be I think right I agree you know I mean I think you know if you can do that it's first of all it's more you know you're being you're sort of having more fun probably because you're just being you but you also have to have a lot of in a way trust in that, because we tend to sort of get a bit anxious about being ourselves. But actually, you know, it's the best thing you can do.

Good, perfect. I like ending on the optimistic note, and that was a perfect place to stop. So Max Victor, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Thank you. It's a pleasure. What if you could have even more and more and more help to pursue your goals? At LPL Financial, we offer more ways for advisors

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