MAX RICHTER - Award-winning Composer & Pianist

Composer Max Richter is known for his ability to translate profound human emotions into music. Max’s record Sleep is the most streamed classical album of all time and his catalogue has surpassed 3 billion streams.

A prolific collaborator, he scored and performed for Kim Jones for the Dior shows, and the new Wayne McGregor and Margaret Atwood ballet MADDADDAM, and arts collective Random International on the Rain Room installation.

Max has collaborated with film directors Denis Villeneuve, Martin Scorsese, and Ari Folman, and scored film & TV including Ad Astra, Black Mirror, Shutter Island, The Leftovers, Arrival and his Emmy-nominated score for Taboo.

He’s the co-founder of Studio Richter Mahr, with his partner and artist Yulia Mahr in Oxfordshire, UK. Max and Yulia built the studio around an old tractor barn, and have powered it with cutting-edge solar and heat-pump technology. It’s a haven for their family and community of musicians and artists which regularly come through. Set within 31 acres of woodland, Max and Yulia have a huge passion for using the land to farm and provide a sustainable working environment as well as using creativity as an elevating force within society. Operating as a free space for artists to develop their work, the studio also works with local partners to support the local community.

"You know, so much of it is about trying to get to a situation where you can sort of uncover the work. It is sort of out there, and it's about having enough patience, peace of mind, concentration, and opportunity to kind of let it come into the foreground somehow. I think Picasso says that: "I hope that when inspiration strikes, it finds me sitting in the chair." You know, so you do have to be in the chair in order for that process to happen. Or in some way in the chair, maybe not literally, but you need to be ready.

Creative work in some way feels like a dialogue with something else. But you know, whether that's something else that is kind of out there, or whether that's something else that is actually just a part of our mind which is normally inaccessible to us, it sort of doesn't matter, in a way. It's sort of not important. But I do think that feeling of there being a dialogue or some sort of inquiry into something else, that's fundamental to creativity.

So again, it's something which is about tabula rasa, something which is about fundamentals, things which are universal, kind of the origin of being, in a way. So all of these sorts of gestures, all of these kinds of ideas in Sleep, they all point to the idea of sleep as being, in some ways, a negotiation. A conversation between a kind of existence and non-existence, you know? "Our little life is rounded with a sleep." You know, this idea of being a kind of fundamental state. So all of the musical language, all the musical objects suggest that sort of feeling. And I think we all need that. We all need to connect to these fundamentals, to the big things which are sort of pre-civilization, the things which are before all the noise, the things which are shared, very simple human experiences.

I think there's something about our culture which sort of erodes those connections to those experiences. And I think particularly large-scale creative works can allow us to reconnect to them because they feel like alternate realities. So when you go to a Sleep performance, you are entering a kind of a different world.”

www.maxrichtermusic.com

https://studiorichtermahr.com

Photo by William Waterworth

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast