6 minute read
The Richter scales
SPOTLIGHT MAX RICHTER
With dozens of memorable film scores to his name, WSA guest of honour Max Richter is also a trailblazer in the world of aural experimentation. Dan Jolin meets the man behind the music
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M
ax Richter has been professionally creating and experimenting with music since the mid-1990s.
As well as scoring dozens of films, including Haifaa Al Mansour’s Wadjda, Scott Cooper’s Hostiles and James Gray’s Ad Astra (see boxout), his influential blend of classical and electronica has resulted in a number of lauded solo albums, such as 2004’s The Blue Notebooks (his response to the Iraq War) and 2020’s Voices (a celebration-cum-elegy for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). One heartrending piece from The Blue Notebooks, ‘On The Nature Of Daylight’, has featured in several movies and TV shows, including Shutter Island, Arrival and The Handmaid’s Tale.
In short, Richter has much to be proud of, and the fact he is a guest of honour at this year’s World Soundtrack Awards (WSA) should come as no surprise… except, perhaps, to the man himself. “I always assume no-one’s ever listening to anything I do,” Richter says. “So when a thing like this happens, you realise that maybe some people are listening. Which is really nice.”
This should not be mistaken for false or even misplaced modesty. “For a lot of years it was true,” he laughs, speaking from his UK studio, where he is preparing for his first post-Covid live performance the following day. “I would make a record and then no-one would hear it. Composing is not a career which makes any sort of rational sense. I just internalised the attitude that I’d work on a project, release it and no-one would care.”
Mood music
For years, music was something that just happened inside Richter’s head. As a child growing up 45 miles north of London in Bedford (where he moved soon after being born in Hameln, Germany), it always circled his mind. Occasionally, he would have what he describes as “an intense musical experience”, where he would hear a composition and realise he was relating to it differently than anyone else around him. “I was physically moved, affected, changed by pieces of music I was hearing. Maybe it was obvious all along that I would be some way involved with it.”
Music is deeply personal to Richter, with his own work frequently described as ‘moody’ or
Max Richter, composer
‘introspective’. A fair appraisal, he agrees. “The music I write is the outcome of my experience of being in the world. If we look around ourselves, we can agree that the world is not in great shape at the moment. So it’s perhaps inevitable that a kind of melancholia is going to creep in.”
Richter did not long remain undiscovered. In 2003, it took a “completely accidental” film-scoring gig to shift him blearily into the limelight, with Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz With Bashir. The Israeli filmmaker loved Richter’s work, and pitched him with a 90-second trailer. “I had never seen storytelling like that,” Richter recalls. “The animation illuminated the documentary aspect. It was a brilliant way to convey the material. I thought it would be a wonderful thing to be involved with.”
Since then, Richter has maintained a fine balance between scoring and his ongoing solo work. “The solo thing is just me sitting in a room, and scoring is me talking to other people,” he explains. “I enjoy that counterpoint.”
But he chooses his film and TV projects carefully. “Most are in some way about the important stories of our time,” he says. “Waltz With Bashir was obviously like that, and so were Miss Sloane or Wadjda or John Ridley’s [mini-series] Guerrilla. All of these are about the problems we’re facing in the world. Those are the things which draw me in.”
Over the years, Richter’s creative process has remained largely unchanged. “The craft of composing, from my standpoint, is about how you put notes together to come up with something which is more than the individual notes,” he explains. Although he does point out that, when it comes to incorporating computers and synthesisers, “They’re not about notes. They’re about sculpting sound objects, and that’s a whole other thing. It’s about finding a relationship between those things that makes sense.”
The digitally driven blurring of the lines between sound design and scoring is something that interests Richter. “In recent years there’s been more of an acceptance that music can also populate the sensorial world of the pictures, in a way that we might have seen as sound design in the old days,” he says. “Because of the tools we now have, the music can just kind of seep into the picture of the world.”
Record maker
Richter is the kind of creator who, it seems, can never be too ambitious nor too busy. As well as maintaining a steady stream of solo albums, including a recomposition of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and an eight-hour
lullaby titled ‘Sleep’, he has also worked on an app (related to ‘Sleep’) and established his own record label. Most recently, he scored Apple TV+’s sci-fi series Invasion, and is currently considering film projects for next year. But foremost on his mind right now is the completion of his studio in Oxfordshire — an “orchestral-size recording studio” complete with Dolby Atmos mixing room and other interdisciplinary art spaces.
A calm and level presence, Richter does not appear overwhelmed by all his commitments and responsibilities. In fact, the idea that he should be does not seem to have occurred to him. “I feel very privileged to be involved with music because that makes me feel good,” he says. “It’s not really work. I just go to the studio, I have a nice time, then I go home. I’m incredibly lucky in that way. I enjoy writing music.” n s
Max Richter
Brad Pitt in Ad Astra
Max Richter tells Dan Jolin about creating the score to James Gray’s 2019 sci-fi Ad Astra
The approach “[Director] James Gray and [actor/producer] Brad Pitt were already cutting when they contacted me. They had some of my music in the edit and just called. We talked about all kinds of crazy ideas.” The brief “There wasn’t really one. All of us are of an age that we were tiny kids when the Apollo programme was happening, so I think Ad Astra had a lot of personal resonance. I definitely wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid.” The innovation “The story sees Brad leaving Earth and flying to the edge of the solar system. I realised we’ve already done that, with the Voyager probes. I happened to know they recorded magnetic field data all the way along, so I got all that data from the University of Iowa’s plasma physics lab and turned it into computermodelled instruments. When there was a shot of Brad zooming past Saturn, I would go to my ‘Saturn instrument’ and make music out of the bits of data that had been gathered at that site.” The challenge “There was a huge amount of recutting and rewriting quite late in the process. So in a way I wrote the score twice. I wrote a lot of music for one edit, then there was a pause for recutting, and then I wrote a bunch more to accommodate all the changes. It was a lengthy process and very iterative.” The result “I love that film. There are things in it which came out beautifully. James is a wonderful filmmaker and great to work with. He appreciated that a composer can bring a lot to a project, especially a film like that where you’ve got all these amazing, beautiful, empty images to be filled with music.”
