Max Richter

I didn't want to teach lessons, I wanted to invite the listener in, leaving them the possibility to reflect rather than striking and subjugating them. The world is already hard enough and I don't want to add more brutality. Over the years I've come to realize that you have to find a balance, because the world is heading towards something very threatening, increasingly based on violent, shouted rhetoric, and I want to speak of a silent protest
(Max Richter)

One of the most precious musical creatures of the last twenty years has probably been modern classical. Defining it isn't the simplest task, since it's hard to pin down its rules or boundaries, but broadly speaking it could be described as music crafted by composers with a classical background — heavily influenced by post-minimalism — who use, alongside traditional instrumentation (piano and strings are certainly the favourites), electronic instruments, sound manipulation and field recordings. But that still isn't enough to define all its essential traits: what's missing is the main aspect of modern classical, that predominantly melancholic and intimate mood, which on one hand pushes the listener towards a peaceful isolation and an autonomous reflection on their own existence, and on the other is also capable of reaching — particularly in its orchestral moments — imperious and solemn flights of fancy. The tendentially minimal aspect — albeit without the compulsive use of repetition that characterizes the entire American minimalist and post-minimalist school — is present, but modern classical aims for emotion and an ever-sought cinematic quality.

Among the composers who paved the way for modern classical, the most celebrated and probably the most significant is Max Richter, by now a celebrity and an absolute point of reference for this generation of musicians, so much so that he's a highly sought-after composer of film and TV soundtracks, and has long since landed on the world's most celebrated classical music label, the legendary Deutsche Grammophon.
German, born in 1966, naturalized British, Richter strikes a surprising balance between the post-minimalism of Philip Glass, the ambient music of Brian Eno, and contemporary classical music from Erik Satie to John Cage. Richter's modern classical breaks away from the contemporary classical music of composers like John Adams, David Lang or Arvo Part by increasingly eroding the divide between highbrow classical and popular music. The formula Richter laboriously arrived at has proven successful, and every one of his releases today draws interest from fans of electronic, ambient and even rock music, as well as classical music listeners.

One can even pinpoint a date when these ideas came into focus to become the model for a new musical current. More than with his debut “Memoryhouse” (2002), Richter fully develops his intuitions with “The Blue Notebooks” (2004) — an LP conceived both as an act of protest against the Iraq war and as a meditation on his own troubled childhood — which today can be considered his masterpiece as well as the founding manifesto of modern classical, a genuine point of reference for all the musicians who later drew close to Richter, so widely recognized as such that fifteen years after its release Deutsche Grammophon celebrated its anniversary in grand style.

Richter's second LP immediately gives the impression of representing a new musical milestone, capable of paving the way for an entire generation of musicians, which is precisely what happened, with a long line of imitators. An LP split into eleven tracks, often brief — some mere one-minute sketches, others stretching up to eight minutes — yet despite this fragmentary nature, it comes across as a single, compact and indivisible sonic flow.
The Blue Notebooks is a long journey into memory, with extremely minimal pianos providing the backdrop to days spent writing on the beach with an old typewriter, framed by the sound of sea waves and readings from Franz Kafka and Czesław Miłosz. The album's common thread is fascinating: the clatter of the typewriter gathering free-flowing ideas and thoughts, binding the whole record together from beginning to end like an intimate, personal diary.
It's as if the German musician were finally bringing all his previous intuitions into focus, reaching absolute apotheosis with the evocative, cinematic “On The Nature Of Daylight”, which earned him international fame and a place in various Hollywood films. The piano and strings, which two years earlier had struggled to find a synthesis, find it perfectly here in these six melancholic minutes, verging on ecstasy, sad and cathartic, as if daylight were tearing through the fog of a now-lost humanity.

In the shorter tracks, small harmonious piano patterns coexist with ambient overdubs (the title track and “Horizon Variations”). Everything is perfect and balanced. Even when the piano alone takes centre stage, the small miracle of “Vladimir Blues” occurs, a composition barely a minute long, extremely simple, yet capable in its acceleration of evoking distant worlds.
In the longer episodes, like “Shadow Journal”, readings from Franz Kafka's “Octavo Notebooks” by actress Tilda Swinton over synth loops and sweeping strings create an intimate, disorienting effect. The synthesizers with female choirs on “Iconography” take on almost religious overtones and earned it the European Film Awards prize for best score for the animated film “Waltz with Bashir”.

“Arboretum”, “Old Song” and “Organum” can be described as a triptych of brief sketches in succession of modern classical and electronica, once again to be understood as a soundtrack for solitary thinkers adrift in space and time. “Old Song” plays on the passing of time and the decay of memories and musical formats, “Arboretum” is a small and highly successful sketch of electronic beats and strings, “Organum” finds a poignant harmony of organ. The third long track is “The Trees”, which after an opening in line with the rest of the album (reading, piano and strings) continues in an insistent piano crescendo, moving and cinematic, one of those flights of fancy that Richter is capable of giving us.

After this album, Richter's career would change radically, public appreciation would grow enormous and accolades would become countless. As if the magic formula had by now been found, all his subsequent works would indeed be children of the poetics of The Blue Notebooks. Fifteen years after the release of “The Blue Notebooks”, Deutsche Grammophon released a reissue with a double CD to mark the anniversary. The release is enriched with lengthy liner notes by the composer, a new piano piece (“A Catalogue Of Afternoons”), a few forgettable remixes, and above all a highly successful version of “On The Nature Of Daylight”, into which the voice of jazz singer Dinah Washington and her 1960 song “This Bitter Earth” is woven, with lyrics that perfectly match the track's mood.

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20/12/2020