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[BACKGROUND CHATTER]
[DISTANT CONVERSATION]
[YULIA MAHR] Everything just takes a while.
Just staying with it in order to get the richness of it.
It's too easy to move on.
[MAX RICHTER] Like a sort of big sky...
...translates into what you're doing.
[YULIA] How would that be if you could see for miles around?
The horizon's all open.
[MAX] A ritual which shifts your state of mind...
...to take you somewhere else.
[YULIA] There's a sense of sharing something.
[MAX] it feels like it can stand different kind of interventions.
[YULIA] I really love that.
I really love it that it goes out and has a life...
- Yeah. -...beyond us.
[MAX] if there's a storm coming...
They said there was going to be.
[YULIA] Yeah.
[SOFT PIANO MUSIC]
[MAX] Music is my sort of vehicle for travelling through the world,
sort of getting through life.
It's like I write music to do that.
It's just kind of odd.
It's kind of an odd thing to do.
- Hello. How are you? - Fine. How are you?
- Lovely to see you. - You too.
How are you?
- Weird. Weird and tired. - Weird and tired!
And this piece is obviously very extreme in some ways.
It's a gigantic thing.
To want to do such difficult things
is kind of odd as well.
It's a puzzle to me.
- Guys, you're almost there. - Alright.
Right, folks, make sure your wristbands are on.
[SOFT MELANCHOLIC PIANO MUSIC]
The moment that I saw the complete eight-hour album,
I listened to it, like, over and over.
But then I stopped listening to it.
I wanted the experience to be new again for me.
After I booked my ticket,
I made this Instagram post
where it was like the gorgeous cover photo of the moon
and I was like... So I'm gonna see this eight-and-a-half hour,
204 movements, classical composition
and I think I made some joke
that I'm just gonna feel crushingly alone
and cry the whole time,
so that's what I'm expecting.
I've tried not to have too many expectations.
Like, I saw the pictures that he posted last night
and I'm like, "Those cots are really close together!"
You know, I mean, you have your own space,
but, uh, usually I'm much more of a loner
as far as not being so close to others.
[WOMAN] I've never watched something continuously
for eight hours,
so just hearing them warming up has me pretty excited.
[MAN] This is probably the ideal way
you want to experience something like this,
being around someone you care about or just other people.
I don't know how to describe it.
It's just kinda like... It hits your soul.
It just makes me feel like connected to this world.
[MAX] I guess what I was aiming for
is this sense of connecting to origins somehow
and fundamentals.
It's almost like, "Can we just start over, please?"
[MUSIC PLAYING THROUGH HEADPHONES]
[MAX] Hi, hello.
Welcome to this performance of "Sleep",
an eight-hour lullaby.
I'm joined this evening by the ACME Ensemble
and Grace Davidson.
[APPLAUSE]
A few more thank-yous, first of all to Chris Ekers
for his wonderful sound,
to Steve Abbott for joining all the dots
and especially to YULIA, my creative partner,
whose vision is a big part of this piece.
There are no rules. Um...
Listen as you like, sleep as you like.
Maybe switch the phones off
and enjoy the trip.
We'll see you on the other side.
[APPLAUSE]
[ INSTRUMENTS TUNING UP]
[SOFT, SOPORIFIC PIANO MUSIC]
♪
[SOFT STRING MUSIC JOINS IN]
♪
[YULIA] When we were younger,
we had small children and we had no money,
so, of course, when Max went away to do his concerts,
I could never go and so I would stay behind.
It was really lovely
when people started streaming concerts
because suddenly I could listen in,
so I started to, every time he'd go away,
I'd listen in to the concert and see how, you know...
You feel nervous for your partner, you want it to go well,
you're interested in how it goes,
you want to be there, so it was my way of experiencing it.
[MAX] YULIA would be listening in.
Of course, if I'm on the other side of the planet,
it would be at some crazy hour in the middle of the night.
[YULIA] I'd be exhausted.
You know, I'd been with the kids all day.
I was so tired, so I would almost always fall asleep.
And pretty soon, I realised
that there's this incredible thing that happens
when you start just drifting in and out of this dreamy space.
And kind of waking up
and liminal spaces would start to develop
and you start to listen in a totally different way
to how you normally listen to a CD
or a disc or even a concert.
And it becomes a...
It can... It becomes a very emotional listening experience.
So when Max would come back, I'd start to talk to him about this
and I was like, "We have to do something with this
because this is an incredible thing."
He said, "Well, it's funny you should say that
because here's this piece I've been working on since 1995."
And he starts getting out these pieces of paper,
showing me these pieces of paper and saying,
"I've been thinking about this myself in a different form."
[MAX] We sort of got into this conversation about
would it be interesting to make a piece
which is in some way made
to exist in that space
or to kind of have that sort of conversation
with, you know, the sleeping mind?
You know, the sleeping mind is as valid and valuable
and, in fact, essential to us actually
in terms of building our waking life.
When we're sleeping, we're not absent.
We're just... It's a different kind of cognitive state.
[YULIA] And so we brought these two ideas together really
and started to develop this idea
for the piece as it is now.
[SOFT PIANO MUSIC]
♪
[SOFT MELANCHOLIC VOCAL MUSIC]
[MAX] Life is busy and life is getting busier.
I've never heard anyone say,
"Oh, things are just getting so much slower."
Everything is always up.
It's moving forward.
That's how life works.
Things just speed up.
That, in a way, suits corporations.
But does it suit individuals as well?
I don't know.
So I wanted to make a piece which...
It's got an element of a sort of quiet protest about it.
Just to kind of take a look at this.
And offer a landscape
to withdraw from that for a minute,
step off the wheel and take stock.
[SOFT MELANCHOLIC VOCAL MUSIC]
[YULIA] it was a very big thing
to bring this into the world and to get it actually made.
That was a two, two-and-a-half-year process,
something like that, and during that period
when Max was composing, I was starting to look around
for the kind of venues we could go to,
what kind of ways we could talk about this project to people.
[MAX] I always think Yulia's the brains of the outfit.
She comes from anthropology and film,
so her universe is visual, performance,
storytelling from that standpoint.
[YULIA] I was developing this language
of talking about issues that were really important to me.
My family were refugees
and I wanted to really explore that from every possible angle.
One of the things that was really important to me
was that this piece should be about community
and should be about connection.
Or at least providing a space for it.
Whether it happens or not, I mean,
that's down to an individual person.
It doesn't have to happen either,
but we're missing that, aren't we?
That was one of the very first conversations we had.
We have this eight-hour piece. Where does it go?
How do we stage it?
What happens with this piece
in order to foster that kind of environment
where something like that can happen?
[WOMAN] Max and YULIA showed me drawings
of this concept of musicians surrounded by sleeping people.
I went with a friend
and all those strangers sleeping together,
open postures,
somehow takes you away from the individual details
of your own life.
A couple of friends said, "This is very disturbing."
Some people couldn't imagine being in a place like that.
But the people I could connect to understood,
there's something about hearing it
and not necessarily watching the performance.
There's some deep memory of being a child and being sung to
when you're drifting off.
So it's such a tender offering.
[SOFT, HIGH-PITCHED VOCALS]
As a cathedral, we wanted to have a kind of connection
with these problems with refugees
and, um... and to make a connection
with an artwork, with music.
[MAN 1] it was this sculpture by Koen Theys,
with 12 bronze mattresses where people slept,
which helped us to have this crazy idea
of having "Sleep" in our cathedral.
And now we have 400 of these beds.
It was a very big unknown for all of us
who worked to prepare for it.
At the same time, there was this vibe
of "this is something very special",
which has never happened and probably never will again.
[YULIA] I think we've had something like 250 enquiries
for the show
and I think it's about 18
that actually we've been able to put on.
Each show takes more or less two years to pull off
from the first conversations to when they finally go on.
For every venue, it's a real labour of love as well.
Yeah, so it's a big juggernaut of a thing,
but it's so worth it.
[APPLAUSE]
Welcome to Max Richter's "Sleep"
at Grand Park, presented by the Music Center.
Tonight's performance is the first outdoor
and the largest ever.
We are hopefully unplugging from our everyday life
to experience this beautiful concert together
right in the heart of down town LA.
[MAN 2] Max basically says, "You can walk around,
you can sit up, you can lie down,
you can disconnect, you can sleep."
And I think that freedom sort of that Max wrote into the piece
and into the presentation of the piece,
I thought it would get augmented by putting it outdoors
and sort of giving it that additional freedom.
[SOFT VOCAL SOUND]
[YULIA] He was never interested in talking to an audience
of 100 people who know about classical music,
so he engaged in a language which is a plain-spoken language
because he wants to connect to a lot of people
and that's immediately frowned on
within a lot of classical communities.
If you're popular, that can't be good.
And obviously we weren't paying attention to any of that
because we're not interested in that conversation at all.
Our conversation is about talking to a lot of people
and talking about a different way of listening to music.
[MAX] There are precedent pieces.
In Indian classical music you have overnight ragas
and there's gallery work from the '60s of Fluxus
and the Bach Goldberg Variations
which were supposedly written for overnight performance.
It's not like sonic wallpaper
which is just quietly bubbling in the background.
It's an artwork and it's to be experienced,
not necessarily to be listened to,
but to be experienced
in the way that we experience a landscape, we're in it.
[GENTLE AMBIENT MUSIC]
[YULIA] People are free to do what they want in the show.
We didn't want too many rules
and that's reflected in all the concerts. They're all different.
In Berlin, everyone shoved their beds together
and you had families all sleeping side by side.
It offers something where people can feel cocooned, safe somehow.
[MAX] it's not a performance in the traditional sense.
If you play a gig,
you're projecting this material really strongly,
you're trying to tell a story...
...whereas in the case of a "Sleep" performance,
the dynamics are completely different.
Those people sleeping are the story.
[WOMAN 1] 10:28. To sleep, perchance to dream.
Sombre. Life noises.
The wild sirens, chattering of people checking in
melts with the music,
creates a tone like in the movies
after something serious has happened.
I heard about the concert
and I was like, "I don't think my wife would want to go.
It sounds too weird." Then I told her about it.
She's like, "It's sleep and it's music? What's not to like?"
[WOMAN 2] I was surprised she waited as long as she did
to say something about it.
I guess she had known about it for a while.
[WOMAN 1] I was really happy to see her asleep.
Yeah, I was a little worried
that because we were out in the open
among all these strangers that...
- And the bugs. - And the bugs.
...she was gonna end up being not happy,
but apparently, her body was like,
"No, I can go to sleep now."
Like, I zonked out,
like, pretty much 15, 20 minutes into the concert, I was out.
Legit, like, all night.
- Yeah. - Which is surprising.
Being a woman in our relationship,
you are kind of on guard, always watching your back,
you don't know who's looking at you, what they're thinking,
what they're thinking of you and how you're making them feel.
I feel like I always... always feel, like, unsafe.
You obviously have something in common
'cause you've all come together around this event.
It's just fascinating. You see people.
You're like, "I wonder would we be hanging out together?
Would we be buddies if I went over
and struck up a conversation with you right now?"
Like, yeah, you did feel kind of safe and protected.
[MAX] The first one was memorable
in that it was just so terrifying
because we just did not know how to play this piece.
How do you rehearse something that size?
The gallery is full of these amazing curios
of 19th century science.
It seemed in a way an appropriate place to do it
because "Sleep" has some of its origins
in, I guess, sleep science.
[PLAYS A FEW PIANO NOTES]
[MAX] We rehearsed it overnight and then we had the next day,
and I was up fixing the parts, all the mistakes I discovered,
all the technical stuff.
And then we played overnight live on Radio 3.
They broadcast it all night long,
so it was kind of a baptism of fire.
I was very lucky to be invited
to be one of the people to fall to sleep
to his music at the Wellcome Foundation.
I think it broke a world record
for the longest continuous piece on the radio.
Once the piece kicked off it was clear
that there was something wrong with the piano
that Max was playing at,
that there was some really tinny sound coming out of that.
And then one of the crew crept up,
climbed on top of this grand piano
and started trying to investigate what...
But the piece had to keep on going.
This was a live broadcast
of this piece that was gonna go on for eight hours
and there was no way we were stopping and starting again.
[MAX] We got through it and it had a real kind of energy,
it had a real sort of gravitational force around it.
It just seemed to kind of affect people,
so that was exciting.
My work comes out of the polarity
between a very straightforward, classical,
conservatoire, university, composer education.
And my enthusiasm for electronic music,
ambient music, the studio as instrument.
[PIANO MUSIC]
It has its roots in the kind of Renaissance
where music was structured very geometrically.
It's also a rejection of super-complicated modernism
which I was schooled in,
but which I felt had really lost its connection
with a broader audience.
I felt like I wanted to build a language
which had a kind of directness.
[NEW SPEAKER] When Max and I first met,
I was giving a talk about maths and symmetry.
I think there was an immediate connection.
There's always been an immediate connection
between maths and music.
[MAX] Like every piece,
it's a big series of "what if" questions.
I started thinking about what kind of music
would I want if I was sleeping?
And I started thinking I would like to feel
that if I wake up in the middle, I want to know where I am.
[NEW SPEAKER] Mathematics is actually the science of patterns
and music is the art of patterns.
And that's the connection.
So you take something simple like the Fibonacci numbers.
So these are numbers which go:
1, 1, 2, 3,
5, 8, 13.
You get the next number
by adding the two previous numbers together.
These have a natural growth which is what nature uses a lot,
so the number of petals on a flower
is invariably a Fibonacci number,
the way that shells grow or pine cones or pineapples...
You'll see these numbers all over the place.
But these are also numbers that composers love using,
so you see Debussy, Bartók very deliberately using them
to give a sense of growth in their pieces.
One of the things that connects the world of art
and the world of mathematics and science as well
is that all of these are actually our response
to the natural world around us.
They're our language trying to help us navigate our way
through the kind of chaos that we live in.
[MAX] I felt like slightly in freefall when I was writing it.
I was like, "I don't really know if this is gonna work."
When you're composing, the notes you're writing,
you're very much writing them in relation to everything
that's happened already and everything that's gonna happen.
When there's a structure that big,
you can't hold it all in your mind any more,
so you really have to just write the moment,
which is freaky
and goes against all your compositional training.
When you're recording sections of 30 or 40 minutes,
you can't do that on tape and it's eight hours of multi-track.
So it broke the machine in all sorts of different ways
and we had to invent new ways of working.
For me, that is also the exciting thing
about creative work.
You've got this space that you know how to do that.
I know how to write Max Richter music
up to this point.
But actually "Sleep" is stepping out of that pool of light
into something else, into the dark
and just finding what's out there.
[GENTLE AMBIENT MUSIC]
♪
I always describe it
as if all the happiness had left the world,
but I was good with it,
as if there was nothing else to lose.
Especially if I'm full of anguish,
if I need to relax
or I need to stop worrying
about what's gonna happen in the future.
Max's music...
cleans your soul if you want to say it that way.
It is as if he had found something
that has already existed for, I don't know,
thousands of years,
that is familiar to humans
like the sound of the sea
or the grass with the wind.
It is something that makes us soothe and relax
and, and... and makes you feel that everything is OK.
As if all humans spoke the same language
and that we have to translate it to English or Spanish
or whatever language you speak.
Everybody can understand it
and you don't need to be a special kind of person
to know what he wants to say and then the feelings are immediate.
It was not new. It was as if I had been there all my life.
It was just like a continuation
of something that you already know very well.
Like kissing your mother
or being with someone you love very much.
[AMBIENT MUSIC]
[MUSIC FADES]
[MAX] I talked to a friend of mine, David Eagleman,
he's a neuroscientist,
just to check that my instincts about sleep music
were not actually stupid.
He pointed me at some research
about how sound and a sleeping mind can join up.
[DAVID] To my knowledge,
it's the first time that somebody has said,
"All right, we're gonna write eight hours of music
and we're gonna try to do things
to keep people in a state of sleep."
So one of the first things that Max and I talked about
was about repetition of music during sleep and how...
Essentially what happens in the brain
is you've got lots of cells, 86 billion neurons,
and they're all doing their own thing,
but when you fall asleep, they come into concert more
and move as a group
which is why if you put electrodes on the head,
you can measure the slow wave
happening in the brain during sleep.
So we talked about the kind of rhythms
that would be appropriate for that sort of thing,
about the kind of repetition
that sleep represents, the sleeping brain.
So Max set out to make sure that the music he was writing
was sort of, you know, rhythmically consonant
with slow-wave sleep.
[MAX] Sleep has a very particular flavour.
It's a very particular colour, right,
because it's all about the bottom
of the frequency spectrum.
And almost all of sleep happens from, like, 100 hertz down
which is a space which isn't really available
with acoustic instruments.
In the natural world,
we hear those frequencies in thunderstorms.
- [THUNDER RUMBLING] - And those sorts of things.
And that's in a way why they have a magical quality
because we can't actually really make those sounds
with acoustic instruments very easily,
or we can but only very quiet.
And for a piece to be structured
around that bit of the frequency spectrum
is interesting to do
which is why the synthesisers are so incredible
because they unlock that bit of the spectrum.
[PLAYS A VARIETY OF ELECTRONIC NOTES]
I was about 13 when I first heard electronic music, really.
[PLAYS ELECTRONIC NOTES]
On a TV show they used Kraftwerk's "Autobahn"
and when I heard the opening,
I mean, it was like being struck by lightning for me.
[PULSATING ELECTRONIC SOUNDS]
You feel like you're interacting with a thing which has a life
because the sound is never the same.
You know, the next day,
even the same patch sounds different. Very organic.
[PLAYS ELECTRONIC NOTE]
I set out on this mission
to try and discover, A, what this sound was
and B, how could I get my hands on it?
And at that time, a synthesiser cost as much as a house.
I got schematics
and a soldering iron and bags of components
and just started in my bedroom building synthesisers
and, you know, just tried to make those sounds.
And that went sort of together with studying academic music.
I always felt that was quite natural, really,
those two things.
[ELECTRONIC MUSIC]
The way the music is made is quite uncharacteristic for me.
It has a lot of affirmation in the way it's structured.
It's sort of asking a question
and then giving you the answer that you want.
It feels good as it goes by because of that.
So you kind of know where you're going all the time
and then it goes there
which is like, you know, not what happens in real life.
So it's a wish fulfilment for "if only life were like this".
[FAINT RUSTLING]
[BIRDS CRY]
[RUSTLING GETS LOUDER]
Look at that, Max.
It's really beautiful.
[MAX] It's pretty awesome, yeah.
[YULIA] The thing I find that's so incredible
is when you're sitting in your office or studio
and you're trying to conjure up this whole world,
and then you come out here
and it just kind of pours out of you, doesn't it?
We met for the first time twice.
[CHUCKLES]
It was the Edinburgh Festival
and there was a performance of the Mahabharata,
you know, this wonderful epic.
So there's like about 100 people on the stage
and about 11 of us in the audience.
I'm sitting there in this thing
and I keep kind of looking at this woman on the stage.
And I'm just like, "Wow, she looks amazing!
I'd really love to get to know her."
And then I walked out of the theatre
and I was like, "You're never gonna see her again,
just get over it, forget about it, get on with your life."
[YULIA] And I love that phase so much
when everything is possible still,
when there's nothing in the way and everything's just...
Then we met again at a theatre
that I was involved with and YULIA was involved with.
I was working in a theatre company for a while.
That's where I met Max because I gave him his first job.
[MAX] Like a sort of energy exchange...
So we were just chatting away
in the back of the theatre basically
while we were supposed to be working.
That kind of unmade works
and works without any mistakes in them.
[YULIA] Yeah. [SHE LAUGHS]
- [MAX] And that's... - [YULIA] So exciting.
[YULIA] When we first met, that was what drew us together,
I think, was talking.
[MAX] Yeah, we were just like...
We just talked about life, the universe and everything.
And that was that.
I just thought I'd just met the most interesting
and kind of kindest and most thoughtful person.
Like, I still think that.
[YULIA] It's tough to make enough money
to feed three kids as an artist,
but it's also been an incredibly interesting journey.
We both had quite complicated childhoods in different ways.
And there is a flavour to that that affects your whole life,
so one of the things that was very comforting
and easy for us together
was the fact that we shared that
and, in a way, that's another lifelong journey, isn't it,
is processing that.
And if you're kind of shy
and poetic like he was, then you do that through music.
[HE PLAYS GENTLE PIANO PIECE]
[MAX] I started making records
and I made "Memoryhouse" in 2002.
It was almost like a series of questions
to see if a language could do all these things I wanted to do.
And kind of no one heard that record.
I mean, other musicians heard it
and it had a kind of a little, tiny, culty sort of audience.
But, you know, the record label was shut down.
We never got to play it.
Nothing happened.
It really took a while, years and years and years,
before anyone really paid attention to...
You know, the number of times we had to, like, go to Plan B.
We were, like, moving house randomly.
You know, it was just very chaotic.
I mean, it's tough. It's tough to make a living. It really is.
Trying to, you know, make records to a high standard
with real musicians on them, it costs money
which I didn't have.
I remember at the "Blue Notebooks" sessions,
we recorded it in one day.
One afternoon, in fact, with the strings,
cos that's the money we had.
And I remember trying to get home from a session
and not being able to get any money out of the bank
because we had no money.
[YULIA] That's the constant question for artists, isn't it?
Do you persevere?
When he did "Vivaldi Recomposed",
he was still walking 40, 60 minutes across town
to interviews because we couldn't afford the fare
and we certainly went through many years
where we would feed the children rather than ourselves.
[CONTINUES GENTLE PIECE]
I mean, most people do not make a living in any art form,
so what do you do
when you're faced with that and you have children?
You're so responsible for these little people
and you can't muck it up.
[LAUGHS]
[GENTLE PIANO PLAYING]
Not bad, Al! Only played that all summer. Pretty nice.
I got that one wrong. I didn't do that one.
Yeah, but you did it the same both times, so it's cool.
That was really nice.
Really nice.
[MAX] I mean, I didn't support the family for years.
We just kind of scratched by.
And I think if I had been able to imagine doing anything else,
I probably would have.
[YULIA] Eventually, I got ill,
because I was just so malnourished.
You just think you're somehow invincible, don't you?
And you keep going.
Your body's showing you all the signs of,
"You can stop now,"
and you go, "No, no, it's OK. I can keep going."
Obviously, you can't in the end, so I did become quite sick.
[MAX] I guess it's the first time I'd really thought about
how we're living our lives, how I'm... what I'm doing.
I mean, of course it's... You know,
the fact of our mortality is real,
but it's only real when it's real, you know,
because we keep it away.
We keep those thoughts away by doing other things.
Quite a big bit of thinking about what to, you know...
what those things mean,
but then do what, you know?
Give up and do what? I don't know.
I guess things do add up over time, you know.
And "Blue Notebooks" did sort of catch people's ears somehow.
It just seemed to... It started something.
I mean, we got the opportunity to premiere "Memoryhouse"
ten years after it was released,
which we did in the Barbican in London.
The place was full and it was like, you know, a love-in.
It was like a homecoming.
There was something wonderful about that, you know.
To just kind of keep going and ten years later here we are.
[YULIA] Writing a piece like "Sleep" takes over two years.
So those two years have to be funded.
And the way we found our way through eventually
was we came up with a little formula, actually,
of how to feed ourselves, which was
that Max would do film work and that film work,
the money would go back into the art, always.
So he could, at night, work on "Sleep".
[MAX] I got into the habit of writing at night
when the kids were small.
We used to put them to bed
and then I guess my work days were kind of
eight or nine o'clock in the evening to about three.
Sort of. Something like that.
Until I kind of fell off my chair, basically.
In a way, making creative things is also kind of...
I feel like it's a kind of self-medicating in a way.
So you write the piece that you wish someone had written
so you can listen to it. [CHUCKLES]
This sort of slightly obsessive involvement with music
probably kept me going.
[YULIA] To the edge of the woods before...
[MAX] 'Cause we don't want to be in the dark.
[YULIA] Well, I don't mind being in the dark.
It's kind of adventurous...
[MAX] I think of making a piece of writing and creative work
as sort of... It's like moving from a space which we know
into a space we don't know.
And that's the kind of interesting part.
And actually it hardly matters what's there.
It's that little process of just stepping out
into somewhere you don't know.
At a certain point, it's almost like the piece starts dreaming.
[ETHEREAL MUSIC]
[HIGH-PITCHED, ELONGATED NOTES]
♪
[MUSIC FADES]
[PLAINTIVE PIANO MELODY]
[STRINGS COMMENCE]
[SOFTLY VIBRATING HUM]
♪
I am a visual artist, so I'm very project-orientated.
I'm making projects that usually take a year or two to complete,
so there's a lot of things to work out.
This, because it was so durational,
gave me the opportunity to resolve some questions
that I was having about what direction I was taking
with certain things.
My mind was wandering and things were happening,
but that music was there and it was permeating into my mind.
It's one thing that really intrigues me
about this project of his that he certainly had intentions
when he started it,
but knowing what that experience would be like for other people
and those random factors that come in...
What influence is a sound
on what's happening in your mind as you're kind of drifting off.
I am kind of at a point in life where I feel like
I need to make the best use of my time
and time is something that's really important.
I mean, daily life is hectic when you have a family
and you're worrying about pick-up time from school
and trying to balance everything else out,
trying to fit in everything I want to fit in the day
in the time that I have.
Mixing that with my own personal work
and then just kind of keeping our house in order. It's busy.
When you have these other factors involved,
like Max has, you know, people that are laying on cots
and listening to that music,
how does that change it? What does that do?
I'm intrigued with starting with an idea
and seeing how does it shape and form and change
as you introduce other people into it,
as everybody, I'm sure, had their own unique experience.
I don't know who these people are,
you know, what has drawn them here.
Experiencing "Sleep" live is really not like anything else.
Who does this?
Who makes, you know,
an eight-hour-long musical composition
that lasts that duration, that's set up
for people to fall asleep to? It's not like anything else.
[PLAINTIVE PIANO AND STRINGS MUSIC]
♪
[MUSIC ENDS]
[PLANE ENGINES OVERHEAD]
[GENTLY HUMMING TONE]
[MAX] When I sit down at the piano
at the beginning of the night, there are 200-something pages
of piano music to play through.
You know, it's a big score,
which plays from beginning to end.
I'm probably on the stage
for about seven-and-a-half of the eight hours.
Something like that, overall. Which is a lot.
I get breaks, just to kind of grab a bite to eat
or a cup of coffee or something.
And, in fact, all the players get breaks.
It's very tough on the string players, actually.
A lot of the pieces use very sustained tones.
Very quiet, you know,
which is the hardest thing for string players to do.
I kind of kidded myself when we first started doing it
that it was fine, everyone would be fine, no problem.
But it is actually a problem. It's really hard.
It's just really physically and mentally tough.
First of all to be concentrating for that amount of time,
cos even though, you know, I'm a pianist,
you know, the notes come into your eyes
and they come out of your fingers,
that bit is sort of automatic,
but you're still having to concentrate.
Doing anything solidly for eight hours is hard.
And, you know, you get achy and stiff and sore
and, yeah, it's tough.
[UNDERLYING HUM CONTINUES]
♪
[PIANO PLAYS SOMBRE NOTES]
♪
[CELLO COMMENCES]
♪
[VIOLIN JOINS IN]
♪
[SOUND SLOWLY BUILDING]
♪
[DWINDLES TO SOLO PIANO]
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
[MAX] I love to just come off the stage
on one of my little breaks, just to hear it.
Out in the house we have this sort of magical cathedral sound,
you know, and I love that sound.
That's the sound that the piece was written for.
So I just wander around and have a listen
and just kind of see what people are up to.
Cos that's really nice for me, just to kind of check in with,
you know, how everyone is sort of finding it.
What's beautiful is just seeing the effect
the piece is having on people. I mean, that's an amazing thing
because you don't really ever get to see that
in such an intimate way.
And just being able to see, you know, somebody sleeping there,
or, you know, doing their yoga or something
or, you know, walking about and thinking their thoughts.
You just kind of get a much bigger sense
of what the piece is doing.
Every performance is really, really special.
It's one of these sort of paradoxical things.
It's incredibly hard to do it, but it's kind of so worth it.
It costs so much to do it and to try and make it happen,
you know, on a personal level and yet it's so satisfying.
[YULIA] Every second is a deliberate second.
Every note is deliberate.
So it was a massive undertaking
and that's what's amazing to me, I suppose,
that somebody can do that,
that they have that much staying power with a creative project
that they can see something like this through.
And that he can perform it. I mean, I don't think I could.
I couldn't play for eight hours straight.
That's what he's brought to me and my work,
his seeing through the... seeing through difficulties.
It's made me more of a fighter for what I believe in
and more committed, in a way, to shaking things up
and trying new things, you know, and not stopping.
You know, when we were young and he was putting out his work,
year after year after year,
and, you know, when you're young and you're starting out,
you do get kicked around a lot and some of the things
that happened to him, I would just... I mean,
would have sent me to bed, crying, and yet he is...
It's just a river passing by for him.
[MAX] I remember talking to YULIA about this at the time,
you know, and I was making decisions
about how the "Blue Notebooks" should be
and what we would do with it,
and she said, "The thing is, you know, if the record fails,
and you've made compromises,
then you're going to be really annoyed,
but if it fails and you did exactly what you wanted,
then who cares?"
So that's always been the M.O. sort of going forward.
Just kind of always bet the farm.
[HE CHUCKLES]
We didn't have a farm!
But, you know, we always bet the farm.
[YULIA] For me, it's all about Max's smile.
He could have been anybody. I don't care what he does!
I mean, I don't care what Max does.
He doesn't have to be a composer for me.
I love his smile and I still love his smile 27 years later,
so it's all about that really.
He's a vulnerable man
and, musically, he's not afraid to show it
and I think he's not afraid to talk about vulnerability
and that's something quite precious
because everybody there is vulnerable in that moment
when they're all sleeping in a room together.
And I think that fragility and vulnerability in life
is something that he wants to talk about.
It goes right the way through to an understanding of the world
and humaneness, I would say, is the big word we try, you know...
I mean, we're all flawed human beings, right?
We don't manage it all the time! Or most of the time.
But we try, and that's the thing, isn't it?
I have such admiration for his determination
and his perseverance.
The fact that he can just... He does it, you know.
That's a big thing for me. I think my admiration for him
has increased through this project.
[WOMAN] Their collaboration is so gorgeous.
To be ambitious for something that ethereal
is an... unusual thing.
I don't see it that much. I see people ambitious
for large objects that will stay there forever.
I see people be ambitious for movies or something,
but to be ambitious for a moment at night
with strangers together?
[CHUCKLES] I just think that's... that's just glorious.
[LOW HUM OF MUSIC]
♪
[MAN] Experiences like this I think remind people
that even in a world where people are very busy,
that if you were to place the arts back into society
there are these rejuvenating types of experiences
that can happen between people.
By having an eight-hour performance,
in a world where three minutes is what is commercially viable,
I think that already flips expectations on its head.
[MUSIC SLOWLY BUILDING]
I teach. I also play.
And my mission, first and foremost,
when working with new students is, typically,
to get them to realise that the sounds that you hear,
you can wield them as well.
You have the ability to make meaning out of sound.
It's like the craziest magic.
And then by having that sort of instrumentation,
I think it says you could have a violin or a cello
right next to a synthesiser.
That gives them a window into something
they may not have known they didn't know
and gives them the tools necessary
to maybe be the next Max Richter.
I don't know. Maybe.
[SUSTAINED MELLOW NOTES]
♪
[MAX] I took the spectrum, the sonic spectrum,
that the unborn baby hears in the womb,
which is basically no high frequencies
because the mother's body filters all of those.
So I've used that spectrum for almost the entire piece.
And then, around sort of seven hours,
the spectrum opens up so you get more and more high frequencies.
So there's kind of a sunrise.
An acoustic sunrise.
[GENTLY RISING SOUND]
I think there's something very fundamental about that spectrum
because that obviously goes to our first memories
of being a person.
Even before we're born, we have this auditory memory
which has a very particular colour.
So that's how the sort of sonics of the piece work on us.
[WOMAN 1] 5:49 a.m. Awake.
Just saw a stray cat, lots of sleeping people.
Feel quite rested. Very alert.
A little emotional.
[WOMAN 2] People actually were pretty respectful.
Not a lot of chatter.
There was a woman with a bathing suit on.
A guy with a "rock, paper, scissor" tattoo
that I thought was sign language.
[WOMAN 1] it made me reflect on my relationship,
knowing all the difficulties that we've been through
as a couple, all the tears, all the fights.
It's all worth it, like, to be with Terri
because I love her so much.
[VOCALIST SINGS SUSTAINED NOTES]
[WOMAN] I was asleep for some of it and awake for some of it
and it kind of just blended with dreaming.
It was restful, but it was like a journey as well.
[MAN] There's parts of it that I recognise
and there's parts where I go, "Was I asleep?"
I don't even remember anymore because it was all very fluid.
[VOCALIST SINGS]
♪
[WOMAN] Falling asleep around a lot of people we didn't know,
just seeing how other people interact with the music as well,
it was really insightful and moving.
[VOCALIST CONTINUES]
[PIANO RESUMES]
[MUSIC GENTLY RISING]
[YULIA] it takes years to get to the place
where it really starts and can really take off.
I feel like we're at the beginning of something.
Just starting, really. And that's what's incredible for us.
[MAX] What if you slept?
And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed?
And what if, in your dreams, you went to heaven
and there you plucked a strange and beautiful flower?
And what if, when you awoke,
you had that flower in your hand?
Ah, what then?
[VOICE AND MUSIC STOP]
[APPLAUSE]
[CHEERING]
[APPLAUSE]
[APPLAUSE CONTINUES]
It was kind of like...
a wave would come over you and just wake you.
[IN FRENCH]
You'd hear just like the rub of the strings - rrrrr!
It felt almost like a massage, but inside.
I'm still in a trance, I think.
And in my head there's a whole world of creatures.
The woman who sang,
it was like a mermaid that was singing to me
that wanted to grab me and pull me into the ocean.
Max was for me a kind of fox.
Very gentle, but also very sneaky, in a way,
that he trapped us from minute one.
He just did it in such a beautiful, elegant way.
[IN FRENCH]
[PIANO PLAYS, MUSIC HUMS]