Max Richter summarizes the state of classical music and why he took a different path.
When I went to university, in Edinburgh, I was like, “Let’s just forget about that for a minute and concentrate on Boulez.” Classical music is a very historical artform, in the sense that all classical music is built on what’s come before: At the beginning of the 20th century, tonality explodes, you get into serialism, and then you get into more and more deterministic music. So Boulez serializes everything: rhythm, duration, dynamics, all structural elements—everything is an expression of a formula. It was considered a historical imperative to do the next step in that, if you were a serious composer. If you were an idiot, then you could write tonal music [laughs] but no one would play it. Which is one of the reasons I started making records. No one’s going to play this, so I better just try and record it myself.
[Tehillim] is peak Reich, where everything comes together. It’s a setting of the Psalms for his ensemble and vocals, and it’s just the most fantastically put-together, virtuosic, beautiful, expressive sonic object. His music, and the music of Arvo Pärt, were triggers for me to move away from the modernist compositional language—the super-complex idea of every piece as a technical manifesto—and towards having a conversation, speaking intelligibly, and connecting.
Read the full article: “Max Richter on the Music That Made Him” (HT: Marginal Revolution)