Product Description
-------------------
Accled British composer Max Richter has made history with a
ground-breaking piece of work: his new work, "," is an
eight-hour lullaby. An exploration of music, consciousness and
human connectivity, the work is intended to be listened to while
ing. The landmark work is played on piano, strings, with
subtle electronic touches and vocals - but no words. Previously
released digitally, the full eight-hour worked is released on CD
and high definition Blu-Ray audio.
Review
------
As a composer, all my works are experiments: either they are
about
something, or the piece itself is the working out of a musical
subject,
an attempt at a solution to a musical question.
The question in this work is How can the ing mind and a
musical work interact, and how will this ing interaction
manifest
itself in the listener s experience of the music?
My fascination with the unconscious and / or ing part of our
lives
is longstanding. I see it as a resource for creative ideas, and
as an
autonomous cognitive space, relatively inaccessible to our
conscious
mind (as described, for example the work of Jung, or more
recently in
David Eagleman s Incognito), a sort of undiscovered country that
lives
inside each one of us.
Discovery takes time. In this case the equivalent of a night s
rest - 8
hours or so. This extended performance duration connects
with a number of strands in recent gallery work (e.g. the
Durational
movement in art) as well as pointing back to some earlier art
music
antecedents...
Musical sources begin with Bach s Goldberg Variations BWV988.
Allegedly written to be played as a sort of expensive lullaby for
an
insomniac nobleman, they are an early example of music and
explicitly being brought into a functional relationship, though
of
course the informal evocation of night and is present in
music
from the earliest written sources, for example the latin chant Te
Lucis
ante Terminum (Before the ending of daylight).
Moving on we come to Mahler s Nachtmusik I and II, the ghost-like
movements either side of the central movement of the enigmatic
seventh Symphony. Mahler s vision is distinctly within the German
Romantic tradition here, with it s emphasis on the intense
articulation
of individual experience. Arguably is the most individual
experience of all.
Fast forward to the 1960s we come to the extended duration works
of
La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Morton Feldman, the contemplative
space that is Stockhausen s Stimmung, and the ecstatic pulsations
of the
early Pink Floyd, among others. These works close the aesthetic
gap
between the physical experience of the music and it s content -
the
sound is the text. This boundary or overlap between the musical
text
and it s sonic presentation is something I am exploring in my own
work, and I see it as in some way mirroring the unconscious /
conscious mind dualism.
Another way to shine a light onto this question is via
contemporary
neuroscience, and, therefore I am in dialogue with David
Eagleman,
director of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor
College
and author of numerous scientific works on our mental processes.
This
is directly affecting the development of the musical work, for
example
on the development of structural aspects of the material that
interlock
with the cyclical nature of itself. --Max Richter December
2014