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" I'm suspicious of the idea of categories in music and this idea of things being in boxes. To me, that seems unnatural. I write the music that somebody with my biography would write, and the thing that's always driven me is an enthusiasm for the material. I sort of follow the notes to where they want to go. "

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" When I was a student, if you accidentally wrote a triad in a piece of yours, it was just sort of like you were breaking the law! You just couldn't do it. And that just meant you were a bad composer. "

Max Richter

Law

Bad

" You can get away with a lot more in a film or television score. It is contextual. "

Max Richter

Score

Away

" When you're working in cinema, you often have a very, very compressed schedule - very few weeks to just kind of go through that whole process of reflection and refining - and it has to be done. "

" I lived in Scotland a long time, and I became aware of Mogwai really from the beginning. They seemed to be fusing hard music structure and sort of raw sonics. They're just very creative thinkers, musical thinkers. "

" Sleep is probably my favorite activity. I wrote this piece out of gratitude that I'm able to sleep well as an offering to people who don't. "

" We're living in our neoliberal, sort of late-stage capitalist culture where human beings are really like objects of production and consumption. We're on our screens all the time; we're kind of being sold at all the time. "

Max Richter

Living

Human

" We tend to think that when we're awake, we're on, and when we're sleeping our mind is off, but actually, we're not off. There's a lot going on! "

" There's different ways to approach music for sleeping. Things like white noise are functional, like a lullaby. This is more like an inquiry, a question about how music and sleep fit together. "

" Often, especially young artists, you feel like you should be doing something. And I think that can be very destructive because creativity is about connecting with the stuff that's deep inside you and making something out of that. "

" We've all got stories to tell that no one else knows. We've all got this truly unique experience of being. So I would say cultivate that, because then also you're cultivating something which is very natural to you. "

" I assumed no one would ever listen to my music, and for quite a lot of years, I was right. "

" It feels like when novelists say they find their characters are doing things they never thought they'd do, the material comes alive, and that's how I feel making music. "

" When we go to sleep ordinarily, we're doing something really private. It's kind of an intimate, private connection with our sort of physical humanity. "

" I just really try to stay focused on what the material is wanting to do. My basic assumption is that no one will ever listen to it anyway. It's fidelity to the material. That's my contract: It's me and the material. And if it connects with other people, I'm thrilled. "

" 'Memoryhouse' came out, and there wasn't a single review and zero sales, and after about a year, it was deleted. So I recorded The 'Blue Notebooks' on a little indie label, and my attitude was, 'Well, if nobody is listening, I might as well keep doing what I'm doing'. "

" I can't usually sleep if I'm listening to music. It seems to fire up my mind, and I keep engaging with it to see what it's doing. "

" I was living in a suburban town north of London, dutifully practicing my Mozart sonatas. And the milkman who delivered the milk in the mornings was kind of milkman by day, composer-artist by night. "

" When I'm working with pictures, with images and storytelling, it's really about the sentiment and the emotional trajectory of the characters. That's really where the music lives, I think. That's what I'm focused on; that's what I respond to most strongly. "

" When I was a kid, there were really only two possible futures in the foreground, which were Orwell's '1984' and Huxley's 'Brave New World'. "

" That childhood passion and involvement and being really submerged in something, that's the kind of state I'm looking for all the time - and preserving that sense of magical possibility and wonder that children have. I think, for artists, if you can stay connected to that, then you are in a good place. "

" People have written about 'Sleep' as if it were some kind of record attempt, but I could just put repeat marks at the end, and it would be 16 hours. It's not about that. "

" It's a liminal thing, humming, And I'm always interested in liminal things. "

" The thing that makes me want to write a piece of music is having something to talk about, you know? Something I want to get across. Because I'm a composer, music is my first language, and that's what I reach for when I want to convey something. "

" 'Black Mirror' obviously has its own universe, with a very strong fingerprint and strong themes, and I was intrigued on reading. It's such a powerful piece of storytelling. "

" It's true that many of the best-known composers were German or Austrian, but we should remember how good the music tradition is in Britain, too, because it has an informality and a fluidity that should really be celebrated. "

" Traditional methods for falling asleep work. Non-taxing, repetitive mental tasks have a lulling effect, and I built those patterns into 'Sleep'. "

" In Germany, people feel like they own classical music, that it is somehow theirs. Over there, everyone still learns to play, and the great composers don't seem alien. "

" When I got the call about 'Arrival,' I was doubtful because the piece had had a life on cinema already, and we were getting to the point where the original context was sort of lost, and I didn't want that to happen. On the other hand, 'Arrival' itself is a political film because it's about unification and getting beyond boundaries. "

" We're chronically sleep-deprived as a culture. We're constantly on. "

" I came from a Conservatoire background where the idea of complexity was very much bound up with good music - good music was seen as complex and difficult to understand. "

Max Richter

Good

Understand