Max Richter (Composer)
Encyclopedia
Max Richter is a German-born British composer
.
, Brian Eno
, Philip Glass
, Julia Wolfe
and Steve Reich
. The ensemble was signed to Decca/Argo, producing five albums. In 1996, Max collaborated with Future Sound of London on their album Dead Cities
, beginning as a pianist, but ultimately working on several tracks, as well as co-writing one track (titled "Max"). Richter subsequently worked with the band over a period of two years, also contributing to the albums The Isness
and The Peppermint Tree and Seeds of Superconsciousness
. In 2000, Richter worked with Mercury Prize
winner Roni Size
on the Reprazent
album In the Mode. Richter produced Vashti Bunyan
's album Lookaftering
(2005) and Kelli Ali's album Rocking Horse
in 2008.
(2004), actress Tilda Swinton
reads from Kafka’s Blue Octavo and other "shadow journals". Songs from Before (2006) features Robert Wyatt
reading texts by Haruki Murakami
.
Richter released his fourth solo album 24 Postcards in Full Colour, a collection of 24 classically-composed miniatures for ringtones, in 2008.
The pieces are a series of variations on the basic material, scored for strings, piano and electronics. Richter's latest album, Infra, is an extension of his 25-minute score for a ballet choreographed by Wayne McGregor which was staged at the Royal Opera House. Infra is composed of music written for piano, electronics and string quintet, the full performance score, as well as material that subsequently developed from the construction of the album.
's "This Bitter Earth" was remixed with Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight" for the Martin Scorsese
film Shutter Island
. In July 2010, "On The Nature Of Daylight" and "Vladimir's Blues" featured throughout the BBC Two two-part drama Dive, which was co-written by Bafta award winning Dominic Savage and Simon Stevens. Richter also wrote the soundtrack to Peter Richardson’s documentary, How to die in Oregon,and the score to Les Impardonnables (2011) directed by André Téchiné. Films featuring Max's music which go on release in 2011 include French drama Elle s’appelait Sarah by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, and David MacKenzie's romantic thriller Perfect Sense. Richter is currently composing the score to Ari Folman’s new film The Congress which is set for release in 2012-13. Max Richter also composed music for the independent feature film, Henry May Long, starring Randy Sharp
and Brian Barnhart
, back in 2008.
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
.
Biography
Richter studied composition and piano at University of Edinburgh, the Royal Academy of Music and with Luciano Berio in Florence. After finishing his studies, Richter co-founded the contemporary classical ensemble Piano Circus. He stayed with the group for ten years, commissioning and performing works by Arvo PärtArvo Pärt
Arvo Pärt is an Estonian classical composer and one of the most prominent living composers of sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-made compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music also finds its inspiration and influence from...
, Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...
, Philip Glass
Philip Glass
Philip Glass is an American composer. He is considered to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public .His music is often described as minimalist, along with...
, Julia Wolfe
Julia Wolfe
Julia Wolfe is an American composer. She was born in Philadelphia, holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Princeton and Yale, and currently works in New York. Wolfe's music is rhythmically vigorous and often clangorously dissonant...
and Steve Reich
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
. The ensemble was signed to Decca/Argo, producing five albums. In 1996, Max collaborated with Future Sound of London on their album Dead Cities
Dead Cities
-History:The Dead Cities are a group of 700 abandoned settlements in northwest Syria between Aleppo and Hama. They date back to before the fifth century CE and contain many remains of Christian Byzantine architecture...
, beginning as a pianist, but ultimately working on several tracks, as well as co-writing one track (titled "Max"). Richter subsequently worked with the band over a period of two years, also contributing to the albums The Isness
The Isness
The Isness is a 2002 album by experimental electronica group The Future Sound of London, released under the alias Amorphous Androgynous...
and The Peppermint Tree and Seeds of Superconsciousness
The Peppermint Tree and Seeds of Superconsciousness
The Peppermint Tree & the Seeds of Superconsciousness is a 2008 album by the Amorphous Androgynous, it was released on FSOL's webpage to buy as a digital download and was released on CD on June 2008....
. In 2000, Richter worked with Mercury Prize
Mercury Prize
The Mercury Prize, formerly called the Mercury Music Prize and currently known as the Barclaycard Mercury Prize for sponsorship reasons, is an annual music prize awarded for the best album from the United Kingdom and Ireland. It was established by the British Phonographic Industry and British...
winner Roni Size
Roni Size
Roni Size is a British record producer and DJ, who came to prominence in 1997 as the founder and leader of Reprazent, a drum and bass collective...
on the Reprazent
Reprazent
Reprazent is a British drum and bass act formed by Roni Size. Their debut album New Forms won the Mercury Music Prize in 1997. Their follow-up album In The Mode featured artists including Rahzel, Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine and Method Man.Roni Size resurrected Reprazent in 2008...
album In the Mode. Richter produced Vashti Bunyan
Vashti Bunyan
Vashti Bunyan is an English singer-songwriter. In 1970, Bunyan released her first album, Just Another Diamond Day. The album sold very few copies, and Bunyan, discouraged, abandoned her musical career...
's album Lookaftering
Lookaftering
Lookaftering is the second album by Vashti Bunyan, the much-delayed follow-up to 1970's Just Another Diamond Day, released in 2005 on Fat Cat Records.-Track listing:All songs by Vashti Bunyan.# "Lately" – 2:21# "Here Before" – 2:05...
(2005) and Kelli Ali's album Rocking Horse
Rocking Horse (album)
Rocking Horse is the third solo album from singer-songwriter Kelli Ali and was released through One Little Indian Records on 24 November 2008 in the United Kingdom....
in 2008.
Solo work
In 2002, Richter released his solo debut Memoryhouse, an experimental album of “documentary music” recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, which explores real and imaginary stories and histories. It combines ambient sounds, voices, and poetry readings. The album went out of print several years later, but was re-released in 2009. Four tracks (“Europe, After the Rain”, “The Twins (Prague)”, “Fragment“, and “Embers”) were used in the six-part 2005 BBC documentary Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution produced by Laurence Rees. On his second album, The Blue NotebooksThe Blue Notebooks
The Blue Notebooks is the second album by British producer/composer Max Richter.The album features readings from Franz Kafka's The Blue Octavo Notebooks and Czesław Miłosz's Hymn of the Pearl and Unattainable Earth...
(2004), actress Tilda Swinton
Tilda Swinton
Katherine Mathilda "Tilda" Swinton is a British actress known for both arthouse and mainstream films. She has appeared in a number of films including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Burn After Reading, The Beach, We Need to Talk About Kevin and was nominated for a Golden Globe for her...
reads from Kafka’s Blue Octavo and other "shadow journals". Songs from Before (2006) features Robert Wyatt
Robert Wyatt
Robert Wyatt is an English musician, and founding member of the influential Canterbury scene band Soft Machine, with a long and distinguished solo career...
reading texts by Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami
is a Japanese writer and translator. His works of fiction and non-fiction have garnered him critical acclaim and numerous awards, including the Franz Kafka Prize and Jerusalem Prize among others.He is considered an important figure in postmodern literature...
.
Richter released his fourth solo album 24 Postcards in Full Colour, a collection of 24 classically-composed miniatures for ringtones, in 2008.
The pieces are a series of variations on the basic material, scored for strings, piano and electronics. Richter's latest album, Infra, is an extension of his 25-minute score for a ballet choreographed by Wayne McGregor which was staged at the Royal Opera House. Infra is composed of music written for piano, electronics and string quintet, the full performance score, as well as material that subsequently developed from the construction of the album.
Film Scores
Richter has composed numerous film soundtracks. He executed the score to Ari Folman’s Golden Globe-winning film Waltz with Bashir in 2007, supplanting the standard orchestral soundtrack with synth-based sounds. Richter wrote the music for Feo Aladag's film Die Fremde (with additional music by Stéphane Moucha). In 2010, Dinah WashingtonDinah Washington
Dinah Washington, born Ruth Lee Jones , was an American blues, R&B and jazz singer. She has been cited as "the most popular black female recording artist of the '50s", and called "The Queen of the Blues"...
's "This Bitter Earth" was remixed with Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight" for the Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
film Shutter Island
Shutter Island
Shutter Island is a best-selling novel by Dennis Lehane, published by Harper Collins in April 2003. A film adaptation was released in February 2010. Lehane has said he sought to write a novel that would be an homage to Gothic settings, B movies, and pulp. He described the novel as a hybrid of the...
. In July 2010, "On The Nature Of Daylight" and "Vladimir's Blues" featured throughout the BBC Two two-part drama Dive, which was co-written by Bafta award winning Dominic Savage and Simon Stevens. Richter also wrote the soundtrack to Peter Richardson’s documentary, How to die in Oregon,and the score to Les Impardonnables (2011) directed by André Téchiné. Films featuring Max's music which go on release in 2011 include French drama Elle s’appelait Sarah by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, and David MacKenzie's romantic thriller Perfect Sense. Richter is currently composing the score to Ari Folman’s new film The Congress which is set for release in 2012-13. Max Richter also composed music for the independent feature film, Henry May Long, starring Randy Sharp
Randy Sharp
Randy Sharp is a country songwriter who has written songs for Clay Walker, Patty Loveless, Reba McEntire, and the Dixie Chicks. He is also the father of Country singer-songwriter Maia Sharp. In 2002, Sharp released an album titled The Connection....
and Brian Barnhart
Brian Barnhart
Brian Barnhart is the President of Race Operations of IndyCar . Having previously served as director of race operations for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and IRL, he is charged with primarily the safety and competition of the racing...
, back in 2008.
Collaborations
Richter wrote the score to Infra as part of a Royal Ballet-commissioned collaboration with dancer Wayne McGregor and artist Julian Opie. The production was staged at the Royal Opera House in London in 2008. In 2010, Richter's soundscape The Anthropocine formed part of Darren Almond’s film installation at the White Cube gallery in London.Solo discography
- Memoryhouse (BBC, 2002)
- The Blue NotebooksThe Blue NotebooksThe Blue Notebooks is the second album by British producer/composer Max Richter.The album features readings from Franz Kafka's The Blue Octavo Notebooks and Czesław Miłosz's Hymn of the Pearl and Unattainable Earth...
(Fat Cat RecordsFat Cat RecordsFat Cat Records is an independent label based in Brighton on England’s South Coast. Their output includes electronica, post rock, indie, downtempo, minimal techno, noise and punk-pop...
, 2004) - Songs from Before (Fat Cat RecordsFat Cat RecordsFat Cat Records is an independent label based in Brighton on England’s South Coast. Their output includes electronica, post rock, indie, downtempo, minimal techno, noise and punk-pop...
, 2006) - 24 Postcards in Full Colour (Fat Cat RecordsFat Cat RecordsFat Cat Records is an independent label based in Brighton on England’s South Coast. Their output includes electronica, post rock, indie, downtempo, minimal techno, noise and punk-pop...
, 2008) - Infra (Fat Cat RecordsFat Cat RecordsFat Cat Records is an independent label based in Brighton on England’s South Coast. Their output includes electronica, post rock, indie, downtempo, minimal techno, noise and punk-pop...
, 2010)
Film scores
- Soundproof (2006) Director: Edmund Coulthard
- Henry May Long (2007) Director: Randy Sharp
- Hope (2007) Director: Stanislav Mucha
- Waltz with BashirWaltz with BashirWaltz with Bashir is a 2008 Israeli animated documentary film written and directed by Ari Folman. It depicts Folman in search of his lost memories from the 1982 Lebanon War....
(2008) Director: Ari Folman. Won 'Best Composer' at the 21st annual European Film Awards. - Darwin – Notes From A Genius (2008) Producer: Jeremy Bristow
- Frankie Howerd: Rather You Than Me Director: John Alexander
- Die Wilde Farm (2009) Director: Dominique Garing & Frédéric Goupil
- Lila, Lila (2009) Director: Alain Gsponer
- Penelopa (2009) Director: Brian Ferris
- How to Die in Oregon (2010) Director: Peter D. Richardson
- Sarah’s Key (2010) Director: Gilles Paquet-Brenner
- My Trip to Al-Qaeda (2010) Director: Alex Gibney
- Die Fremde (2010) Director: Feo Aladağ
- The Womb (2010) Director: Benedek Fliegauf
- Impardonnables (2011) Director: André Téchiné
- Perfect Sense (2011) Director: David MacKenzie
Awards and Nominations
- European Film Award - Best Composer - Walz with Bashir (2008)
- Cinema Eye HonorsCinema Eye HonorsThe Cinema Eye Honors is an award which celebrates nonfiction films and filmmakers, recognizing the breadth of the genre and includes the crafts of cinematography, editing, producing, directing, etc. It was first presented at the IFC Center in New York City on March 18, 2008...
- Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition - Walz with Bashir (2008) - Annie AwardAnnie AwardThe Annie Awards have been presented by the Los Angeles, California branch of the International Animated Film Association, ASIFA-Hollywood since 1972...
- Music in an Animated Feature Production - Nominee, Walz with Bashir (2008) - International Film Music Critics Association Awards - Breakout Composer of the Year - Nominee, Walz with Bashir (2008)
- Preis der deutschen Filmkritik - Beste Musik - "Die Fremde" (2010)
- Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentaries- "How to die in Oregon" (2010)
External links
- Official Website
- Max Richter on Myspace
- FatCat Records Artist page
- Max Richter Facebook
- Max Richter Twitter
- Review of 'Infra' in Tokafi Magazine
- Review of 'Infra' in Nowness magazine
Interviews
- Two and a Half Questions with Max Richter on Headphone Commute (Oct, 2008)