Max Richter: the composer who crosses the invisible divide between “high” and “low” music | music

German-born British composer Max Richter was not nominated for an Oscar until this year, though he may have one day ruined someone else’s chance at winning it – unintentionally.

In 2016, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences disqualified Jóhann Johansson’s score for Arrival on the grounds that viewers would find it impossible to distinguish the late Icelandic composer’s soundtrack from the purchased score that ended Denis Villeneuve’s alien invasion psychodrama: Richter’s soaring, minimalist drama about the nature of daylight.

A decade later, Richter was nominated for Best Original Score of the Year for his work in Shakespeare’s Hamnet. If he wins, it will be the culmination of an already remarkable 12 months for the musician, who turns 60 a week after the Oscars in Los Angeles.

Last year, his 2015 album “Sleep” surpassed 2 billion streams across all platforms, becoming the first classical recording to do so. Awarded a CBE in the New Year’s Honors List, his work will be celebrated with the Berlinale Camera Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, which starts next week, and from Monday, a live ballet inspired by the works of Virginia Woolf.

The only thing that might hinder Richter’s rise at this point is his success. Hamnet once again relies on “On the Nature of Daylight” to tug at the heartstrings, and the score has become so ubiquitous on screens big and small that it has sparked a backlash among critics, with The Guardian’s Tom Service recently dismissing it as “a cliché for moments of serious contemplation or sentimental sentiment” in film.

However, in terms of his musical origins, there was nothing predictable about Max Richter’s meteoric rise. Born in Hamelin, Lower Saxony, but raised in Bedford, he was introduced to simple music at the age of 12-13 by the local milkman, an enthusiastic new music fan who introduced him to recordings by Terry Riley, Philip Glass and John Cage with a daily pint and inspired an epiphany. “Until then, I thought ‘new music’ was Stravinsky,” he told German newspaper Die Zeit in a recent interview.

The ability to cross the invisible divide between “high” and “low” music has become a career-defining skill. Despite his classical training, Richter never hid his enthusiasm for the early electronica of Kraftwerk or the snarling punk of Stiff Little Fingers.

Before achieving his breakthrough as a composer in his own right, he worked with the electronic hippies Future Sound of London in the mid-1990s and contributed strings to Roni Size & Reprazent’s 2000 album In the Møde.

Christian Badzura, vice president of A&R at Richter’s label Deutsche Grammophon, remembers being blown away by his 2002 debut album Memoryhouse and its 2004 follow-up The Blue Notebooks. “He obviously had the classic pen-and-paper skills, but he managed to write tonal music that never sounded thin. There was a lot of emotional power.”

These albums have been retrospectively recognized as landmarks of the genre known as “neoclassicism”, “post-minimalism” or “new repertoire”, but one interesting factor about Richter’s career is that he managed to gain a profile mainly through collaboration.

“The first thing about Max is that he’s very good at meeting deadlines,” said Royal Ballet director Kevin O’Hare, whose company has staged three collaborations between Richter and choreographer Wayne MacGregor. “In ballet, you commission a work two or three years in advance, and the person who really executes it is the composer. So, you rely on Max, and he always carries out the assignments.”

MacGregor’s ballet productions, such as 2015’s Woolf Works and 2022’s MaddAddam, eschew linear narrative in favor of fast-paced storytelling. O’Hare said Richter’s music proved particularly resilient to sudden changes in mood or environment. “It’s not that everyone cries all the time, but he has this ability to channel the right emotions at the right moments.”

In the world of film, Richter has been a sought-after collaborator since he conducted the music for director Ari Folman’s 2008 animated war documentary Waltz with Bashir.

On the Nature of Daylight, in particular, has proven irresistible to filmmakers, appearing in fantasy romances (Stranger Than Fiction), horror thrillers (Shutter Island), post-apocalyptic dramas (The Last of Us), and even a 35th anniversary episode of EastEnders. Chloé Zhao used the track for the final minutes of Hamnet even though Richter had already written original music for the scene, later saying it was “spiritually irreplaceable” after using a choral version during rehearsals.

The piece begins with an almost churchy 24-bar chord progression on the lower strings which is then layered in a simple manner with circular, repetitive melodies on the violins. However, what In the Nature of Daylight lacks in variety, it makes up for in the use of harmonies.

Juno Buchanan, a television composer and music lecturer at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, said the piece’s internal sounds – the melodies found between the soprano and bass parts – will be as familiar to pop fans as they are to classical music fans. “You’re just as likely to find similar harmonic figures in Coldplay’s Fix You as in Barber’s Adagio for Strings.”

The piece achieved the feat of being bright and dark, warm and cold at the same time. “It doesn’t attach its sentimental colors to the mast, so you can mount it to any mast you want.”

That same chameleon-like adaptability, and its algorithmic efficiency at communicating big emotions, is what has drawn the ire of some critics. Alex Ross of The New Yorker wrote: “What troubles me about Richter’s project is, ultimately, its integrity. The music is steadfast, considerate, anonymous.”

To the question “What is the use of art,” Richter’s music provides a confident, if overly answer-oriented, answer: it amplifies our feelings and calms our nerves. Richter’s record-breaking eight-hour Sleep Album is designed to make it easier to sleep through the night and comes with an app to “create personalized music sessions to improve meditation, concentration or sleep.”

Sam Jackson, controller of BBC Radio 3 and the BBC Proms, insisted that Richter’s music was more than just a highly functional health instrument. “Contemporary composers who embrace melody, like him, are sometimes dismissed as making music to ‘lean in’; to be put in the background to serve your mood. But his music also inspires people to lean forward.”

He referred to Richter’s project “Voices” for the year 2020, which he completed with his creative life partner, visual artist Yulia Maher, and which weaves words from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into music. Every time Radio 3 plays “On the Nature of Daylight,” listeners write in because they want to know more about the work: “They really engage with the music and the message behind it,” Jackson said.