MAX RICHTERThe Blue Notebooks

“Everyone carries a room about inside them.This fact can be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say at night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.”

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MAX RICHTERThe Blue Notebooks

Back in 2003, when he composed The Blue Notebooks, Max Richter had few expecta-tions. His first album, Memoryhouse, had appeared in 2002 to limited fanfare, and its maverick mix of styles and influences – born of Richter’s rigorous classical training and his fascination for electronica (which had led, in previous years, to collabora-tions with The Future Sound Of London and Roni Size) – had proven too great a leap for most people’s imagination. In fact, as Richter recalls, his debut had already been deleted by the time its successor arrived. “No one cared”, Richter says of that early, doomed effort. “The world was not ready for this language.”

These days, it’s hard to believe that The Blue Notebooks might have suffered the same fate. Released two years later by 130701 Records – a small imprint of a not-much-big-ger independent label, FatCat Records, who’d made waves with Icelandic band Sigur Rós – it’s since helped pave the way for a generation of successful young composers, and, as a pioneering piece of work, elicits enviable superlatives. Some, to Richter’s delight, even appeared upon its release. America’s Pitchfork website, for instance, named it “one of the most affecting and universal contemporary classical records in recent memory”, while Mojo’s David Sheppard – author of Brian Eno’s biography, On Some Faraway Beach – defined it as “an album of pure, meditative loveliness”.

Such praise derived, in part, from Richter’s approach to its composition, which, in turn, drew at least somewhat upon his response to Memoryhouse’s reception: “‘No one’s listening’, I thought. ‘I may as well do exactly what I want because I’ll be selling no records.’” The Blue Notebooks, however, was neither a last, desperate throw of the dice by the British composer – born, in 1966, in West Germany, but by now living in Hackney, East London – nor a self-indulgent exercise in emancipation. Instead, it was carefully conceived as “a meditation on violence and its repercussions, inspired both by the Iraq war – which was looming – and my own experiences.”

Given its contemplative nature, this may seem surprising, since political works like Beethoven’s Fidelio, Sibelius’ Finlandia and Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony have depended – partially, anyhow – on volume for their rousing effect. Richter notes

1. The Blue Notebooks 1:202. On The Nature Of Daylight 6:123. Horizon Variations 1:534. Shadow Journal 8:235. Iconography 3:396. Vladimir’s Blues 1:197. Arboretum 2:548. Old Song 2:119. Organum 3:1310. The Trees 7:5311. Written On The Sky 1:4012. A Catalogue Of Afternoons* 1:5113. On The Nature Of Daylight (Orchestral Version) 6:3614. Vladimir’s Blues 2018* 1:3015. On The Nature Of Daylight (Entropy)* 6:5416. Vladimir’s Blues (Jlin Remix)* 3:4517. Iconography (Konx-Om-Pax Remix)* 3:5718. This Bitter Earth / On The Nature Of Daylight w/ Dinah Washington 6:13

*Previously unreleased

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too that he was inspired by songwriters like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, plus the late-1970s punk movement. The Blue Notebooks, however, was not intended as dissent of such kind. “I didn’t want to lecture”, Richter says. “I wanted to invite the listener in, allowing them space to reflect rather than be beaten into submission. The world is tough enough, and I don’t want to add to the brutality. Over the years, I’ve realised that there’s a balance to strike, and that actually, as our world spins into something quite threatening, increasingly based on loud and vicious rhetoric, I want to talk about quiet protest.”

The Blue Notebooks is also intimately personal. The political sphere, sadly, doesn’t have a monopoly on cruelty, and Richter recalls that, as “a very sensitive child, I reacted to the violence around me by internalising everything. I closed all the shutters, built up walls, became as perfect as I could be, in order not to be hit. My only refuge was music, and I totally disappeared into the internal landscapes it opened up to me.” Indeed, an air of no stalgia permeates The Blue Notebooks, some-thing acknowledged in the texts Richter selected for actress Tilda Swinton’s crucial monologues. “Everyone carries a room about inside him”, she begins, the words taken from Franz Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks – whose title Richter adapted for his suite – and later she recites Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, blurring past and present in vivid fashion: “I was here when she, with whom I walk, wasn’t born yet.”

“I chose the texts”, Richter says, “to reflect on my sense of the politics of the time. Facts were beginning to be replaced by subjective assertions in the build-up to the war, which seemed to be viewed as inevitable and justified in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Kafka’s use of the absurd to investigate power structures struck me as highly relevant. He is, of course, the patron saint of doubt, and doubt – about poli-tics, and the way society was heading – was what I was looking to express. The texts were specifically picked because they refer to childhood, or the passing of time, when everything around is failing.”

As Richter points out, this is something buried in The Blue Notebooks’ very archi-tecture. “‘On The Nature Of Daylight’ uses a palindromic structure,” he says, offering the suite’s most famous piece as illustration, “so the present and the past coexist.” Moreover, he adds, “There were certain pieces that were central to my musical ‘refuge’, and these make an appearance, as though I’m revisiting that experience, but through a half-remembered haze. The most obvious example is ‘Old Song’, which quotes the whole of the tenth song from Schumann’s Dichterliebe.”

The milestone recording – much of it achieved, remarkably, in just three hours – wasn’t merely radical in its thematic approach. It was also defiant in its arrange-ments and structure. While its dominant instrumentation suggested it was conceived as classical music, Richter also employed delicate, contemporary electronic flou-rishes – something unprecedented at the time, at least in the manner Richter pursued the idea. Additionally, his decision to work with familiar popular music forms – including strict, if unhurried, 4/4 rhythms, which later memorably allowed Dinah Washington’s This Bitter Earth to be incorporated into ‘On The Nature Of Daylight’ (for the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island) – made it significantly more accessible.

“I come from a high-modernist classical music training,” Richter concludes, “where maximum complexity, extreme dissonance, asymmetry and impenetrability were badges of honour. If you wrote a single tonal chord – even by accident – people would mock you, and concerts were more like the issuing of manifestos. I wrote a lot in that tradition, but came to feel that, for all its technical sophistication, this languagewas basically inert. It reached almost nobody beyond the new music cliques. I didn’t want to talk to just those people. I deliberately set out to be as plainspoken as possible.”

The tactic brought Richter overwhelming, overdue success. The Blue Notebooks remains not only a landmark release, but also a staple of his concerts, with excerpts performed in recent years alongside, for instance, parts of 2015’s magnum opus, Sleep. In addition, its widespread use in TV and film – ‘On The Nature Of Daylight’, in particular, played a further pivotal role in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival – has ensured it’s become part of the public consciousness, helping all but demolish boundaries between contemporary classical and popular music.

Nonetheless, the greatest blessing afforded by this reissue – which comes with three previously unreleased recordings, as well as two remixes, underlining the work’s crossover appeal – is the renewed opportunity it offers to contemplate today’s deeply divided political and social landscape. Richter may have been concerned, all those years ago, that he was working with a language for which no one was ready, but it’s one that, in 2018, we need more urgently than ever.

Wyndham WallaceBerlin, 2018

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℗ 2004 (1–11), 2014 (13), 2018 (12, 14–17) Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Berlin ℗ 2018 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Berlin / 1959 The Verve Music Group (18)This compilation ℗ 2018 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Berlin

Composed + Produced by Max Richter (1–17) · “This Bitter Earth” (18) Written by Clyde Otis + Published by Third Side Music Inc. · “On The Nature Of Daylight (18) Written by Max Richter · Recorded by Philip Bagenal (1–11, 16, 17); Steve Parr (1, 3–11, 16, 17); · Rupert Coulson (12, 14, 15) · Pro Tools Engineer: Tom Bailey (12, 14, 15) · Mixed by Max Richter (1–11, 12, 14); Rupert Coulson (12, 14, 15); Robbie Robertson (18) · Remixed by Jlin (16); Konx-Om-Pax (17) · Mastered by Mandy Parnell (1–11); Götz-Michael Rieth (16, 17) · Recorded in 2003 (1–11, 16, 17) Recorded at Scoring Stage, Babelsberg, in 2010 (13) and at Air Studios, London, on 9 January 2018 (12, 14, 15)

Reader: Tilda Swinton (1, 4, 7, 8, 10) · Piano: Max Richter (1, 3, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14–16) · Electronics: Max Richter (1, 3–5, 7–10, 17)Violins: Louisa Fuller + Natalia Bonner (2, 4, 7, 10, 15, 18) · Viola: John Metcalfe (2, 4, 7, 10, 15, 18) · Cellos: Philip Sheppard + Chris Worsey (2, 4, 7, 10, 18); Chris Worsey + Ian Burdge (15) · Max Richter Orchestra conducted by Lorenz Dangel (13) · Vocals: Dinah Washington (18)

Published by Mute Song Ltd (1–5, 8–11, 13, 17, 18); Mute Song International Ltd (7); Decca Publishing (12); Mute Song (14, 15); Copyright Control (6, 16);

www.maxrichtermusic.comwww.deutschegrammophon.com

Executive Producer Studio Richter Mahr: Yulia Mahr

Executive Producer Deutsche Grammophon: Christian Badzura

Product Management Deutsche Grammophon: Nanja Maung Yin

Product Coordinator Deutsche Grammophon: Simão Capitão

Project Coordinator Studio Richter Mahr: Rebecca Drake-Brockman

Artist Management: Steve Abbott Photos: © Heiko Prigge

Cover Photo: © Peter Langer Art Direction:Studio Marek Polewski

Layout: Erkin Karamemet

Editorial + Artworking: WLP Ltd

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