undefined

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