8 hours
atmospheric music
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Create your own personalized music sessions using SLEEP to help you meditate, focus, or fall asleep more easily
MOVIE
The film follows Max Richter and his creative partner, artist and BAFTA winner Yulia Mahr, to his concerts, where the extraordinary composer, pianist, and producer performs his eight-hour work, SLEEP.
The British composer Max Richter has created a monumental musical work.
Süddeutsche Zeitung
About the music
SLEEP is an eight-hour lullaby
This turbulent life—so fast, so little time. When I look at my children, I wonder where they’ll find peace. Those moments of being, when they were babies, with outstretched arms, full of trust in the world.
For a long time, I wanted to write something that would help them find complete calm; the result was my personal lullaby for a hectic world—a manifesto for a slower pace of life.
This piece is meant to be listened to at night. I hope that people will fall asleep while listening to it. The project is an experiment; I wanted to explore how music and consciousness interact—that fascinates me. We spend more time sleeping than on any other activity; over the course of an average life, that adds up to several decades. It’s truly astonishing, this state that lies between being and non-being (and in which, for me personally, all my work takes place).
What happens to music in that state?
Can music and consciousness interact even outside of the waking state?
Can music be a genuine shared creative space?
I’ve always found the conventions of classical music performance fascinating—our strict rules that dictate how and what kind of music we’re allowed to enjoy. When, in the last century in Europe, the complexity and inaccessibility of music came to be equated with intelligence and the avant-garde, we lost something. Modernism gave us so many overwhelming works, and at the same time, it took away our lullabies—and the experience of community through sound. The audience has grown smaller. All my works from recent years have addressed these questions, including SLEEP. SLEEP is a deliberate political statement.
Max Richter
