that Max Richter says, plus the beginning of a third, in the liner notes for The Blue Notebooks, last first, since it considers the music:
“I come from a high-modernist classical music training, … 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 language was basically inert.”
[worth pausing there, for a minute.]
“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 third thing, left here hanging for its suggestiveness:
“I chose the texts … to reflect on my sense of the politics of the time. Facts were beginning to be replaced by subjective assertions”…
And the first last:
“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.”
[another pause is called for.]
“Over the years, I’ve ralised 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.”
