The film scores of John Williams are beloved by untold millions. Philip Glass’s name is known to a good fraction of the population. Arvo Pärt’s sonic visions entrance audiences around the world. But, if cultural relevance is measured in sheer saturating ubiquity, the composer of our moment is the fifty-seven-year-old British minimalist Max Richter, who, according to his record label, Deutsche Grammophon, has produced the “most streamed classical record of all time.” That album, released in 2015, is titled “Sleep.” It lasts eight and a half hours and is designed to facilitate a full night’s slumber. Richter has also produced an extended compositional remix of “The Four Seasons,” transforming Vivaldi’s kinetic concertos into something spacey and amorphous. His customary mode, as in his soundtrack for the dystopian HBO series “The Leftovers,” is slowly unspooling, painstakingly repetitive melancholia.
Richter’s most inescapable creation is a six-minute juggernaut of wistfulness titled “On the Nature of Daylight,” which first appeared in 2004, on an album called “The Blue Notebooks,” on the indie label FatCat Records. (D.G. rereleased the album in 2018, in an expanded version.) The piece has been featured in a slew of movies, from “Shutter Island” to “Arrival,” and recently heralded a scene of gay double suicide in the series “The Last of Us,” also dystopian. It is built around a recurring block of hymnal chords in the key of B-flat minor. We first hear the chords alone; then a solo violin unfurls a languid ribbon of eighth notes over them; more voices are added, with aching suspensions; there is a mild crescendo. The chords are often inverted, with a note other than the root in the bass, resulting in a chorale-like, let-us-pray atmosphere. There’s no melody as such, but the violin line, sliding upward by steps and drooping by fifths, sticks in the mind. It’s an earworm that actually moves like a worm.
This music has the air of being outside of time, yet it emerges from a long history, going back to the mysterious simplicities of Erik Satie. Minimalism of the nineteen-seventies and eighties is the main point of departure. Richter’s work matches a definition that the composer and critic Tom Johnson proposed in 1972, when he described the output of La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Glass as “flat, static, minimal, and hypnotic.” (Johnson is quoted in Kerry O’Brien and William Robin’s new anthology, “On Minimalism,” which gives a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon.) Richter also has ties to the allied world of ambient music, whose emblematic document is Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports,” from 1978. Victor Szabo, in his recent book “Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off: Ambient Music’s Psychedelic Past,” characterizes the genre as “uniform, predictable, and understated, music without obtrusive changes in instrumentation or volume to draw the ear, music without harmonic or rhythmic surprises.” The late Ryuichi Sakamoto was a distinguished, eccentric practitioner.
In this dreamy arena, Richter has found a distinctive voice, although his debt to Glass is considerable, to say the least. His piece “November,” which figures in “The Leftovers,” strongly resembles the closing track of Glass’s “Mishima” score. Richter is, however, more ethereal than insistent in his endless arpeggiation. Classic minimalism follows a logic of gradual change, so that apparently uniform landscapes undergo, over time, a radical transformation; Richter’s pieces usually wind up not far from where they began. At the same time, his tendency to subject his materials to modest elaboration takes him away from ambient music in the strict sense. “On the Nature of Daylight” is closer in design to Pachelbel’s notorious Canon, the peak of the ambient Baroque. It starts, it adds layers, it swells, it expires.
Some classical diehards may be offended that so venerable a label as D.G. is hawking Richter’s confections, or that other labels are offering a welter of like-minded, often curiously named artists (Moux, lyr, Yaffle, riopy, Balmorhea). In fact, labels have long used mass-market successes to finance less commercial projects. Goddard Lieberson, the legendary chief of Columbia Records, funnelled proceeds from “My Fair Lady” and “The Sound of Music” into surveys of Webern and Stravinsky. Nor does Richter commit any great outrage against taste or craft. I can spend an hour or two in his boutiquey spaces without feeling the urge to flee. I can’t say the same of the New Agey noodlings of Ludovico Einaudi, who, confusingly, has been described as “the most streamed classical artist of all time.”
What troubles me about Richter’s enterprise is, ultimately, its inoffensiveness. The music is impassive, deferential, anonymous. This is why Hollywood soundtrack supervisors push it so hard. If the audience recognized “On the Nature of Daylight” every time, it wouldn’t be as effective. Somehow, it keeps erasing itself and making itself new. We’ve come a long way from minimalism’s pioneer days, when scandals erupted in concert halls and established composers spluttered in fury. Minimalism was countercultural and iconoclastic; ambient music, likewise, echoed utopian ideals, as Szabo shows. Richter’s pieces exude a gentle fatalism, a numbed acquiescence. Don’t worry, be pensive. As we sleepwalk toward global disaster, these algorithmic elegies promise that we will dissolve into mist before the abyss opens.
In the midst of my meanderings through the Richter maze, I heard, via an online stream, the world première of Cassandra Miller’s “I cannot love without trembling,” a desolate, radiant concerto for viola and orchestra. Miller, a Canadian composer based in London, has her own affiliations with the complicated lineage of minimalist and ambient music, although she is too idiosyncratic an artist to be slotted into a single category. Her work generally moves at an unhurried pace, employing loops, ostinatos, and other repetitive structures. Yet its progress is as unpredictable as it is methodical. Simple harmonies cloud over, fixed tones melt into glissandos, squalls of noise blow in. A chaotic humanness animates this zone of the minimalist multiverse, with the singing voice front and center.
Miller often immerses herself in found musical objects: a Maria Callas recording, an American Baptist hymn, birdsong. She goes through an obsessive phase of listening to her sources and mimicking them with her voice. She then transfers her impressions to the page, weaving around them a finely varied musical fabric. The title of her new score comes from Simone Weil: “Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.” The melodic material is derived from a haunting handful of recordings made by the Greek American fiddler Alexis Zoumbas in the early twentieth century—documents that, in turn, draw on the age-old lamenting songs of Epirus, in Greece. Miller asks her soloist to study not only the Zoumbas tracks but also her own sung replicas of them.
This fragmented, mediated process yields an experience of bruising immediacy. The concerto’s première took place at the Klarafestival, in Brussels, and is streaming at the Belgian site VRT. Lawrence Power gives a staggering account of the solo part, with Ilan Volkov and the Brussels Philharmonic providing vehement support. As the viola delivers its keening, cawing songs, the orchestra becomes a chamber of resonances and reverberations: the strings quiver in sympathy, the brass cast brooding shadows, a piccolo alights with birdlike chatter. We end where we begin, with a glimmer of harp, but something colossal has transpired.
Other quotations from Weil are inscribed over sections of Miller’s score. One of them reads, “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” The piece itself demands such devotional attention, although, given the complex provenance of its sources, it doesn’t pass itself off as a pure, sacred vessel. The atmosphere of lamentation is engulfing—so much so that you could hear the work as one more apocalyptic lullaby for an anxious age. Yet the emotions are too ragged and potent to leave you in a daze of sadness. Shards of memory pierce the illusion of a seamless ritual. Sorrow edges into rage. This is music that reminds us how to cry. ♦
