Max Richter is one of contemporary classical music's most revolutionary and innovative composers, known for his sociopolitical awareness. His film and television scores are instantly recognizable for their emotional depth, impact, and poignancy. Richter has also arranged music for art exhibitions, ballets, and runway shows, including a longstanding collaboration with Dior Men’s artistic director, Kim Jones. Among his numerous albums, one of his most ambitious works, Sleep, is an 8-hour composition designed in collaboration with neuroscientists to be experienced during slumber. His ninth studio album, In A Landscape (Decca Records)—an ode to the extremes of nature, love, and the polarity of existence—marks the first solo record produced at Studio Richter Mahr, a creative audio laboratory in Oxfordshire that he co-founded with his wife, Yulia Mahr. The studio also serves as a residency for emerging musicians. Released in early September, the album revisits themes first explored in The Blue Notebooks, written in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and described by Richter as a “meditation on violence.” Richter’s new album, which wavers between electronic and acoustic sounds, is a moving soundtrack for a new era of uncertainty and chaos.

MAX RICHTER Hi, how are you?

HANS ULRICH OBRIST I'm good, and you?

RICHTER I'm good.

OBRIST Where are you?

RICHTER I am in my studio in Oxfordshire.

OBRIST I was talking with your friend Nico Muhly, and he mentioned Studio Richter Mahr as a great example of a residency for musicians. Can you describe how it works?

RICHTER Yulia Mahr and I conceived this studio as a multidimensional laboratory. It functions as an instrument for us to deliver our own work into the world. We also felt that we should make it available to other practitioners who may not have the opportunity to work in these facilities in their everyday lives—artists who are mostly in the early stages of their careers. We've had quite an informal kind of a process where we invite people to come for a couple of weeks, or whatever it might be, and give them the facilities and accommodations for free. There is no agenda. There is no expectation. There are no hoops to jump through. It's simply providing a platform or a context for them to make work. It’s rooted in thinking back to when we were starting—when I was starting out—having no resources. You are very limited. You can make music on a piece of manuscript paper, but you can’t do anything in terms of recording or putting the work out into the world unless you have some resources.

OBRIST You mentioned that the space is like your instrument. Can you talk about what that entails—from the technology to the acoustics?

RICHTER Music can now be made on the computer. You can sit in your bedroom, and you can make a record. However, if you want to use acoustic instrumentation, you need a space to record. And that’s where the roadblock comes for people just starting because that is expensive. We also have the opportunity to record and mix in sound formats, like [Dolby] Atmos, a new language we’re exploring in this space. You need a lot of very specific equipment to do that. So, this is really about providing the best possible recording scenario for people who want to explore their work in a kind of optimal condition.

OBRIST Suzanne Pagé, the visionary director of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, who was my mentor and a great friend, told me you were invited to make a sonic component for Mark Rothko's retrospective. So many creatives in art, music, and literature are inspired by Rothko. How did you come to know about the work of Mark Rothko? What does the work mean to you, and why do you think revisiting his legacy today is particularly relevant?

RICHTER Like most people who are London-based, the room at the Tate on Millbank with the Seagram Murals made a tremendous impact. This goes back to my teen years. Encountering that work in that space and the way it seemed to relate to and contrast with everything else that was going on in the building in such a profound way. It was an experience that prompted a lot of reflection on my part about what art can do. I’d been introduced, via a very circuitous route, to the minimalists as really quite a young kid. My experience of seeing Rothko chimed in with that. It seemed to reinforce this view of, as he says, “Complex ideas expressed simply.” This was aspirational for me—how could you convey something nuanced and sophisticated and rich, but make it feel simple?

OBRIST Complexity and simplicity—all great things in art are often oxymoronic.

RICHTER Exactly. Yes. And the works set up this sort of dialogue; they ask quite a lot from you. There’s some sort of conversation, which the work elicits from you directly, because it’s not flooding you with data. One of the most interesting things he said was, “Silence is so accurate.” If you put Rothko and Arvo Pärt together, that makes sense. It’s quite historical, reduced, and minimal. And I think that's one of the things that I really enjoy about Rothko’s work: it’s asking fundamental questions.

OBRIST It’s interesting that there are these possibilities for exhibitions to have soundtracks. Alex Poots and I worked on this commission where Gerhard Richter made works related to the music of Arvo Pärt, and Arvo Pärt made music for Richter. And it was all brought together in a room, like an exhibition, not a concert. How do visual art and music come together for you?

RICHTER A meeting point between my work and Rothko's work is that he’s inventing a place when he makes a series of paintings. A piece of music is an imaginary landscape, a place you can inhabit. Within my work, the most obvious example of that is Sleep, which is this eight-and-a-half-hour overnight piece. And I see this Rothko project as, in some way, branching out from that. In my mind, this project exists in two parts. The first is more like a sound installation in response to the Rothko’s, which has fluidity. And then, there’s the locked version of the music, which can be performed or recorded.

OBRIST There are dedicated spaces where we can listen to sound—for instance, La Monte Young’s Dream House in New York. More recently, Tyshawn Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) was performed at the Rothko Chapel in Houston. I am curious if you have collaborated with living visual artists.

RICHTER This is going back quite a while, but I made some work with Darren Almond. He has a long-running photographic project documenting a mine in Northern Siberia in the Arctic Circle. There is a mountain there, which has, by some fluke, every mineral on Earth. And it’s the most polluted place in Russia. I made some acoustic material to respond to that—mainly from the resonance of these big steel pipelines. We got together through a shared interest in the work of John Cage.

OBRIST For Rothko, “Art is an adventure into unknown worlds which can be explored only by those willing to take the risk.”

RICHTER I think every project is ideally a journey into something you don’t know. That’s why it’s interesting to do it. You have a set of assumptions, and you have things you do know, and creative work is going outside of that pool of light into something you don’t know. I’d describe it more like an enquiry, or a journey. Rothko was quite a troubled man, prone to a lot of anxiety and doubt. We all are, but he sees the idea of making work as risky. It did seem to matter to him very much what people thought. That in itself is risky.

OBRIST Rothko once said, “You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral. Then you should look again. I’m the most violent of all American painters. Behind these colors, there hides the final cataclysm.” Do you agree with that? And was there cataclysm in your sound piece for Mark Rothko?

RICHTER This is why the works affect people so powerfully. It’s very common to wander into the room at Tate Britain and see people just sitting there crying. The works ask the really fundamental human questions.

OBRIST My next question is about your upcoming album, In A Landscape. It’s been described as connecting or reconciling polarities. We are living in a time of the extinction and environmental crisis. As Alexis Pauline Gumbs says, “It’s important to create a situation where we are feeding communion with the environment and go beyond this idea of separation.” Art seems to be one of the most important things right now to reconcile polarities. Can you talk about that and how it articulates itself in the new album?

RICHTER You’re absolutely right. We live in a culture driven by dopamine and cortisol-mediated digital platforms and technology. And so you have, as it is in the UK right now, an amplification of extreme behaviors. This is rooted in people having different points of view. It’s really a very simple thing (laughs). We have a situation now where people with very straightforward, different points of view can no longer have a conversation, but the record is also about polarities in a broader sense. It’s about integrating acoustic instrumentation with electronic music. It’s about reconciling the built environment, the human environment, with a natural environment. We’re trying to find an integrated situation where things can mutually enhance one another rather than get into a polarized, adversarial situation. There’s a long history of artists engaging with the world beyond the urban space and making a fertile connection between creative work and the natural world. For example, Black Mountain College, Ian Hamilton Finlay with Little Sparta, or Derek Jarman at Dungeness Garden.

OBRIST I was just in Salzburg doing this talk with landscape architect Piet Oudolf and artist Tino Sehgal. At CONVOCO!, they were talking about bringing Tino’s “constructed situations” into gardens. That made me think about music in gardens and landscapes, because normally, music is experienced digitally, at home, on mobile devices, or in a concert hall. But are you interested in bringing your work into the landscape as an installation?

RICHTER I have been thinking about that. The title of the record, In A Landscape, is deliberately multidimensional. You can mishear it as “inner landscape,” referring to the world out there or the internal world, and that’s a deliberate and quite nice expression of how I see the process of composing and how it relates to this record. There’s a lineage back to John Cage. He wrote a piece with the same title in the late ’40s, which goes back to his love of [Erik] Satie. Satie is a very important figure in how music and human beings interact. He’s incredibly revolutionary; people dismiss him because the music is so beautiful. But that’s a big mistake. It’s very radical art. Actually, it reminds me of something Hamilton Finlay said about how people think of gardens as retreats, when they are actually attacks. Satie’s music is a bit like that—there’s a tremendous radicalism in it, which feeds into Cage’s anarchistic hinterland.

OBRIST Another project is your collaboration with Kim Jones and Dior. Collaboration between the world of art and fashion is not new. Consider Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Coco Chanel, who created the costumes, and [Igor] Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring. Diaghilev worked with artists like Picasso—he brought all these disciplines together. We live in a moment where more and more disciplines are coming together. Just yesterday, I had a wonderful conversation with Luca Guadagnino who was telling me about his collaboration with JW Anderson, who made the costumes for Queer, his new film, which is set to premiere in Venice. So, I’m very interested in your different collaborations with Kim Jones.

RICHTER With Kim, we initially connected via a shared enthusiasm for Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. He’s a passionate, lifelong Bloomsbury enthusiast with a very important collection of her writings and first editions. He has that wide-open, inquiring mind, which is so fun to be around and connect with. I do think of his fashion shows as fundamentally creative projects. We collaborated on a runway show inspired by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land on the occasion of its 100th anniversary. We had Gwendoline Christie and Robert Pattinson read sections of The Waste Land—much of it is a two-way conversation. I also contributed some music to that, which was played live. We have continued making pieces in this sort of conversational process. His language is fashion. There’s a sort of fundamental borderlessness in this work: there is movement, there is video and film, there is music, there are the clothes, and there is a kind of theater. The design is always very specific, and you are building a setting for this event. So, it’s very multidimensional. I’m fascinated by the interpenetration and borderlessness of fashion.

“Technology in music is a fascinating historical story. Even early musical systems are technological, but they’re technological from a conceptual level.” - Richter

OBRIST The topic of this magazine issue is the notion of the citizen. What does it mean for you to be a citizen in the 21st century at this very extreme time? Byung-Chul Han has written this beautiful book on hope: “Hope makes action possible even in the midst of the deepest despair because it fuels us with meaning. Hope creates its own insight. It recognizes the yet-not-being.”

RICHTER The notion of the citizen is interesting, being in the UK. I lived in Berlin for ten years, and the notion of the citizen in Germany and the notion of a citizen in the UK are quite different. The UK never really recovered from Margaret Thatcher’s statement that there is “no such thing as society,” which was swallowed wholesale by UK culture and has become accepted wisdom. It takes a long time to recover from that idea. I was very struck by how the notion of citizenship and of belonging to one another wasn’t considered a bad thing in Germany, but rather a strength. Of course, Germany has its problems. I think artists are also citizens. It’s like what Nina Simone said, “You can’t help it. An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.” In other words, artists naturally talk about the world that they’re living in, just as everybody else does. But in our case, we happen to do it via the medium of whatever creative language we are involved with. So, it’s natural for creative work to engage with societies and the world around us, which is part of being a citizen.

OBRIST Going back to Cage, in Halberstadt, Germany, there’s his great piece, As Slow as Possible, which was intended to be the slowest piece of music in history—it will be going for centuries. That is longue durée, à la Fernand Braudel, in music. A lot of artists are interested in that right now. For example, we invited Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg to do a project, which was a garden for pollinators, not for humans. I hear rumors that you are also a farmer, besides being a great composer.

RICHTER I wouldn’t say I'm a farmer, necessarily. Still, this studio was conceived to be as integrated a project as possible on many levels. We grow all the food. Last year, we fed everyone in the studio from the garden. It’s a small-scale farming operation, but actually, most of the landscape we have here is forest. And that’s deliberately left alone because we’re trying to encourage pollinators and bird life, which is very much under pressure in the UK. That’s something Yulia and I have been very focused on: trying to get all the feedback loops working in a positive way.

OBRIST The other day, I spoke to Holly Herndon and we discussed this notion of harmony. Holly answered that harmony is a sophisticated communication technology. So, what is harmony for you? We haven’t talked much about technology, but I’m curious how these advanced technologies of our moment, AI and blockchain, change music or notions of harmony.

RICHTER Technology in music is a fascinating historical story. Even early musical systems are technological, but they’re technological from a conceptual level. The harmonic language we use, which Bach more or less perfected, is a conceptual technology. It’s a conceptual framework, which is very sophisticated, but it exists essentially in our brains. There’s no physical manifestation of it. However, it’s a very complex technological system, a cultural expression of the harmonic series. And then, of course, there’s all the physical technology, the synthesizers, the computers, all of these things which have, in a way, extended the palette outwards from acoustic instruments to essentially anything you can imagine. Ultimately, it still comes back to what you would like to say as an artist. Mentioning Bach again, his music is extraordinarily durable. You can play Bach on any instrument, any synthesizer, any computer, any piano, or sing it, or whatever it might be, and it still has something about it. That has to do with its organization; it has to do with its relationship via the tonal system to the harmonic series. So, there’s a kind of a fundamentalness about it, which has to do with what he’s trying to say. I’m very interested in the why of writing a piece of music, and that has to do with what I want to say.

OBRIST It's a paradox to ask someone who makes music to talk about silence. But I am curious if you could talk a little bit about the role of silence in your practice.

RICHTER Silence is one of the fundamental colors in my paintbrush. You have objects, content, and material, but how the music is put together is intimately related to the absence of those things with silence. Silence is the background tool. And it’s something I work with very consciously. Most of my writing process is taking things away.

Max Richter is one of contemporary classical music's most revolutionary and innovative composers, known for his sociopolitical awareness. His film and television scores are instantly recognizable for their emotional depth, impact, and poignancy. Richter has also arranged music for art exhibitions, ballets, and runway shows, including a longstanding collaboration with Dior Men’s artistic director, Kim Jones. Among his numerous albums, one of his most ambitious works, Sleep, is an 8-hour composition designed in collaboration with neuroscientists to be experienced during slumber. His ninth studio album, In A Landscape (Decca Records)—an ode to the extremes of nature, love, and the polarity of existence—marks the first solo record produced at Studio Richter Mahr, a creative audio laboratory in Oxfordshire that he co-founded with his wife, Yulia Mahr. The studio also serves as a residency for emerging musicians. Released in early September, the album revisits themes first explored in The Blue Notebooks, written in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and described by Richter as a “meditation on violence.” Richter’s new album, which wavers between electronic and acoustic sounds, is a moving soundtrack for a new era of uncertainty and chaos.

MAX RICHTER Hi, how are you?

OBRIST I'm good, and you?

RICHTER I'm good.

OBRIST Where are you?

RICHTER I am in my studio in Oxfordshire.

OBRIST I was talking with your friend Nico Muhly, and he mentioned Studio Richter Mahr as a great example of a residency for musicians. Can you describe how it works?

RICHTER Yulia Mahr and I conceived this studio as a multidimensional laboratory. It functions as an instrument for us to deliver our own work into the world. We also felt that we should make it available to other practitioners who may not have the opportunity to work in these facilities in their everyday lives—artists who are mostly in the early stages of their careers. We've had quite an informal kind of a process where we invite people to come for a couple of weeks, or whatever it might be, and give them the facilities and accommodations for free. There is no agenda. There is no expectation. There are no hoops to jump through. It's simply providing a platform or a context for them to make work. It’s rooted in thinking back to when we were starting—when I was starting out—having no resources. You are very limited. You can make music on a piece of manuscript paper, but you can’t do anything in terms of recording or putting the work out into the world unless you have some resources.

OBRIST You mentioned that the space is like your instrument. Can you talk about what that entails—from the technology to the acoustics?

RICHTER Music can now be made on the computer. You can sit in your bedroom, and you can make a record. However, if you want to use acoustic instrumentation, you need a space to record. And that’s where the roadblock comes for people just starting because that is expensive. We also have the opportunity to record and mix in sound formats, like [Dolby] Atmos, a new language we’re exploring in this space. You need a lot of very specific equipment to do that. So, this is really about providing the best possible recording scenario for people who want to explore their work in a kind of optimal condition.