I have an unusual criticism of British composer Max Richter's new piece – it actually failed to send me to sleep. Normally, the idea of a concert hall full of dozing punters is a composer's worst nightmare of course, but Richter's new composition is in a peculiar class of its own. Released at the beginning of the month for streaming only, Richter's new piece – entitled Sleep – is a form of eight-hour lullaby specifically designed to rock listeners into slumber.
The idea, as yet to be fully tested, is that the music keep the listener’s subconscious pleasantly busy even as they wander through eight hours of dreams. People across the world (including me) got to try this themselves on the night of September 3, when the curious were encouraged to nod off while leaving the piece streaming overnight. A condensed one-hour version of the piece has been available since alongside the full-length recording.
To push the experience further, Richter is also planning live performances of the piece. This autumn Sleep will be played in Berlin in concert halls filled with beds instead of chairs, with Richter waking concertgoers after eight hours to quiz them over their experiences, while BBC Radio Three have also broadcast a live version of the piece. All tallied up, that's a whole lot of sleeping.
It's easy to be tickled by Richter's bright idea. This is music designed to sidestep the wandering mind's normal straining for attention and, as sleep sets in, to fly under the radar of consciousness. It's just one chapter in a career of tuneful but experimental music by Richter, who to date is probably best know for his 2012 rewrite of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, a cheeky-sounding project that actually delivered something of genuinely novel beauty.
He's succeeded again in coming up with something that's at least interesting. After listening to Richter's latest in its one-hour form while awake, I can confirm that Sleep is certainly pleasant to listen to. Beginning with 10 minutes of sweet-sad loops of piano chords, it then moves on to a minimal, slightly medieval-sounding arrangement of two female voices and organ. Further episodes include lush strings and tuneful, rippling piano, with overlapping baroque and classical influences that never stray beyond a sense of harmonic order and pretty but understated melody.
Fans of holy minimalists such as Arvo Pärt and John Tavener – and such fans are legion – may find that Sleep makes them very happy indeed. For a sceptical listener, the piece's soft sweetness could contain a drop too much syrup. The music does sound at times like a soundtrack to the more self-consciously poignant episodes of a romantic film, albeit a classy one.
Ultimately, though, the minimal sounds are a canvas for whatever you bring to them. If you’re feeling upbeat, the piece’s meditative, drawn out chords could express blissful peace. In a sad moment, their minimalism might seem bleak. It seems harsh to damn the piece as classical chill out, however. Certainly, it uses voices and piano where other more instantly dismissed music uses whale song and wind chimes. But calming and free of rough, attention-arresting details is exactly what it is supposed to be – this is a piece designed to create a mood without jarring its audience into consciousness and anything too off-rhythm or jerky would defeat the point.
Could Richter’s piece enhance your rest though? There’s certainly some evidence that calmer types of classical music help with relaxation. A 2008 study from Hungary’s Institute of Behavioural Sciences found that students with sleep complaints saw improvement in their sleep quality and mood when listening to 45 minutes of classical music at bedtime – an effect not replicated when playing soothing spoken-word audiobooks to the same group.
Even during waking hours this effect can be felt. The London Underground system now plays clearly audible classical music in many stations, primarily as a way of calming people’s behaviour in potential trouble spots. The extent to which Richter’s piece might actually influence what its dozing listeners dream of is yet to be recorded, but there’s no doubt that it could ease them into deeper sleep.
It also poses an interesting question for reviewers. In a genre that normally demands careful attention, how do you assess the quality of a piece that actively avoids being too obtrusive? I dutifully turned it on to discover what it made me dream of, but unfortunately I can’t tell you – for the simple reason that I just couldn’t fall asleep listening to the piece.
I like the idea of music that can drip feed into your consciousness even as you fade into sleep, but it’s not one that worked for me. Granted, heavy after a day’s work and dinner, I may have occasionally drifted off to sleep in the concert hall thanks to the dimmed lights and warmth. But I am a light sleeper and, lying in bed, my brain will often do whatever it can to stay conscious. My eyes and ears strain so carefully for noise and light to keep it occupied that I never travel anymore without earplugs and a sleep mask. At home I dislike sleeping in a room with even an LED showing red in the darkness. So rather than calming me into sleep, my brain heard the music and refused to let go.
There was more to it than that, however. For me personally, the music had a poignancy that proved to be almost unbearable. Admittedly I could hardly have chosen a more loaded setting in which to hear it. Not wishing to disturb my partner, I opted to listen to Sleep while spending the night at my father's. He died a while back and his house, lying empty prior to being sold, is currently an untenanted place that my siblings and me go back to occasionally to keep it in good condition, or just to say goodbye for a few hours. I've slept here alone before without event, but it just so happened that listening to Sleep there triggered some powerful memories from my childhood.
The first section consists of simple repetitive loops of piano chords, elegant and well played but also reminiscent of a child learning the instrument, hesitantly scaling the keyboard. Without pre-planning, I listened to it in my old bedroom, where my sister (still a good pianist today) used to practice the piano all day on our battered bright red upright, which has long since been junked. As a kid I always resented her piano being in my room, but now lying in the dark felt like going back to my childhood, those same simple chords an echo of a past chapter that had recently closed. It was too much. I turned the music off.
The echoes I heard in Sleep don't have much to do with Richter, of course. They nonetheless show one of the qualities of minimal music. Much classical music is like a story you need to follow carefully to get the most out of. You listen to a piece's variations, the way the composer revisits certain themes before bringing all the strands together into some form of final order. Minimal music, however, is very different. It's more like a room you walk into, a place where you stay for a time while you're lost partly in thoughts suggested but not as explicitly guided by your surroundings. The composer builds the room's walls and adds his or her own suggestions as to its colour and shape, but it's equally the listener who furnishes the room themselves. Sleep is just such a space, and it was evocative enough to instantly fill with images from my own life. To work as a lullaby, however, Richter should have made it a little quieter and a little duller.
Feargus O’Sullivan is a regular contributor to The National.
thereview@thenational.ae
