Max Richter

I just really try to stay focused on what the material is wanting to do. My basic assumption is that no one will ever listen to it anyway. It's fidelity to the material. That's my contract: It's me and the material. And if it connects with other people, I'm thrilled.

I'm suspicious of the idea of categories in music and this idea of things being in boxes. To me, that seems unnatural. I write the music that somebody with my biography would write, and the thing that's always driven me is an enthusiasm for the material. I sort of follow the notes to where they want to go.

'Memoryhouse' came out, and there wasn't a single review and zero sales, and after about a year, it was deleted. So I recorded The 'Blue Notebooks' on a little indie label, and my attitude was, 'Well, if nobody is listening, I might as well keep doing what I'm doing'.

'Spring One' probably has only four bars of Vivaldi in it, but it feels like it's all Vivaldi. It's odd. It's a bit like walking around a sculpture, you just sort of see it from a different angle.

I assumed no one would ever listen to my music, and for quite a lot of years, I was right.

When you make a piece, one of the interesting things is hearing what other people think about it.

When I got the call about 'Arrival,' I was doubtful because the piece had had a life on cinema already, and we were getting to the point where the original context was sort of lost, and I didn't want that to happen. On the other hand, 'Arrival' itself is a political film because it's about unification and getting beyond boundaries.

I think, as human beings, we all have a fundamental mode, a basic way of relating to the rest of reality, and for me, it's always instinctively been about sound making and trying to extract information, grammar, meaning from sound making. That's been my way of navigating reality that's very personal; a painter might say they make marks or look.

It feels like when novelists say they find their characters are doing things they never thought they'd do, the material comes alive, and that's how I feel making music.

That childhood passion and involvement and being really submerged in something, that's the kind of state I'm looking for all the time - and preserving that sense of magical possibility and wonder that children have. I think, for artists, if you can stay connected to that, then you are in a good place.

When you're working in cinema, you often have a very, very compressed schedule - very few weeks to just kind of go through that whole process of reflection and refining - and it has to be done.

We've all got stories to tell that no one else knows. We've all got this truly unique experience of being. So I would say cultivate that, because then also you're cultivating something which is very natural to you.

Often, especially young artists, you feel like you should be doing something. And I think that can be very destructive because creativity is about connecting with the stuff that's deep inside you and making something out of that.

In Germany, people feel like they own classical music, that it is somehow theirs. Over there, everyone still learns to play, and the great composers don't seem alien.

It's true that many of the best-known composers were German or Austrian, but we should remember how good the music tradition is in Britain, too, because it has an informality and a fluidity that should really be celebrated.

You can get away with a lot more in a film or television score. It is contextual.

I can't usually sleep if I'm listening to music. It seems to fire up my mind, and I keep engaging with it to see what it's doing.

People have written about 'Sleep' as if it were some kind of record attempt, but I could just put repeat marks at the end, and it would be 16 hours. It's not about that.

Traditional methods for falling asleep work. Non-taxing, repetitive mental tasks have a lulling effect, and I built those patterns into 'Sleep'.

Sleep is probably my favorite activity. I wrote this piece out of gratitude that I'm able to sleep well as an offering to people who don't.

When I'm working with pictures, with images and storytelling, it's really about the sentiment and the emotional trajectory of the characters. That's really where the music lives, I think. That's what I'm focused on; that's what I respond to most strongly.

All music is just a collision of sounds until you know its internal conventions and understand the nuances. It's a question of familiarity.

There's different ways to approach music for sleeping. Things like white noise are functional, like a lullaby. This is more like an inquiry, a question about how music and sleep fit together.

When I was a kid, there were really only two possible futures in the foreground, which were Orwell's '1984' and Huxley's 'Brave New World'.

Sleeping and being asleep is one of my favorite activities. Really, what I wanted to do is provide a landscape or a musical place where people could fall asleep.