Sleep

Description

Product Description Acclaimed British composer Max Richter has made history with a ground-breaking piece of work: his new work, "SLEEP," is an eight-hour lullaby. An exploration of music, consciousness and human connectivity, the work is intended to be listened to while sleeping. The landmark work is played on piano, strings, with subtle electronic touches and vocals - but no words. Previously released digitally, the full eight-hour worked is released on CD and high definition Blu-Ray audio. Review As a composer, all my works are experiments: either they are about something, or the piece itself is the working out of a musical subject,an attempt at a solution to a musical question.The question in this work is How can the sleeping mind and amusical work interact, and how will this sleeping interaction manifestitself in the listener s experience of the music?My fascination with the unconscious and / or sleeping part of our livesis longstanding. I see it as a resource for creative ideas, and as anautonomous cognitive space, relatively inaccessible to our consciousmind (as described, for example the work of Jung, or more recently inDavid Eagleman s Incognito), a sort of undiscovered country that livesinside each one of us.Discovery takes time. In this case the equivalent of a night s rest - 8hours or so. This extended performance duration connects SLEEPwith a number of strands in recent gallery work (e.g. the Durationalmovement in art) as well as pointing back to some earlier art musicantecedents...Musical sources begin with Bach s Goldberg Variations BWV988.Allegedly written to be played as a sort of expensive lullaby for aninsomniac nobleman, they are an early example of music and sleepexplicitly being brought into a functional relationship, though ofcourse the informal evocation of night and sleep is present in musicfrom the earliest written sources, for example the latin chant Te Lucisante Terminum (Before the ending of daylight).Moving on we come to Mahler s Nachtmusik I and II, the ghost-likemovements either side of the central movement of the enigmaticseventh Symphony. Mahler s vision is distinctly within the GermanRomantic tradition here, with it s emphasis on the intense articulationof individual experience. Arguably sleep is the most individualexperience of all.Fast forward to the 1960s we come to the extended duration works ofLa Monte Young, Terry Riley and Morton Feldman, the contemplativespace that is Stockhausen s Stimmung, and the ecstatic pulsations of theearly Pink Floyd, among others. These works close the aesthetic gapbetween the physical experience of the music and it s content - thesound is the text. This boundary or overlap between the musical textand it s sonic presentation is something I am exploring in my ownwork, and I see it as in some way mirroring the unconscious /conscious mind dualism.Another way to shine a light onto this question is via contemporaryneuroscience, and, therefore I am in dialogue with David Eagleman,director of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor Collegeand author of numerous scientific works on our mental processes. Thisis directly affecting the development of the musical work, for exampleon the development of structural aspects of the material that interlockwith the cyclical nature of sleep itself. --Max Richter December 2014