Original subtitles

Everything just takes a while.

Just staying with it in order to get the richness of it.

It's too easy to move on.

Like a sort of big sky...

...translates into what you're doing.

How would that be if you could see for miles around?

The horizon's all open.

A ritual which shifts your state of mind...

...to take you somewhere else.

There's a sense of sharing something.

It feels like it can stand different kind of interventions.

I really love that.

I really love it that it goes out and has a life...

- Yeah. - ...beyond us.

If there's a storm coming...

They said there was going to be.

Yeah.

Music is my sort of vehicle for travelling through the world,

sort of getting through life.

It's like I write music to do that.

It's just kind of odd.

It's kind of an odd thing to do.

- Hello. How are you? - Fine. How are you?

- Lovely to see you. - You too.

How are you?

- Weird. Weird and tired. - Weird and tired!

And this piece is obviously very extreme in some ways.

It's a gigantic thing.

To want to do such difficult things

is kind of odd as well.

It's a puzzle to me.

- Guys, you're almost there. - Alright.

Right, folks, make sure your wristbands are on.

The moment that I saw the complete eight-hour album,

I listened to it, like, over and over.

But then I stopped listening to it.

I wanted the experience to be new again for me.

After I booked my ticket,

I made this Instagram post

where it was like the gorgeous cover photo of the moon

and I was like... So I'm gonna see this eight-and-a-half hour,

204 movements, classical composition

and I think I made some joke

that I'm just gonna feel crushingly alone

and cry the whole time,

so that's what I'm expecting.

I've tried not to have too many expectations.

Like, I saw the pictures that he posted last night

and I'm like, "Those cots are really close together!"

You know, I mean, you have your own space,

but, uh, usually I'm much more of a loner

as far as not being so close to others.

I've never watched something continuously

for eight hours,

so just hearing them warming up has me pretty excited.

This is probably the ideal way

you want to experience something like this,

being around someone you care about or just other people.

I don't know how to describe it.

It's just kinda like... It hits your soul.

It just makes me feel like connected to this world.

I guess what I was aiming for

is this sense of connecting to origins somehow

and fundamentals.

It's almost like, "Can we just start over, please?"

Hi, hello.

Welcome to this performance of "Sleep",

an eight-hour lullaby.

I'm joined this evening by the ACME Ensemble

and Grace Davidson.

A few more thank-yous, first of all to Chris Ekers

for his wonderful sound,

to Steve Abbott for joining all the dots

and especially to Yulia, my creative partner,

whose vision is a big part of this piece.

There are no rules. Um...

Listen as you like, sleep as you like.

Maybe switch the phones off

and enjoy the trip.

We'll see you on the other side.

When we were younger,

we had small children and we had no money,

so, of course, when Max went away to do his concerts,

I could never go and so I would stay behind.

It was really lovely

when people started streaming concerts

because suddenly I could listen in,

so I started to, every time he'd go away,

I'd listen in to the concert and see how, you know...

You feel nervous for your partner, you want it to go well,

you're interested in how it goes,

you want to be there, so it was my way of experiencing it.

Yulia would be listening in.

Of course, if I'm on the other side of the planet,

it would be at some crazy hour in the middle of the night.

I'd be exhausted.

You know, I'd been with the kids all day.

I was so tired, so I would almost always fall asleep.

And pretty soon, I realised

that there's this incredible thing that happens

when you start just drifting in and out of this dreamy space.

And kind of waking up

and liminal spaces would start to develop

and you start to listen in a totally different way

to how you normally listen to a CD

or a disc or even a concert.

And it becomes a...

It can... It becomes a very emotional listening experience.

So when Max would come back, I'd start to talk to him about this

and I was like, "We have to do something with this

because this is an incredible thing."

He said, "Well, it's funny you should say that

because here's this piece I've been working on since 1995."

And he starts getting out these pieces of paper,

showing me these pieces of paper and saying,

"I've been thinking about this myself in a different form."

We sort of got into this conversation about

would it be interesting to make a piece

which is in some way made

to exist in that space

or to kind of have that sort of conversation

with, you know, the sleeping mind?

You know, the sleeping mind is as valid and valuable

and, in fact, essential to us actually

in terms of building our waking life.

When we're sleeping, we're not absent.

We're just... It's a different kind of cognitive state.

And so we brought these two ideas together really

and started to develop this idea

for the piece as it is now.

Life is busy and life is getting busier.

I've never heard anyone say,

"Oh, things are just getting so much slower."

Everything is always up.

It's moving forward.

That's how life works.

Things just speed up.

That, in a way, suits corporations.

But does it suit individuals as well?

I don't know.

So I wanted to make a piece which...

It's got an element of a sort of quiet protest about it.

Just to kind of take a look at this.

And offer a landscape

to withdraw from that for a minute,

step off the wheel and take stock.

It was a very big thing

to bring this into the world and to get it actually made.

That was a two, two-and-a-half-year process,

something like that, and during that period

when Max was composing, I was starting to look around

for the kind of venues we could go to,

what kind of ways we could talk about this project to people.

I always think Yulia's the brains of the outfit.

She comes from anthropology and film,

so her universe is visual, performance,

storytelling from that standpoint.

I was developing this language

of talking about issues that were really important to me.

My family were refugees

and I wanted to really explore that from every possible angle.

One of the things that was really important to me

was that this piece should be about community

and should be about connection.

Or at least providing a space for it.

Whether it happens or not, I mean,

that's down to an individual person.

It doesn't have to happen either,

but we're missing that, aren't we?

That was one of the very first conversations we had.

We have this eight-hour piece. Where does it go?

How do we stage it?

What happens with this piece

in order to foster that kind of environment

where something like that can happen?

Max and Yulia showed me drawings

of this concept of musicians surrounded by sleeping people.

I went with a friend

and all those strangers sleeping together,

open postures,

somehow takes you away from the individual details

of your own life.

A couple of friends said, "This is very disturbing."

Some people couldn't imagine being in a place like that.

But the people I could connect to understood,

there's something about hearing it

and not necessarily watching the performance.

There's some deep memory of being a child and being sung to

when you're drifting off.

So it's such a tender offering.

As a cathedral, we wanted to have a kind of connection

with these problems with refugees

and, um... and to make a connection

with an artwork, with music.

It was this sculpture by Koen Theys,

with 12 bronze mattresses where people slept,

which helped us to have this crazy idea

of having "Sleep" in our cathedral.

And now we have 400 of these beds.

It was a very big unknown for all of us

who worked to prepare for it.

At the same time, there was this vibe

of "this is something very special",

which has never happened and probably never will again.

I think we've had something like 250 enquiries

for the show

and I think it's about 18

that actually we've been able to put on.

Each show takes more or less two years to pull off

from the first conversations to when they finally go on.

For every venue, it's a real labour of love as well.

Yeah, so it's a big juggernaut of a thing,

but it's so worth it.

Welcome to Max Richter's "Sleep"

at Grand Park, presented by the Music Center.

Tonight's performance is the first outdoor

and the largest ever.

We are hopefully unplugging from our everyday life

to experience this beautiful concert together

right in the heart of downtown LA.

Max basically says, "You can walk around,

you can sit up, you can lie down,

you can disconnect, you can sleep."

And I think that freedom sort of that Max wrote into the piece

and into the presentation of the piece,

I thought it would get augmented by putting it outdoors

and sort of giving it that additional freedom.

He was never interested in talking to an audience

of 100 people who know about classical music,

so he engaged in a language which is a plain-spoken language

because he wants to connect to a lot of people

and that's immediately frowned on

within a lot of classical communities.

If you're popular, that can't be good.

And obviously we weren't paying attention to any of that

because we're not interested in that conversation at all.

Our conversation is about talking to a lot of people

and talking about a different way of listening to music.

There are precedent pieces.

In Indian classical music you have overnight ragas

and there's gallery work from the '60s of Fluxus

and the Bach Goldberg Variations

which were supposedly written for overnight performance.

It's not like sonic wallpaper

which is just quietly bubbling in the background.

It's an artwork and it's to be experienced,

not necessarily to be listened to,

but to be experienced

in the way that we experience a landscape, we're in it.

People are free to do what they want in the show.

We didn't want too many rules

and that's reflected in all the concerts. They're all different.

In Berlin, everyone shoved their beds together

and you had families all sleeping side by side.

It offers something where people can feel cocooned, safe somehow.

It's not a performance in the traditional sense.

If you play a gig,

you're projecting this material really strongly,

you're trying to tell a story...

...whereas in the case of a "Sleep" performance,

the dynamics are completely different.

Those people sleeping are the story.

10:28. To sleep, perchance to dream.

Sombre. Life noises.

The wild sirens, chattering of people checking in

melts with the music,

creates a tone like in the movies

after something serious has happened.

I heard about the concert

and I was like, "I don't think my wife would want to go.

It sounds too weird." Then I told her about it.

She's like, "It's sleep and it's music? What's not to like?"

I was surprised she waited as long as she did

to say something about it.

I guess she had known about it for a while.

I was really happy to see her asleep.

Yeah, I was a little worried

that because we were out in the open

among all these strangers that...

- And the bugs. - And the bugs.

...she was gonna end up being not happy,

but apparently, her body was like,

"No, I can go to sleep now."

Like, I zonked out,

like, pretty much 15, 20 minutes into the concert, I was out.

Legit, like, all night.

- Yeah. - Which is surprising.

Being a woman in our relationship,

you are kind of on guard, always watching your back,

you don't know who's looking at you, what they're thinking,

what they're thinking of you and how you're making them feel.

I feel like I always... always feel, like, unsafe.

You obviously have something in common

'cause you've all come together around this event.

It's just fascinating. You see people.

You're like, "I wonder would we be hanging out together?

Would we be buddies if I went over

and struck up a conversation with you right now?"

Like, yeah, you did feel kind of safe and protected.

The first one was memorable

in that it was just so terrifying

because we just did not know how to play this piece.

How do you rehearse something that size?

The gallery is full of these amazing curios

of 19th century science.

It seemed in a way an appropriate place to do it

because "Sleep" has some of its origins

in, I guess, sleep science.

We rehearsed it overnight and then we had the next day,

and I was up fixing the parts, all the mistakes I discovered,

all the technical stuff.

And then we played overnight live on Radio 3.

They broadcast it all night long,

so it was kind of a baptism of fire.

I was very lucky to be invited

to be one of the people to fall to sleep

to his music at the Wellcome Foundation.

I think it broke a world record

for the longest continuous piece on the radio.

Once the piece kicked off it was clear

that there was something wrong with the piano

that Max was playing at,

that there was some really tinny sound coming out of that.

And then one of the crew crept up,

climbed on top of this grand piano

and started trying to investigate what...

But the piece had to keep on going.

This was a live broadcast

of this piece that was gonna go on for eight hours

and there was no way we were stopping and starting again.

We got through it and it had a real kind of energy,

it had a real sort of gravitational force around it.

It just seemed to kind of affect people,

so that was exciting.

My work comes out of the polarity

between a very straightforward, classical,

conservatoire, university, composer education.

And my enthusiasm for electronic music,

ambient music, the studio as instrument.

It has its roots in the kind of Renaissance

where music was structured very geometrically.

It's also a rejection of super-complicated modernism

which I was schooled in,

but which I felt had really lost its connection

with a broader audience.

I felt like I wanted to build a language

which had a kind of directness.

When Max and I first met,

I was giving a talk about maths and symmetry.

I think there was an immediate connection.

There's always been an immediate connection

between maths and music.

Like every piece,

it's a big series of "what if" questions.

I started thinking about what kind of music

would I want if I was sleeping?

And I started thinking I would like to feel

that if I wake up in the middle, I want to know where I am.

Mathematics is actually the science of patterns

and music is the art of patterns.

And that's the connection.

So you take something simple like the Fibonacci numbers.

So these are numbers which go:

1, 1, 2, 3,

5, 8, 13.

You get the next number

by adding the two previous numbers together.

These have a natural growth which is what nature uses a lot,

so the number of petals on a flower

is invariably a Fibonacci number,

the way that shells grow or pine cones or pineapples...

You'll see these numbers all over the place.

But these are also numbers that composers love using,

so you see Debussy, Bartók very deliberately using them

to give a sense of growth in their pieces.

One of the things that connects the world of art

and the world of mathematics and science as well

is that all of these are actually our response

to the natural world around us.

They're our language trying to help us navigate our way

through the kind of chaos that we live in.

I felt like slightly in freefall when I was writing it.

I was like, "I don't really know if this is gonna work."

When you're composing, the notes you're writing,

you're very much writing them in relation to everything

that's happened already and everything that's gonna happen.

When there's a structure that big,

you can't hold it all in your mind any more,

so you really have to just write the moment,

which is freaky

and goes against all your compositional training.

When you're recording sections of 30 or 40 minutes,

you can't do that on tape and it's eight hours of multi-track.

So it broke the machine in all sorts of different ways

and we had to invent new ways of working.

For me, that is also the exciting thing

about creative work.

You've got this space that you know how to do that.

I know how to write Max Richter music

up to this point.

But actually "Sleep" is stepping out of that pool of light

into something else, into the dark

and just finding what's out there.

I always describe it

as if all the happiness had left the world,

but I was good with it,

as if there was nothing else to lose.

Especially if I'm full of anguish,

if I need to relax

or I need to stop worrying

about what's gonna happen in the future.

Max's music...

cleans your soul if you want to say it that way.

It is as if he had found something

that has already existed for, I don't know,

thousands of years,

that is familiar to humans

like the sound of the sea

or the grass with the wind.

It is something that makes us soothe and relax

and, and...and makes you feel that everything is OK.

As if all humans spoke the same language

and that we have to translate it to English or Spanish

or whatever language you speak.

Everybody can understand it

and you don't need to be a special kind of person

to know what he wants to say and then the feelings are immediate.

It was not new. It was as if I had been there all my life.

It was just like a continuation

of something that you already know very well.

Like kissing your mother

or being with someone you love very much.

I talked to a friend of mine, David Eagleman,

he's a neuroscientist,

just to check that my instincts about sleep music

were not actually stupid.

He pointed me at some research

about how sound and a sleeping mind can join up.

To my knowledge,

it's the first time that somebody has said,

"All right, we're gonna write eight hours of music

and we're gonna try to do things

to keep people in a state of sleep."

So one of the first things that Max and I talked about

was about repetition of music during sleep and how...

Essentially what happens in the brain

is you've got lots of cells, 86 billion neurons,

and they're all doing their own thing,

but when you fall asleep, they come into concert more

and move as a group

which is why if you put electrodes on the head,

you can measure the slow wave

happening in the brain during sleep.

So we talked about the kind of rhythms

that would be appropriate for that sort of thing,

about the kind of repetition

that sleep represents, the sleeping brain.

So Max set out to make sure that the music he was writing

was sort of, you know, rhythmically consonant

with slow-wave sleep.

Sleep has a very particular flavour.

It's a very particular colour, right,

because it's all about the bottom

of the frequency spectrum.

And almost all of sleep happens from, like, 100 hertz down

which is a space which isn't really available

with acoustic instruments.

In the natural world,

we hear those frequencies in thunderstorms.

And those sorts of things.

And that's in a way why they have a magical quality

because we can't actually really make those sounds

with acoustic instruments very easily,

or we can but only very quiet.

And for a piece to be structured

around that bit of the frequency spectrum

is interesting to do

which is why the synthesisers are so incredible

because they unlock that bit of the spectrum.

I was about 13 when I first heard electronic music, really.

On a TV show they used Kraftwerk's "Autobahn"

and when I heard the opening,

I mean, it was like being struck by lightning for me.

You feel like you're interacting with a thing which has a life

because the sound is never the same.

You know, the next day,

even the same patch sounds different. Very organic.

I set out on this mission

to try and discover, A, what this sound was

and B, how could I get my hands on it?

And at that time, a synthesiser cost as much as a house.

I got schematics

and a soldering iron and bags of components

and just started in my bedroom building synthesisers

and, you know, just tried to make those sounds.

And that went sort of together with studying academic music.

I always felt that was quite natural, really,

those two things.

The way the music is made is quite uncharacteristic for me.

It has a lot of affirmation in the way it's structured.

It's sort of asking a question

and then giving you the answer that you want.

It feels good as it goes by because of that.

So you kind of know where you're going all the time

and then it goes there

which is like, you know, not what happens in real life.

So it's a wish fulfilment for "if only life were like this".

Look at that, Max.

It's really beautiful.

It's pretty awesome, yeah.

The thing I find that's so incredible

is when you're sitting in your office or studio

and you're trying to conjure up this whole world,

and then you come out here

and it just kind of pours out of you, doesn't it?

We met for the first time twice.

It was the Edinburgh Festival

and there was a performance of the Mahabharata,

you know, this wonderful epic.

So there's like about 100 people on the stage

and about 11 of us in the audience.

I'm sitting there in this thing

and I keep kind of looking at this woman on the stage.

And I'm just like, "Wow, she looks amazing!

I'd really love to get to know her."

And then I walked out of the theatre

and I was like, "You're never gonna see her again,

just get over it, forget about it, get on with your life."

And I love that phase so much

when everything is possible still,

when there's nothing in the way and everything's just...

Then we met again at a theatre

that I was involved with and Yulia was involved with.

I was working in a theatre company for a while.

That's where I met Max because I gave him his first job.

Like a sort of energy exchange...

So we were just chatting away

in the back of the theatre basically

while we were supposed to be working.

That kind of unmade works

and works without any mistakes in them.

Yeah.

- And that's... - So exciting.

When we first met, that was what drew us together,

I think, was talking.

Yeah, we were just like...

We just talked about life, the universe and everything.

And that was that.

I just thought I'd just met the most interesting

and kind of kindest and most thoughtful person.

Like, I still think that.

It's tough to make enough money

to feed three kids as an artist,

but it's also been an incredibly interesting journey.

We both had quite complicated childhoods in different ways.

And there is a flavour to that that affects your whole life,

so one of the things that was very comforting

and easy for us together

was the fact that we shared that

and, in a way, that's another lifelong journey, isn't it,

is processing that.

And if you're kind of shy

and poetic like he was, then you do that through music.

I started making records

and I made "Memoryhouse" in 2002.

It was almost like a series of questions

to see if a language could do all these things I wanted to do.

And kind of no one heard that record.

I mean, other musicians heard it

and it had a kind of a little, tiny, culty sort of audience.

But, you know, the record label was shut down.

We never got to play it.

Nothing happened.

It really took a while, years and years and years,

before anyone really paid attention to...

You know, the number of times we had to, like, go to Plan B.

We were, like, moving house randomly.

You know, it was just very chaotic.

I mean, it's tough. It's tough to make a living. It really is.

Trying to, you know, make records to a high standard

with real musicians on them, it costs money

which I didn't have.

I remember at the "Blue Notebooks" sessions,

we recorded it in one day.

One afternoon, in fact, with the strings,

cos that's the money we had.

And I remember trying to get home from a session

and not being able to get any money out of the bank

because we had no money.

That's the constant question for artists, isn't it?

Do you persevere?

When he did "Vivaldi Recomposed",

he was still walking 40, 60 minutes across town

to interviews because we couldn't afford the fare

and we certainly went through many years

where we would feed the children rather than ourselves.

I mean, most people do not make a living in any art form,

so what do you do

when you're faced with that and you have children?

You're so responsible for these little people

and you can't muck it up.

Not bad, Al! Only played that all summer. Pretty nice.

I got that one wrong. I didn't do that one.

Yeah, but you did it the same both times, so it's cool.

That was really nice.

Really nice.

I mean, I didn't support the family for years.

We just kind of scratched by.

And I think if I had been able to imagine doing anything else,

I probably would have.

Eventually, I got ill,

because I was just so malnourished.

You just think you're somehow invincible, don't you?

And you keep going.

Your body's showing you all the signs of,

"You can stop now,"

and you go, "No, no, it's OK. I can keep going."

Obviously, you can't in the end, so I did become quite sick.

I guess it's the first time I'd really thought about

how we're living our lives, how I'm...what I'm doing.

I mean, of course it's... You know,

the fact of our mortality is real,

but it's only real when it's real, you know,

because we keep it away.

We keep those thoughts away by doing other things.

Quite a big bit of thinking about what to, you know...

what those things mean,

but then do what, you know?

Give up and do what? I don't know.

I guess things do add up over time, you know.

And "Blue Notebooks" did sort of catch people's ears somehow.

It just seemed to... It started something.

I mean, we got the opportunity to premiere "Memoryhouse"

ten years after it was released,

which we did in the Barbican in London.

The place was full and it was like, you know, a love-in.

It was like a homecoming.

There was something wonderful about that, you know.

To just kind of keep going and ten years later here we are.

Writing a piece like "Sleep" takes over two years.

So those two years have to be funded.

And the way we found our way through eventually

was we came up with a little formula, actually,

of how to feed ourselves, which was

that Max would do film work and that film work,

the money would go back into the art, always.

So he could, at night, work on "Sleep".

I got into the habit of writing at night

when the kids were small.

We used to put them to bed

and then I guess my work days were kind of

eight or nine o'clock in the evening to about three.

Sort of. Something like that.

Until I kind of fell off my chair, basically.

In a way, making creative things is also kind of...

I feel like it's a kind of self-medicating in a way.

So you write the piece that you wish someone had written

so you can listen to it.

This sort of slightly obsessive involvement with music

probably kept me going.

To the edge of the woods before...

'Cause we don't want to be in the dark.

Well, I don't mind being in the dark.

It's kind of adventurous...

I think of making a piece of writing and creative work

as sort of... It's like moving from a space which we know

into a space we don't know.

And that's the kind of interesting part.

And actually it hardly matters what's there.

It's that little process of just stepping out

into somewhere you don't know.

At a certain point, it's almost like the piece starts dreaming.

I am a visual artist, so I'm very project-oriented.

I'm making projects that usually take a year or two to complete,

so there's a lot of things to work out.

This, because it was so durational,

gave me the opportunity to resolve some questions

that I was having about what direction I was taking

with certain things.

My mind was wandering and things were happening,

but that music was there and it was permeating into my mind.

It's one thing that really intrigues me

about this project of his that he certainly had intentions

when he started it,

but knowing what that experience would be like for other people

and those random factors that come in...

What influence is a sound

on what's happening in your mind as you're kind of drifting off.

I am kind of at a point in life where I feel like

I need to make the best use of my time

and time is something that's really important.

I mean, daily life is hectic when you have a family

and you're worrying about pick-up time from school

and trying to balance everything else out,

trying to fit in everything I want to fit in the day

in the time that I have.

Mixing that with my own personal work

and then just kind of keeping our house in order. It's busy.

When you have these other factors involved,

like Max has, you know, people that are laying on cots

and listening to that music,

how does that change it? What does that do?

I'm intrigued with starting with an idea

and seeing how does it shape and form and change

as you introduce other people into it,

as everybody, I'm sure, had their own unique experience.

I don't know who these people are,

you know, what has drawn them here.

Experiencing "Sleep" live is really not like anything else.

Who does this?

Who makes, you know,

an eight-hour-long musical composition

that lasts that duration, that's set up

for people to fall asleep to? It's not like anything else.

When I sit down at the piano

at the beginning of the night, there are 200-something pages

of piano music to play through.

You know, it's a big score,

which plays from beginning to end.

I'm probably on the stage

for about seven-and-a-half of the eight hours.

Something like that, overall. Which is a lot.

I get breaks, just to kind of grab a bite to eat

or a cup of coffee or something.

And, in fact, all the players get breaks.

It's very tough on the string players, actually.

A lot of the pieces use very sustained tones.

Very quiet, you know,

which is the hardest thing for string players to do.

I kind of kidded myself when we first started doing it

that it was fine, everyone would be fine, no problem.

But it is actually a problem. It's really hard.

It's just really physically and mentally tough.

First of all to be concentrating for that amount of time,

cos even though, you know, I'm a pianist,

you know, the notes come into your eyes

and they come out of your fingers,

that bit is sort of automatic,

but you're still having to concentrate.

Doing anything solidly for eight hours is hard.

And, you know, you get achy and stiff and sore

and, yeah, it's tough.

I love to just come off the stage

on one of my little breaks, just to hear it.

Out in the house we have this sort of magical cathedral sound,

you know, and I love that sound.

That's the sound that the piece was written for.

So I just wander around and have a listen

and just kind of see what people are up to.

Cos that's really nice for me, just to kind of check in with,

you know, how everyone is sort of finding it.

What's beautiful is just seeing the effect

the piece is having on people. I mean, that's an amazing thing

because you don't really ever get to see that

in such an intimate way.

And just being able to see, you know, somebody sleeping there,

or, you know, doing their yoga or something

or, you know, walking about and thinking their thoughts.

You just kind of get a much bigger sense

of what the piece is doing.

Every performance is really, really special.

It's one of these sort of paradoxical things.

It's incredibly hard to do it, but it's kind of so worth it.

It costs so much to do it and to try and make it happen,

you know, on a personal level and yet it's so satisfying.

Every second is a deliberate second.

Every note is deliberate.

So it was a massive undertaking

and that's what's amazing to me, I suppose,

that somebody can do that,

that they have that much staying power with a creative project

that they can see something like this through.

And that he can perform it. I mean, I don't think I could.

I couldn't play for eight hours straight.

That's what he's brought to me and my work,

his seeing through the... seeing through difficulties.

It's made me more of a fighter for what I believe in

and more committed, in a way, to shaking things up

and trying new things, you know, and not stopping.

You know, when we were young and he was putting out his work,

year after year after year,

and, you know, when you're young and you're starting out,

you do get kicked around a lot and some of the things

that happened to him, I would just...I mean,

would have sent me to bed, crying, and yet he is...

It's just a river passing by for him.

I remember talking to Yulia about this at the time,

you know, and I was making decisions

about how the "Blue Notebooks" should be

and what we would do with it,

and she said, "The thing is, you know, if the record fails,

and you've made compromises,

then you're going to be really annoyed,

but if it fails and you did exactly what you wanted,

then who cares?"

So that's always been the M.O. sort of going forward.

Just kind of always bet the farm.

We didn't have a farm!

But, you know, we always bet the farm.

For me, it's all about Max's smile.

He could have been anybody. I don't care what he does!

I mean, I don't care what Max does.

He doesn't have to be a composer for me.

I love his smile and I still love his smile 27 years later,

so it's all about that really.

He's a vulnerable man

and, musically, he's not afraid to show it

and I think he's not afraid to talk about vulnerability

and that's something quite precious

because everybody there is vulnerable in that moment

when they're all sleeping in a room together.

And I think that fragility and vulnerability in life

is something that he wants to talk about.

It goes right the way through to an understanding of the world

and humaneness, I would say, is the big word we try, you know...

I mean, we're all flawed human beings, right?

We don't manage it all the time! Or most of the time.

But we try, and that's the thing, isn't it?

I have such admiration for his determination

and his perseverance.

The fact that he can just... He does it, you know.

That's a big thing for me. I think my admiration for him

has increased through this project.

Their collaboration is so gorgeous.

To be ambitious for something that ethereal

is an...unusual thing.

I don't see it that much. I see people ambitious

for large objects that will stay there forever.

I see people be ambitious for movies or something,

but to be ambitious for a moment at night

with strangers together?

I just think that's...that's just glorious.

Experiences like this I think remind people

that even in a world where people are very busy,

that if you were to place the arts back into society

there are these rejuvenating types of experiences

that can happen between people.

By having an eight-hour performance,

in a world where three minutes is what is commercially viable,

I think that already flips expectations on its head.

I teach. I also play.

And my mission, first and foremost,

when working with new students is, typically,

to get them to realise that the sounds that you hear,

you can wield them as well.

You have the ability to make meaning out of sound.

It's like the craziest magic.

And then by having that sort of instrumentation,

I think it says you could have a violin or a cello

right next to a synthesiser.

That gives them a window into something

they may not have known they didn't know

and gives them the tools necessary

to maybe be the next Max Richter.

I don't know. Maybe.

I took the spectrum, the sonic spectrum,

that the unborn baby hears in the womb,

which is basically no high frequencies

because the mother's body filters all of those.

So I've used that spectrum for almost the entire piece.

And then, around sort of seven hours,

the spectrum opens up so you get more and more high frequencies.

So there's kind of a sunrise.

An acoustic sunrise.

I think there's something very fundamental about that spectrum

because that obviously goes to our first memories

of being a person.

Even before we're born, we have this auditory memory

which has a very particular colour.

So that's how the sort of sonics of the piece work on us.

5:49 a.m. Awake.

Just saw a stray cat, lots of sleeping people.

Feel quite rested. Very alert.

A little emotional.

People actually were pretty respectful.

Not a lot of chatter.

There was a woman with a bathing suit on.

A guy with a "rock, paper, scissor" tattoo

that I thought was sign language.

It made me reflect on my relationship,

knowing all the difficulties that we've been through

as a couple, all the tears, all the fights.

It's all worth it, like, to be with Terri

because I love her so much.

I was asleep for some of it and awake for some of it

and it kind of just blended with dreaming.

It was restful, but it was like a journey as well.

There's parts of it that I recognise

and there's parts where I go, "Was I asleep?"

I don't even remember anymore because it was all very fluid.

Falling asleep around a lot of people we didn't know,

just seeing how other people interact with the music as well,

it was really insightful and moving.

It takes years to get to the place

where it really starts and can really take off.

I feel like we're at the beginning of something.

Just starting, really. And that's what's incredible for us.

What if you slept?

And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed?

And what if, in your dreams, you went to heaven

and there you plucked a strange and beautiful flower?

And what if, when you awoke,

you had that flower in your hand?

Ah, what then?

It was kind of like...

a wave would come over you and just wake you.

You'd hear just like the rub of the strings - rrrrr!

It felt almost like a massage, but inside.

I'm still in a trance, I think.

And in my head there's a whole world of creatures.

The woman who sang,

it was like a mermaid that was singing to me

that wanted to grab me and pull me into the ocean.

Max was for me a kind of fox.

Very gentle, but also very sneaky, in a way,

that he trapped us from minute one.

He just did it in such a beautiful, elegant way.