The Blue Notebooks

It takes serious chops to mix string quartets, electronic music and the actress Tilda Swinton reading Kafka and Polish poet Czesław Miłosz into something coherent and affecting. British composer Max Richter did just that with The Blue Notebooks, originally composed in 2003 as a protest album about the Iraq War and immediately heralded as an iconic, moving work. The melancholic music found an audience far outside the classical realm: The bittersweet “On the Nature of Daylight” was used in Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010) and Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi film Arrival (2016), and even had its own music video. The Blue Notebooks’ continued influence on film scores cemented its status and warranted an expanded reissue—The Blue Notebooks (15 Years)—in 2018, featuring several new arrangements, remixes and a bonus single. Still, the work’s centrepiece is "Shadow Journal", in which soaring violin and spoken prose dovetail with a pulsating sublow bassline. In “Old Song”, Richter takes a piece from Schumann’s Dichterliebe (1840) song cycle—the 19th-century’s equivalent of a concept album—and strips away the classical voice, leaving only its spare piano accompaniment; even the organ on “Iconography” and “Organum” never explodes the reflective atmosphere. The work’s elegant balance of achingly long melodic lines and subtle electronics became a touchpoint for contemporary classical composers and film lovers alike.