In A Landscape

There are abundant signs of Max Richter’s love of minimalism on In a Landscape. The album features 19 short musical episodes written for stripped-back forces—string quintet, grand piano, Hammond organ, and MiniMoog, plus tape delays, vocoders, and reverbs. Its 10 compositions are interlocked with “Life Studies,” ambient interludes featuring snippets of recordings from everyday life to create snapshots of Richter’s world. “The title ‘In a Landscape’ can be heard in two ways: as it’s written, or as ‘in-ner landscape,’ as it sounds,” he explains to Apple Music Classical. “These are the kind of polarities that I’m exploring: between the external and the internal, electronic and instrumental, the technological world against the natural world.” The album’s title is taken from maverick avant-gardist John Cage’s 1948 work for solo harp or piano, itself inspired by Erik Satie, and throughout Richter pays homage to the composers who have influenced him over the years. Along with the language of American minimalist composers such as Terry Riley and Philip Glass, who have made repetition an organizing feature of their work, and the beauty of everyday sounds that Cage himself explored, you’ll hear the influence of Baroque music—shades of Bach in the harmonies of “And Some Will Fall,” for example, and Purcellian sighs in “Late and Soon.” In “Love Song,” the references are more explicit: its violin melody is borrowed directly from an opera by English 17th-century composer John Eccles, given added emotional resonance by Richter’s somber piano accompaniment. Elsewhere, most noticeably in “Andante,” it’s the light and dark of Schubert that Richter draws on, “just because I love his music and can’t leave him alone,” he says. Richter’s love of poetry—by Keats, Anne Carson, and Peter Redgrove, among others—is also drawn into the mix. “Late and Soon,” for example, takes its title from an 1802 sonnet in which Wordsworth laments the growing materialism of the Industrial Revolution, writing: “The world is too much with us; late and soon / Getting and spending, we lay waste to our powers; / Little we see in Nature that is ours.” “I was thinking, ‘Wow, he’s talking about Twitter basically, and the sort of distractedness of our lives,’” Richter says. “There isn’t any overarching poetic scheme; these are just jumping-off points and things that I have a kind of affection for. It’s a bit like you see something and you sort of love it. Then you want to explore it or elevate it in some way. And that’s really the way that these texts work in the piece.” The same can be said of the way Richter appropriates found sounds to bring texture, atmosphere, and glimpses of autobiographical narrative to his interpolating “Life Studies.” Ranging from field recordings sourced in the woodland surrounding his studio to the noise of cities he travels through, they provide evocative “polaroid shots” of Richter’s life. “I love exploring places on foot,” he says. “So there’s lots of walking in nature. There’s downtown New York, Sydney, Berlin, bits of Paris, various airports. There’s stuff in our house. People jamming on the piano, while someone else is cooking, while someone else is whatever, feeding a dog or something—just domestic life.” In many ways these interludes, both transient and ambient, bring us back to the playful ephemerality of Satie. But they are also a reminder of Richter’s love of using recorded material, first heard on his socio-politically aware breakthrough albums, 2002’s Memoryhouse, dealing in part with the Kosovo conflict in the Balkans, and 2004’s The Blue Notebooks, a protest album about the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While it makes no overt political statements, says Richter, In a Landscape is born out of his recognition of our need to reconcile differences. “We live in a very polarized world, and particularly, the online space is dominated by very shrill monologues. People who have a difference of opinion can’t talk to one another anymore. So I guess this principle of trying to put disparate elements together in one space creatively is a kind of political storytelling. It’s kind of a beautiful narrative.”