During the past few weeks I’ve been listening to “Sleep,” by the contemporary British composer and musician Max Richter. The wordless composition, which is scored for piano, strings, voice, and electronics, is a little more than eight hours long. The full-length “Sleep” is available only as a digital download; a one-hour version, “From Sleep,” is available on vinyl and CD format also. The eight-hour version, Richter said in a recent interview, is a lullaby, and the one-hour version, a daydream. “From Sleep” is beguiling, “Sleep” is more tranquil and, by design, more elusive. It is “meant to be slept through,” Richter says. I can’t describe what happens in at least six hours’ worth of “Sleep,” because I’ve been sleeping.
On September 27th, a live performance of “Sleep,” involving Richter and a half-dozen other musicians, was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 from midnight to 8 A.M. It was the longest live broadcast of a single piece of music in the station’s history. The piece was performed in the reading room of the Wellcome Library, a London institution dedicated to the study of medical history, to an audience of around twenty people, accommodated in camp beds. Afterward, when they were interviewed by the BBC, few could claim to have slept for the duration of the performance. “I didn’t want to sleep,” one audience member said, while another described experiencing hallucinations. Radio listeners tweeted their reactions throughout the night, and, as for the musicians, one suspects that by the end they were in need of a good sleep themselves.
“Sleep” is made up of thirty-one movements that vary in length from just less than three minutes to more than thirty. My conscious awareness as a listener is confined mainly to the composition’s first and last hours, beginning with a movement called “Dream 1 (before the wind blows it all away),” a series of soft piano chords, and ending with “Dream 0 (till break of day),” the longest movement, in which the string instruments, playing sustained notes that seem to melt one into the other, gently coax the sleeper awake. Certain melodies and chord progressions recur across instruments; the composition is repetitious enough to allow you to drift in and out without worrying that you’ve missed crucial developments.
Richter’s use of repeated patterns is based on the practice of minimalist composers such as Philip Glass, though his harmonic sensibility reminds me more of Michael Nyman, who, like Richter, has scored several works for film. “Sleep” is designed as ambient music and is released on the prestigious classical record label Deutsche Grammophon, but Richter is equally at home in the world of popular music: he will at perform at the festival All Tomorrow’s Parties this November, and has previously worked with the electronic band the Future Sound of London. Although they’re designed to mimic a sleeper’s brain waves, the electronically generated bass frequencies that pulse through “Sleep” recall the cavernous bottom end of a club sound system, radically slowed.
A unique kind of hearing takes place while asleep. Being asleep, or semi-asleep, changes my ability to comprehend the distance between instruments in a piece of music: everything feels foreshortened, as if each element were squashed against a pane of glass. I find the most useful music to fall asleep to is melodious but minimal, with little to no percussion. Lyrics, too, are a distraction, or at least those in English are. They demand too much rational scrutiny. I find that Latin plainsong is effective, and has the added benefit of being unaccompanied, though I don’t know that it’s quite right of me to use sacred music as a sleep aid, when it is designed to bring listeners (and performers) to a state of spiritual clarity, not oblivious slumber.
In July this year, at the Sydney venue Carriageworks, I witnessed a set by the American composer William Basinski who, like Max Richter, works at the intersection of classical, experimental, and ambient music styles. Or rather, I experienced the set, because Basinski insured that it took place in near total darkness, and he encouraged the audience to lie on the floor, which I did, and to fall asleep, which I tried to do. Carriageworks, as the name suggests, was formerly a railway maintenance workshop: a huge, high-ceilinged site that once would have absorbed all kinds of industrial noises. The performance was a sort of unwitting requiem for the room’s audio history. I wondered if the ghosts of railway workers past could hear it, and were soothed.
There is an elegiac quality to Richter’s “Sleep.” The main vocal melody, performed both on the record and during the BBC’s live broadcast by the soprano Grace Davidson, is a loop that slowly descends in pitch, played against a series of high, keening notes that seem to reach for a place somewhere beyond the mortal world. The composition’s slow pace is restful but also funereal. Sleep is the intimation of death, and we can escape one no more than the other. The liner notes to “Sleep” quote Heraclitus and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the title of the fifth movement, “who’s name is written on water,” is a reference to John Keats (though the errant apostrophe is confusing). “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water” is the epitaph that Keats chose for himself as he was dying, and the words are carved into his headstone. Keats’s poetry is deeply concerned with the nature of sleep, and his sonnet “Ode to a Nightingale” is a peerless evocation of a sleeper’s hearing. “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget” is a wish that the human body might be transformed into sound.
