Half the audience asleep and eight-hour work's composer, Max Richter, was delighted
Richter 'woke up one day' with idea of composition, eventually called Sleep, that explores the boundary between sleeping and waking and encourages listeners to doze off
More than half the audience was asleep and at least one was snoring during the world premiere of Max Richter’s latest composition at the Wellcome Library in London. And the 49-year-old British composer couldn’t have been more pleased.
The piece, called Sleep, lasts eight hours, and it is designed to do exactly that: encourage people to fall asleep. And stay asleep.
Richter had the idea one morning. “You could say I woke up with it,” he tells the South China Morning Post in a recent interview in Oxford.
“I wanted to explore the boundary between sleeping and waking: it’s a fertile space and I wanted to see whether music could really send people into that space.”
Richter rarely listens to his own work – except when it’s one of his film scores; including for The Lunchbox (2013) and Disconnect (2012), and he has never had a problem sleeping.
“The opposite really – I’ll go to bed and literally 10 seconds later I’m asleep. You could say that I’m on the edge of sleep most of the time, and just waiting for the excuse.”
In fact the only thing that would get in the way would be if he had to listen to Sleep.