48 LISTENER MARCH 10 2018
Books & Culture
GETTY IMAGES
S
leep and the lack of it are hot
21st-century topics. Along-
side dire warnings about the
negative effects of sleep depri-
vation, there’s plenty of help
on offer: sleep-tracking pillows,
essential oil sprays, robotic bed
companions.
And advice: wear socks to bed, paint
your bedroom blue, give up caffeine,
alcohol and energy drinks late in the day.
Sleep was not such a big issue last century,
so what has changed?
Composer Max Richter, coming to
the Auckland Arts Festival this month,
thinks it may be something to do with
information overload. “We’re living in
a sort of blizzard of data, on our screens
all the time. That can be a psychological
load,” he says. His eight-hour work Sleep
was written as an antidote. “I wanted to
make a piece that functioned like a mini
holiday, a roadblock on the information
superhighway, something that would
allow people to stop scrolling on that
screen. So, the piece has a political, socialdimension as an act of resistance
against this capitalist, neo-liberal,
technocratic existence. It’s an
invitation to stop and take time
to reflect on other things.”
Audiences for Sleep arrive
about bedtime, some
wearing their pyja-
mas. They’re assigned
a camp stretcher,
then invited to
sleep, stay awake
or enjoy a mixture
of both for eight
hours while the
musicians perform.
Richter says he also
had other starting
points. “It’s a musi-
cal enquiry into
the nature of sleep,
drawing on the lull-
aby tradition, taking
some things from
[experimental group]
Fluxus in the 60s,from Indian culture and, of course,
Bach’s Goldberg Variations.” He’s
referring to the apocryphal story
that Bach composed that music
to soothe the sleepless nights of a
Count Keyserlingk, whose
harpsichordist, Johann
Gottlieb Goldberg, per-
formed the variations.
Insomnia isn’t a new
phenomenon.
Richter’s music for
Sleep is, as you might
expect, calm, gentle,
peaceful and repeti-
tive. It has, to my
ears, a New Age fla-
vour. There are hints
of Bach’s harmonic
progressions and it’s
not hard to hear the
influence of the mini-
malists. The composer
tells a story from his
childhood in small-town
England, where theTHEATRE • BOOKS • DANCE • MUSIC • FILM
Overnight
sensation
British composer Max
Richter is inviting New
Zealand audiences
to snooze their way
through his eight-hour
performance. by ELIZABETH KERR