Max Richter on Composing MADDADDAM

The prolific output of composer Max Richter stretches across numerous art forms, including concert music, opera, ballet, art and video installations. His acclaimed ability to translate profound human experience into music of great emotional resonance makes him a powerful collaborator for choreographers whose work also seeks to articulate the ineffable. His longstanding artistic collaboration with Sir Wayne McGregor has included The Royal Ballet’s Infra and Woolf Works, and now MADDADDAM. Here the composer elaborates on his creative process.

Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy of novels has had a unique impact on contemporary literature. How did you approach researching the vast landscape of Atwood’s world?

For me, the process was all about getting deeply into the texts themselves. The MaddAddam trilogy contains a tremendous variety of voices, narrative approaches and psychological environments, and I spent a lot of time reading and rereading, trying to discover the kinds of music that could feel inevitable within this multidimensional universe of Margaret’s creation. While spending time with the books, I was making my own notes in the texts themselves. The writing is so rich with psychological and sensory material, as well as a lot of drama, and discovering very specific concrete musical connections to these aspects of the trilogy felt like a perfect way for music to speak to Margaret’s writing. The music seeks to be very direct in framing the evolving emotional landscape of the narratives, but without resorting to direct parallelisms.

Were there any specific elements of the trilogy or Margaret’s writings that informed your composition?

When thinking about the project, I was looking at how the source material of the books operates on several levels. You have the micro scale: the inner life of some of these characters, Toby, Ren and Jimmy, their interpersonal relationships and the drama of the way they relate to one another. But then there’s also the broader societal dimension and the larger environmental perspective, these much larger themes. The individual psychological dramas play out against these very large-scale backdrops, and one of the real challenges for the project was trying to integrate these things: the very personal and direct, first-person type of material, with these larger-scale, more universal concerns. That suggested to me that I really needed multiple musical languages to speak to that duality.

There are multiple languages created in terms of the various use of instrumentation, scale, emotional register and musical grammar. There are a lot of different kinds of writing in the trilogy – there’s hard-hitting detective-like reportage; there’s fantasy, a kind of folksy, almost Tolkien-esque writing; there is crime fiction, there are hymn tunes, and it seemed to me that this multidimensionality had to be reflected in the musical setting.

So the music is very diverse: there are hymn tunes, 1970s Laurel Canyon style folk music, abstract electronica, techno, et cetera, and there’s a spine of orchestral material. This orchestral music is very contrapuntal. The individual melodic lines twist and interact with one another as they develop and replicate themselves, evoking the complex interrelationships of the principal characters. Underlying the whole composition is a kind of collage aesthetic –
which reflects the complex narrative universe of MaddAddam trilogy.

In spite of the work’s narrative complexity, I didn’t want to employ a one-to-one Leitmotif process for this work. Rather, I wanted to try and speak more to the psychology and emotions of each episode. For instance, for the characters of the Gods’ Gardeners – a community of hippie-like characters who live on the rooftops – I wrote some naïve, folk-type material, and some hymn tunes that populate their scenes in the book. There is also a recurring theme, the orchestral spine, which we get once in each act. It employs a continuously falling-yet-not-falling musical geometry that works as a commentary on the dystopia we find ourselves in.

This highly-anticipated production has been a long time in the making. Could you elaborate on the work’s inception and working with the other members of the creative team?

When Wayne contacted me about the project, it was originally planned pre pandemic. We had done Woolf Works together before and this seemed like the natural next step. We had breakfast with Margaret when she was in London. She’s an amazing mind. A real force of nature. In terms of her involvement with the musical aspects of the project, she was completely hands off. She was very trusting of me, which is impressive, because for a writer, it’s a big thing to hand over your work for it to be translated into another medium.

Wayne and I have done a lot of different things together over the years, so we have a very comfortable working relationship, very conversational. Making a piece like this together is really a series of experiments, and a kind of collective questioning of just what this work should be. He’ll send me ideas, I’ll send things back, and eventually we get something which starts to feel like it has intention and a gravitational field of its own that tells you what to do with it. For MADDADDAM, the process was a continual inquiry of ‘what ifs’, a sort of collaging or assembling of parts together, so the final product reflected a multidimensional expressive object of individual atoms. Wayne’s a brilliant creative mind and we always have a blast.

MADDADDAM and Woolf Works, your last collaboration with Wayne, are both three-act ballets. Musically, how does the structure of these two works compare?

MADDADDAM is a little different from Woolf Works, because in Woolf Works, we were exploring three distinct fictional worlds. In MADDADDAM we are working within the continuity of a larger structure. The three acts are closely related, and the musical material is interwoven between them. Writing any composition is partly about discovering what sort of grammar and vocabulary emanates from the world of that piece – discovering its natural language. For MADDADDAM, the key, for me, was the principle of the collage. It allowed me to create the feeling of a very large, fleshed-out world. The work is full of different languages, colliding with one another and exploding into different relationships. That’s very much the world of the trilogy – very dynamic and multidimensional, very tactile and full of emotional energy.

This article was originally printed in the Royal Ballet and Opera's programme for MADDADDAM and is provided courtesy of Royal Ballet and Opera.

MADDADDAM is Onstage June 13 – 21.

About MADDADDAM

Top Photo: Max Richter. Photo by Karolina Kuras.