How far can music take us, especially if it accompanies us on our journey within, touching the boundary between dreams and reality? Let’s get comfortable. Our senses will soon be hit by an extravaganza of stimuli and mad improvisation.
Suggested background music: Robert Rich, Somnium
What role does sleep play? Is it only about rest? The principles of good sleep hygiene created to help us sleep properly through the night and wake up rested involve measures like limiting stimuli, and this includes auditory stimuli. But is that what we really need? For starters, let’s reminisce on our first childhood memories: Hush Little Baby, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Rock-a-Bye Baby. These are popular and appreciated tunes; with their help, we were able to fall fast asleep, much like an old bear. We no longer listen to them as adults; our bedrooms have become silent. Nobody sings to us, so it’s hard to get a good night’s sleep. So maybe an adult lullaby would be worth a try?
The Eight-Hour Lullaby
Max Richter, a composer of contemporary music known for his combination of electronic sounds with classical works, extended an unconventional proposal to his fans. The British artist, who keeps a solid distance from music conservatory conventions, is often invited to different festivals. In addition to records created for films, his bibliography also includes a soundtrack for sleeping. The eight-hour long composition created in 2005, adopted to the model duration of sleep, is fittingly entitled Sleep and was released as a set of eight CDs. The sounds lead the slumberer through gentle landscapes, sometimes softly pulsating, other times at the edge of audibility, to finally in the last hour greet the rising sun with uplifting and ever more louder musical motifs. It’s quite possible that people who are more immune to the sounds of their alarm clock do not even register these sounds and wake up at their normal time as if nothing had happened. “I removed all high frequencies from the piece. I wanted to mimic the sound that a child hears in its mother’s womb,” Max Richter explains to promote his sleep-time fantasies. On a side note, did the record label take into account at all that the form in which the composition was released would require the sleeping music lover to get up at night seven times only to change the CD? Good thing we have streaming services…
For fans of nightly attractions, Richter organized concerts at dusk. It turned out that he was generous enough to provide the night owls with beds instead of uncomfortable chairs. So people could bring their own pillows, brush their teeth, put on their pyjamas, take off their slippers, get comfortable and wait for Morpheus to come. The crowds desiring to fall into his arms were quite big. As many as several hundred people would queue up during a single concert (an event in Los Angeles provided 560 pieces of sleep-time furniture!). Some of them would cuddle up and sleep like a log, waking up only to the morning applause, others would scroll through Facebook, while some people decided to spend the rest of the night in more conventional surroundings and greet the day in their own bedrooms. The musicians didn’t have such wide a choice. Somebody had to play so somebody else could sleep.
Richter’s ambitious concept was performed by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, along with Grace Davidson and the author of the idea himself. None of the artists had a double. “At the beginning of the night, I sit at the piano and see that I have 250 pages of music to play, which seems to be a painstaking task. The composition is really quite demanding physically, especially for string instruments, which play a lot of extended sounds,” the composer admits.
Is Sleep anything more than just a commercial concept? Max Richter prepared the musical background to one of the favourite activities of 21st-century humans in cooperation with neurobiologist David Eagleman. “We took advantage of the fact that sleep is yet another state in which the brain is doing something. It’s active, but in a different way, and receives music while the consciousness is drifting far away somewhere,” he explained in interviews. Numerous studies have proven that listening to music can help people with sleeping disorders rest better and reduce the time needed to fall asleep. Yet more so than being a scientific experiment, Sleep focuses on the shared listening experience and is quite simply a pleasant lullaby spread out over time.
Experiments by night
I had the opportunity to participate in such an event. Although it wasn’t the Max Richter edition, but one prepared by Robert Rich, and it didn’t take place in Los Angeles, but in Kraków, and not on specially prepared beds, but on the cold floor of the ballroom at the abandoned Forum Hotel. In addition, it didn’t happen in the midst of a warm California night, but in October when it was rainy and foggy, something that only intensified the oddness of the situation, which was surreal to begin with.
Most importantly though, Rich takes the lead as far as organizing such concerts is concerned. He conducted experiments by night while he was still a student of composition at Stanford University in the 1980s. The school was famous for sleep research conducted at its Department of Psychiatry. Rich enjoyed stopping by the library there. Although he made a clear distinction between science and art and did not conduct any type of survey among the audience for their experiences, he did encourage people to share their observations shortly before morning.
Beyond the hard floor, I remember waking up every so often to change my position. I was not fully aware of where I was; the outer world was blending in with my inner world. Interestingly, I had the impression that it wasn’t the sound of the single-person orchestra that would wake me, but rather an inner feeling of sorts, like getting off a decelerating roller coaster. I didn’t feel like it was great fun, but then again I didn’t feel I needed to change my surroundings immediately. And while the accommodation was far from being all-inclusive, once I dug myself out of my nylon cocoon, I was treated to hot tea by the performer himself. The one thing that didn’t suit me at all in this slightly psychedelic and somewhat mystical ritual was that I had to share this intimate situation with strangers. “Persuading people to do something that is socially different, namely sleeping in the same room with unfamiliar others has an effect on the body’s activation level; your heart rate increases, your breathing becomes more shallow and your sleep is disturbed. It is not my intention to induce deep sleep, but rather active sleep. The sounds become a kind of thread of consciousness, which in a way helps you enter a state of half-sleep,” Robert Rich explained at the Unsound Festival in Kraków.
Rich’s musical interests go back to the 1960s, when artists like Terry Riley and Harry Partch, or John Cage and the hippie Grateful Dead, created their compositions on the US West Coast. Their rehearsals would resonate an entire block, all the way to Robert’s house, who was a few years old at the time. Avant-grade composers loved to introduce elements from spiritual cultures to concert halls (such as the Indonesian gamelan or Navajo traditions), thereby supplementing the definition of a concert with a ritual dimension and a communal aspect. The events were often accompanied by psychedelic substances, meaning that the whole thing would sometimes last as long as three days. Rich condensed his vision of the concerts to nine-hour vigils and encouraged people to take advantage of the natural propensity of the brain to induce hallucinations. “Drugs enhance sensory capacities: we feel, hear and see more. I believe that this state of overstimulation and cognitive noise is too much a reflection of the chaotic and noisy world we live in. I am much more interested in creating an antidote for this noise and remind people about the beautiful spaces that can exist in silence.”
And it’s hard not to agree with Rich. Getting your ear used to attentive listening and a more sophisticated experience, which is measured in whispers rather than shouts, is quite simply healthier. And isn’t that what we care about the most nowadays?
Translated from the Polish by Mark Ordon
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