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Combining classical discipline with the inventive spirit of electronic music, Max Richter speaks to -- and frequently critiques -- 21st century life with evocative elegance. On early masterworks such as 2002's Memoryhouse and 2003's The Blue Notebooks, the composer and producer united his childhood memories and commentary on war's devastating aftermath into gorgeous, aching music; with 2015's eight-hour Sleep, he challenged the increasing disposability of art and music as well as audiences' ever-decreasing attention spans. Richter's fascination with the growing role of technology in everyday life was a major theme of releases spanning 2008's collection of bespoke ringtones to the music for a particularly paranoid 2016 episode of the TV series Black Mirror. Despite the high-concept nature of much of his work, Richter always maintains a powerful emotional connection with his listeners. 2012's Recomposed: The Four Seasons, an experimental reimagining of Vivaldi's violin concertos, topped classical charts in over 20 countries. The emotive quality of his music translated perfectly to scoring and soundtrack work, which ranged from documentaries such as Waltz with Bashir (2008); feature films including Ad Astra (2019); television series like Invasion (2021); and stage productions including Infra (2008) and Woolf Works (2015), both projects with Richter's longtime collaborator, choreographer Wayne McGregor. Richter's mix of modern composition, electronic music, and field recordings -- which he revisited on 2024's In a Landscape -- was as influential as it was innovative, paving the way for artists such as Nico Muhly and Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Born in West Germany in the mid-'60s, Richter and his family moved to the U.K. when he was still a little boy, settling in the country town of Bedford. By his early teens, he was listening to the canon of classical music as well as modern composers including Philip Glass, whose music was a major influence on Richter. The Clash, the Beatles, and Pink Floyd were also important, along with the early electronic music scene; inspired by artists such as Kraftwerk, Richter built his own analog instruments. He studied composition and piano at Edinburgh University, the Royal Academy of Music, and in Florence with Luciano Berio.

He then became a founding member of the Piano Circus, a contemporary classical group that played works by Glass, Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, and Julia Wolfe, and also incorporated found sounds and video into their performances. After ten years and five albums for Decca/Argo, Richter left the group and became more involved in the U.K.'s thriving electronic music scene, collaborating with the Future Sound of London on 1996's Dead Cities (which features a track named after him) and The Isness; he also contributed orchestrations to Roni Size's 2000 album In the Mode.

Richter's own work evolved from the Xenakis-inspired music of his early days into something that included his electronic and pop influences. His 2002 debut album, Memoryhouse, introduced his mix of modern composition, electronica, and field recordings. Recorded with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the album explored childhood memories as well as the aftermath of the Kosovo War in the 1990s and was hailed as a masterpiece. Two years later, Richter made his FatCat debut with The Blue Notebooks, which incorporated readings from Franz Kafka's Blue Octavo Notebooks and Polish writer Czesław Miłosz by actress Tilda Swinton into dreamlike pieces for strings and piano that touched on the Iraq War and Richter's early years. Released in 2006, Songs from Before paired his plaintive sound with texts written by Haruki Murakami and delivered by Robert Wyatt.

In 2008, he issued 24 Postcards in Full Colour, a collection of intricate ringtones envisioned by Richter as a way to connect people around the world. That year also saw the release of his music for Ari Folman's Golden Globe-winning film Waltz with Bashir. Focusing on electronics instead of a typical orchestral score, it was Richter's highest-profile soundtrack project to date. He then worked on several other film scores, including music for Benedek Fliegauf's Womb, Alex Gibney's My Trip to Al-Qaeda, and David MacKenzie's Perfect Sense. Another scoring project, Infra, marked the beginning of Richter's enduring collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor. Commissioned by the Royal Ballet in 2008, Infra was a ballet inspired by T.S. Eliot's classic poem "The Wasteland," and the 2005 London terrorist bombings. Richter re-recorded and expanded his music for the 2010 album Infra, his fourth release for FatCat Records.

Richter began the 2010s with soundtrack work that included the award-winning scores to Die Fremde (2010) and Lore (2012). The composer reunited with McGregor for 2012's Sum, a chamber opera based on Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives, a collection of short stories by neuroscientist David Eagleman about the possibility of life after death. That year also saw the release of one of Richter's most popular albums, Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi - The Four Seasons. An avant-garde, loop-based reworking of the composer's timeless set of violin concertos, it topped the classical charts in 22 countries, including the U.K., the U.S., and Germany. In turn, McGregor choreographed a ballet, Kairos, to Richter's recomposition. Disconnect, the score to Henry-Alex Rubin's film about the impact of technology on relationships, arrived in 2013. His other releases that year included the score to Wadjda, which was the first feature-length film made by a Saudi Arabian woman (director Haifaa Al-Mansour); the music to Ritesh Batra's The Lunchbox; and Ruairí Robinson's sci-fi excursion The Last Days on Mars. Richter also worked with Folman again on the music to The Congress, an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel The Futurological Congress.

In 2014, Richter launched a mentorship program for aspiring young composers and wrote music for HBO's The Leftovers, which also featured pieces from Memoryhouse and The Blue Notebooks. The following year saw the arrival of Sleep, an eight-hour ambient piece scored for piano, strings, electronics, and vocals that Richter described as a "lullaby for a frenetic world and a manifesto for a slower pace of existence." The piece premiered at a Berlin performance where the audience was given beds instead of seats. Sleep and From Sleep, a one-hour adaptation, were released in September 2015. The following year, Richter provided the score to the sci-fi/horror film Morgan and the disturbingly cheery music for "Nosedive," an episode of Black Mirror that took the all-consuming nature of social media to extremes. Released in January 2017, Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works drew from his score for McGregor's 2015 Royal Ballet production inspired by three of Virginia Woolf's most acclaimed novels. It was followed that May by the soundtrack compilation Out of the Dark Room. That September, Richter's Emmy-nominated music for the BBC One drama Taboo was released.

Richter remained busy on soundtrack work in 2018, with projects including the music for the HBO TV series My Brilliant Friend as well as the scores to films like Hostiles, White Boy Rick, and Mary Queen of Scots, which won a Best Original Score -- Feature Film Award at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards. For his score to the August 2019 film Ad Astra, he used plasma wave data from NASA's Voyager Interstellar Mission played by a custom virtual instrument as an element of his compositions (two years later, the score earned Richter his first Grammy nomination). That October, Deutsche Grammophon issued Voyager: Essential Max Richter, an expansive retrospective that included two previously unreleased pieces written for Sleep.

Richter continued to expand on Sleep in 2020, first with the documentary Max Richter's Sleep, which premiered in North America at that year's Sundance Film Festival, and later with an app designed to help listeners use the work for focus, meditation, and rest. His other projects that year included contributions to Rudolf Buchbinder's Diabelli Variations project, music for the second season of My Brilliant Friend, and Journey CP1919, a work commissioned for the Aurora Orchestra and inspired by the discovery of the first pulsar star. July 2020 saw the release of Voices, a work combining crowd-sourced readings of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a "negative orchestra" comprising eight violins, six violas, 24 cellos, 12 double basses, and a harp. A decade in the making, Voices included performances by violinist Mari Samuelsen, the choir Tenebrae, and solo soprano Grace Davidson. A second volume, Voices 2, followed in 2021. Richter additionally collaborated with Kristjan Järvi and the Baltic Sea Philharmonic on an album titled Exiles, which included orchestral versions of some of his earlier works. He also released his score for the first season of the television series Invasion. Richter collaborated with Kristjan Järvi and the Baltic Sea Philharmonic on August 2021's Exiles, a ballet piece about the refugee crisis that included orchestral versions of some of his earlier works. In 2022, the composer worked with McGregor once more, scoring an adaptation of Margaret Atwood's MaddAdam trilogy commissioned by the National Ballet of Canada and the Royal Ballet. That year, Richter also returned to The Four Seasons with The New Four Seasons - Vivaldi Recomposed. Featuring violinist Elena Urioste and the Chineke! Orchestra, this version employed vintage analog synthesizers and period-accurate instruments for a rawer approach to Vivaldi's work. March 2023 saw the release of SLEEP: Tranquility Base, an EP of electronic interpretations of the original piece accompanied by remixes courtesy of Kelly Lee Owens and Alva Noto.

Richter's music for a major Mark Rothko exhibition, the Johan Renck film Spaceman, and the spy thriller TV series The Veil preceded his ninth solo album, September 2024's In a Landscape. Recorded at Studio Richter Mahr, the creative space he built with his wife, award-winning visual artist Yulia Mahr, the album's balance of electronic and acoustic instrumentation, everyday moments, and life's big ideas echoed Memoryhouse and The Blue Notebooks. Richter supported In a Landscape with a tour that included dates with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. ~ Heather Phares

Whether it's as guitarist for the National, curator of the MusicNOW festival, producer, film scorer, or composer-in-residence, Bryce Dessner is constantly expanding his musical horizons. Drawing on diverse elements and influences, including music of other cultures or styles, much of his creative energy is sparked by collaborations with other musicians. Around the time the National released their 2001 eponymous debut, Dessner co-founded the contemporary ensemble Clogs, and he has remained active as a performer and festival director in the classical realm alongside his indie rock band's Top Five-charting success. In 2017, the National's seventh studio album, Sleep Well Beast, reached a career-high number two, while Planetarium, a genre-bending collaboration between Dessner, Nico Muhly, Sufjan Stevens, and James McAlister, placed just outside the top half of the Billboard 200. Katia and Marielle Labèque's 2019 album Dessner: El Chan consisted entirely of Dessner compositions, and he was one of three members of the National to provide the songs for the film musical Cyrano in 2021. He continued to compose for film in the early 2020s, scoring Alejandro G. Inarritu's Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, and Rebecca Miller's She Came to Me.

Bryce Dessner and his twin brother Aaron have played music since childhood. One of their various endeavors as young adults was Project Nim, whose other members included Bryan Devendorf. Bryce went on to earn both his bachelor's and master's degree in music at Yale. Aaron joined Matt Berninger and brothers Bryan and Scott Devendorf to form the National in New York in 1999. In 2001, just as the National released their first album on the Brassland Records label -- co-founded by the Dessner brothers and Alec Hanley Bemis -- Bryce was added to the group on guitar, solidifying a lineup that would remain intact throughout their rise to mainstream success. He also joined some of his Yale classmates, including Padma Newsome, to form Clogs, an ensemble collaboratively creating primarily acoustic instrumental music. They issued the debut album Thom's Night Out that October.

Dessner founded the Cincinnati-based MusicNOW Festival in 2006. With a focus contemporary composition, over the years it has featured an international roster of guests ranging from Glenn Kotche, Bell Orchestre, So Percussion, and Sufjan Stevens to the Kronos Quartet, the Cincinnati Symphony, and the Lone Bellow. He's also directed festivals in Brooklyn, London, and Cork, Ireland, some combining other arts with music.

Arriving on Brassland in 2003, the National's sophomore LP, Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, reunited the band with producer Nick Lloyd and introduced Newsome, who contributed violin, viola, and string arrangements. That year, Clogs released Lullaby for Sue, following it with Stick Music in 2004. The National returned in 2005 with Alligator, which also featured strings by Newsome as well as piano and organ by Newsome and Lloyd. It marked their debut on the Beggars Banquet label. The Clogs recording Lantern arrived on Brassland and Talitres Records in 2006. Back with the National, their fourth full-length, Boxer, proved a commercial breakthrough in 2007. Featuring expanded instrumentation, including woodwinds and brass, keyboards by Thomas Bartlett (Doveman), and production by the band and Peter Katis, it reached number 68 on the Billboard 200. Boxer charted higher in countries including countries in the U.K., New Zealand, and Finland. A year later, they issued The Virginia EP, a collection of unreleased songs, B-sides, demos, and live recordings. The National signed with 4AD for their fifth studio LP, High Violet. Released in 2010, it embraced the more cinematic sound of Boxer with guests who included not only Newsome and Bartlett but such names as Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, Nadia Sirota, Bon Iver's Justin Vernon, and Arcade Fire's Richard Reed Parry. High Violet landed in the Top Three in the U.S., Canada, and a handful of European countries, and reached number five in the U.K. Dessner also released an album (The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton) and two EPs (Veil Waltz and Last Song EP) with Clogs in 2010. The album featured Newsome along with Berninger, Sufjan Stevens, and Aaron Dessner.

Meanwhile, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Bryce Dessner began receiving commissions from organizations such as the American Composers Forum and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A commission from the Kronos Quartet, Aheym (2009), was the first to bring him wider attention and was the centerpiece on a Kronos 2013 disc devoted to his music. St. Carolyn by the Sea (2011), a double concerto for electric guitars, commissioned in part by Muziekgebouw Eindhoven, along with two other Dessner works, was paired with film music by Jonny Greenwood for its premiere recording performed by the Copenhagen Philharmonic and Andre de Ridder, released in 2014 on Deutsche Grammophon. Among other notable Dessner creations are the Top 20 classical album Music for Wood and Strings, for So Percussion, which was performed on instruments designed by Dessner and Aron Sanchez; and Murder Ballades from Eighth Blackbird's Grammy-nominated album Filament. Another Grammy-nominated album with Dessner's name on it was the National's 2013 release Trouble Will Find Me, on which he worked as producer and orchestrator as well as performer. That album had similar chart placements to its predecessor, High Violet, and also featured Bartlett, Muhly, Parry, and Stevens alongside over a dozen other instrumentalists. Sharon Van Etten, Nona Marie Invie, and St. Vincent's Annie Clark sang on the record. In 2013, Dessner also became composer-in-residence at Muziekgebouw Eindhoven for a three-year period. During the residency, his band released the nine-LP box set Lot of Sorrow (2015), which captured a live, MoMA-hosted performance art collaboration with Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson from 2013. Dessner also contributed to the soundtrack for the Oscar-winning film The Revenant (2015), and a score he wrote with his brother Aaron for the 2016 thriller Transpecos received a soundtrack release on Milan Records.

In 2017, 4AD released Planetarium, a collaborative work inspired by the Solar System that featured music by Dessner, Muhly, Stevens, and drummer James McAlister (Ester Drang). The same year, the National's third studio album for 4AD and seventh overall, Sleep Well Beast, went to number two in the U.S. and topped the charts in Canada, Ireland, and the U.K. Sleep Well Beast also won the National a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album in early 2018. Boxer: Live in Brussels saw release later in 2018, and the National returned in May 2019 with their eighth studio album, I Am Easy to Find. Inspired by a collaboration with filmmaker Mike Mills, it reached number one on the U.S. Top Rock Albums chart and showcased cameos by a number of female vocalists, including Gail Ann Dorsey, Eve Owen, and Sharon Van Etten. Also in 2019, Dessner collaborated with Will Oldham and Eighth Blackbird on When We Are Inhuman, which was part of Dessner's Murder Ballades series, and the Katia and Marielle Labèque recording Dessner: El Chan consisted of three works by Dessner, including a concerto for two pianos. Meanwhile, Aaron Dessner's high-profile production efforts for Taylor Swift led to the National appearing on "Coney Island" from Swift's 2020 album Evermore. After contributing a cover of INXS' "Never Tear Us Apart" to the bushfire relief charity album Songs for Australia, the band returned in 2021 with the original song "Somebody Desperate" for the Cyrano soundtrack. The film musical featured lyrics by Matt Berninger and Carin Besser and music by Bryce and Aaron Dessner.

On his own, Bryce Dessner continued to compose for a number of notable films. In 2022, he scored the semi-autobiographical Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths for Alejandro G. Inarritu. The following year, his work was featured in Rebecca Miller's She Came to Me and Zach Braff's A Good Person. Tracks from those soundtracks would make their way on to Dessner's debut album for Sony Classical, 2024's Solos, alongside various collaborative pieces he has written over the last few years. ~ Patsy Morita & Marcy Donelson