The Blue Notebooks
The Blue Notebooks
Main page

The Blue Notebooks

logo
Community Hub0 subscribers
What are your thoughts?
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
The Blue Notebooks

The Blue Notebooks is the second album by neo-classical producer and composer Max Richter. The album was conceived in 2003 and released on 26 February 2004 on 130701, an imprint of FatCat Records. It is a protest album about the 2003 invasion of Iraq and violence in general.

Following the success of his 2012 album Vivaldi Recomposed on the Deutsche Grammophon label, Richter signed many of his previous recordings to DG, including The Blue Notebooks, which was reissued on 29 April 2014.

On 11 May 2018, DG released a two-disc fifteenth-anniversary edition of The Blue Notebooks which includes re-recordings, alternate arrangements, and remixes by Jlin and Konx-Om-Pax.

Richter composed The Blue Notebooks in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He has described it as "a protest album about Iraq, a meditation on violence – both the violence that I had personally experienced around me as a child and the violence of war, at the utter futility of so much armed conflict." The album was recorded about a week after mass protests against the war.

The album features readings from Franz Kafka's The Blue Octavo Notebooks and Czesław Miłosz's Hymn of the Pearl and Unattainable Earth. Both extracts are read by the British actress Tilda Swinton.

The track "Shadow Journal" was recorded after Richter participated in a demonstration against the Iraq War in London.

The tracks "Shadow Journal" and "Organum" were included in the soundtrack of the animated documentary Waltz with Bashir (2008), while the track "Vladimir's Blues" is featured throughout all three seasons of the TV series The Leftovers (2014–2017).

The track "On the Nature of Daylight" has been used extensively throughout cinema and television, including in Stranger than Fiction (2006), Shutter Island (2010), Disconnect (2012), Arrival (2016), Togo (2019), The Handmaid's Tale (2021), The Last of Us (2023), and Hamnet (2025).

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.