One of Classical Music's Biggest Stars Says AI Is Degrading Our Taste

Composer Max Richter discusses how his music responds to political crises and offers listeners a refuge from them. His new album, While The Flood Rages, grows out of a ballet inspired by Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam novels, whose post-apocalyptic world raises questions about current social and technological upheavals. Though the material is often bleak, Richter says he remains hopeful: people have created many of their problems and can create solutions. Music, for him, can briefly shift consciousness and provide an alternate reality where things make sense. That outlook also shapes earlier works, including Memoryhouse, about children in Kosovo, and The Blue Notebooks, a protest against the Iraq War. He recalls feeling that public opposition to the war was powerless against governments’ increasingly surreal political narratives.

Richter describes composition as an experimental, often solitary process: he sketches at the piano, sets ideas aside, and returns to them months or years later. He says he focuses on getting the notes right rather than imagining commercial success, despite billions of streams and the extraordinary afterlife of “On the Nature of Daylight.” The piece unexpectedly shaped the ending of Hamnet, with director Chloé Zhao playing it on set during filming. Richter also connects his sensitivity to suffering with violence in his childhood home, describing creativity as both refuge and a way to develop empathy. On AI-generated music, he calls it a “solution looking for a problem” and warns that it degrades taste.