Full Transcript for Weekend Listen: Composer Max Richter on AI and Music’s Future

room all together. So it's a very different experience from a record. 00:06:33 Speaker 1: So when you reimagined it, you had to add these other elements. You weren't going to just release the score, essentially. 00:06:40 Speaker 2: It couldn't be one-to-one, yeah. It had to be a new journey through that landscape, through that material. 00:06:46 Speaker 3: But the material itself, how does it speak to you? Because it is this post-apocalyptic world where there are a small group of human survivors who remain. And I saw that you've also commissioned an essay about the future of humanity in the age of the machine. So therefore, I mean, I have to ask you why this works for you right now? What does it reveal that you're thinking about? 00:07:12 Speaker 2: You know, for me, creative work, music often comes out of questions, questions about the world. And I think it feels like we're at sort of multiple turning points, really, culturally, societally, technologically. on a human level. Margaret's work often speaks to these sorts of questions and they are really embedded in the writing of Mad Adam. And I wanted to investigate those things further in this release and to kind of focus on the unknowns and the questions that Margaret's text raises. 00:07:49 Speaker 3: Aspects of it are really bleak. And I think one can see, if you look at the album, one can see those elements in it. But the title track, While the Flood Rages, is that an effort to bring hope into the mix? Because I felt as I listened that the rhythm of it, the beats within, somehow suggested to me life has to go on amid all of this tumult. 00:08:12 Speaker 1: Yes. 00:08:13 Speaker 2: I mean, I'm, I guess, fundamentally quite hopeful. 00:08:18 Speaker 1: You sound not sure about that somehow. 00:08:20 Speaker 2: Well, what does Rothko say? You know, sort of 51% sort of hope or something. But the world of the ballet and the world we live in now, we're beset by all sorts of problems, all sorts of crises. And they are obviously largely of our own making. We've made the problems, we can make the solutions. 00:08:39 Speaker 3: Is music part of your own release from all of that? Because you're channeling the world around you. in your previous work and in this one, into it. So is it the way that you take yourself to a different place, even though you are responding to and reflecting the difficulties. 00:08:54 Speaker 2: Of this world? Yeah, I mean, I think music can be a kind of wish fulfillment exercise for a different world. You know, I think probably many of us who work in creativity think of the work as a kind of a refuge in a way. an alternate reality, maybe a place where everything makes sense in the way that in the world, you know, it doesn't a lot of the time. So that's one of the things music can do. And there is certainly music of that sort in the record, in the album. I mean, the title track is a little like that, I think. It's a sort of point of repose amongst this sort of rather, a lot of challenging material in a way. 00:09:44 Speaker 1: There's another track, Now We Can Sing. And as the title suggests, I did feel as I listened to it that it was, you know, it was touching me right here in my heart, like deep inside, which presumably is your intention. As you set out to write a piece like that, you are trying. to lift people up. 00:10:02 Speaker 2: Oh, totally. Yeah. I mean, I think that's one of the magical things that music can do. You know, it can just elevate us, elevate our experience. And, you know, that's something I really treasure about it. This opportunity to kind of shift consciousness a tiny bit, you know, If I get up in the morning and I stick on the radio and there's some bit of Schubert or something that I love, my day is just a tiny bit better from that moment, even like 1% better. And I do think that's a valuable thing. I sort of cherish that idea. 00:10:32 Speaker 3: That's interesting enough in itself. You're willing to switch on the radio and kind of take whatever is there rather than making a choice about what you want to listen to yourself. 00:10:42 Speaker 2: In a way, I think one of the nicest things about doing creative work is working with what you don't know. It's the surprises. I think Cage says, doesn't he, that everything known rests on unknown things. It's that feeling of what's out there. I enjoy that. 00:10:58 Speaker 1: Can we go back a bit, Max, to your previous work? And of course, I'm thinking about other moments when you've responded to The Times. You had a whole album, The Blue Notebooks, which was a protest at the Iraq War. And even before that, you were thinking about children in conflict with your first album, Memory House. So how consumed are you by current events? 00:11:22 Speaker 2: To me, it's natural to be talking about the world I'm living in. I mean, I think we all do that every day. You meet a friend, you talk about what's going on. It's just my language happens to be music. So different artists have different ideas about how that should be expressed or if it should be expressed. There are plenty of composers who aren't really interested in that or interested in purely sort of musical questions in a way. But for me, it's always just seemed instinctively right that, you know, if I have something on my mind, if I have something to talk about, then I will put that in the work. 00:11:57 Speaker 1: So tell me about that period in the run-up to the Iraq war, because I... I remember it very clearly as well. I mean, you were upset, angry. 00:12:08 Speaker 2: Well, the sort of biggest thing really, well, two big things. The first is that I felt that there was a sort of shift from politics based on a kind of consensual reality into something else, into a kind of a narrative, a sort of some sort of metafictional fantasy narrative. to do with the justification of the war aims and all of this stuff. 00:12:30 Speaker 1: The weapons of mass destruction, the story that was being told around.

00:12:33 Speaker 2: The weapons of mass destruction. And I felt like, of course, this has been happening before, but I thought this was an extreme example of something. And I thought it was sort of verging on a kind of surrealist situation. We all went to that big march, you know, a couple of weeks before the recording session. And there was this sort of feeling of decoupling of what ordinary people felt, which was, this was ridiculous. And what, you know governments certain governments were doing so those were the two things that I sort of felt one a sense of kind of alienated absurdity and secondly a sense of being in a way in a majority but a majority being completely you know disempowered so you were on. 00:13:15 Speaker 1: The march yourself yeah looking around at people who felt the same way as you did and then realizing that leadership made no difference at all yeah I mean what I find really interesting about that album is that At the time, it didn't get that much attention. But within it is, on the nature of daylight, the piece which has had this extraordinary and immense life ever since. 00:13:37 Speaker 2: Well, yes. In a way, it's interesting because, you know, the previous record, Memory House, which was also in a way about the world we're living in. 00:13:46 Speaker 1: I should explain. 00:13:47 Speaker 3: It wasn't that inspired by the poetry you had read, written by children in Kosovo? 00:13:52 Speaker 2: Yes, that's right. Exactly. Exactly. So in a way, thematically related, you know, also about the world in a way. But that record had had absolutely zero exposure. You know, I sort of spent years working on it, and then it was like nothing happened. So in a way, I wasn't expecting the Blue Notebooks to either. And actually, there was a sort of a freedom in that. You know, Memory House had commercially failed. So I felt like, well, no one's listening, so I can just keep writing exactly what I want because no one cares. So that's what I did with the Blue Notebooks. And... In a sense, the fact that it didn't really cut through didn't surprise me and I sort of didn't mind either. I felt that was okay. 00:14:30 Speaker 1: You've certainly been proved right on the weapons of mass destruction. 00:14:33 Speaker 2: Well, yes. 00:14:34 Speaker 3: But on The Nature of Daylight, 190 million streams. It's an extraordinary achievement. 00:14:41 Speaker 2: Well, I mean, those numbers are not something I can really imagine. It sort of feels a bit fictional, really. I mean, I think for me, what I'm interested in is I'm trying to put the notes in the right places on a piece of paper. And that's really the alpha and omega of what I do. I don't really think about what it might sell, X or Y, and I never really have. Because actually, just getting the notes in the right places on the paper is quite hard. But at least I can control them. I can sort of control that. That's my sort of sphere of influence. After that, it's... There's nothing I can do to affect anything. So I sort of don't really think about that. 00:15:28 Speaker 1: How long does it usually take you to compose a piece of music? Does it start with the piano? 00:15:35 Speaker 2: Often. I mean, the piano is my instrument. So as well as sort of performing, it's also my sketch pad. So I work at the piano. I work on a piece of paper on a table or with a computer or whatever. 00:15:48 Speaker 1: Yeah, you'll sit there, keep experimenting, keep honing, and will you only write the notes on the page once you're sure of them, or are you even experimenting on the page? 00:15:58 Speaker 2: There's quite a lot of scribbling. There's a scribbling phase, and it's a lot of composting, honestly. Things which are sort of, you know, I'll write something and it'll be like, I don't really know what that is. And then months later you sort of pick it up, and there's a kind of iterative composting process that goes on. 00:16:17 Speaker 1: So things will come back then from the Richter composting. 00:16:21 Speaker 2: Definitely. 00:16:23 Speaker 1: Months, even years later? Definitely, yeah, sure. 00:16:25 Speaker 3: I mean, is there an actual. 00:16:26 Speaker 2: Drawer where you'll put the scribble papers? Yeah, there are piles of paper all over the studio. And I quite like that sort of forgetting process, actually. I think it's really healthy. Because then you can come back to the material with a kind of objectivity. 00:16:39 Speaker 3: But then you know it works... When it works at the first moment of a scribble, or do you sometimes remember the piece from ages ago and pull it up? 00:16:51 Speaker 2: There's sort of no rule about that, really. Sometimes a thing will just land, almost like an email landing in your inbox, just fully formed, you know, and you think, oh, well, you know, and you just sort of write it out, basically. Other times it can take a while and it can be difficult and can be quite a sort of a wrestling process. And you have to be like a sort of little dog with a bone, you know, just sort of not let go and sort of just keep sort of working away at it. Honestly, I see the whole thing as a kind of set of experiments. And eventually things just kind of something will catch fire. Something will turn into an object which feels like it has a kind of gravitational field of its own, which has a sort of a character. It's a bit like novelists talk about this, don't they? They'll be writing something and then suddenly the characters start to do things which they're not expecting. And it's that sort of feeling of intentionality that the material can have. 00:17:45 Speaker 3: Does anyone else get involved? Do you play the music to anyone before you've decided it's finished? Because novelists, of course, have editors and the manuscripts might go through many drafts. Is yours a solitary process? 00:17:58 Speaker 2: It is basically, yes. It depends what it is. If it's a piece of concert music or a solo project, a solo record, then I will get it

basically finished before anyone hears it. In the case of a film, obviously, it's completely different because really it's a fundamentally collaborative process and you're constantly shuffling materials back and forth, you know, with the director and other people. 00:18:23 Speaker 1: Well, which leads me to On the Nature of Daylight being used in Hamnet. And I'd love to know more about this because as most people, because the film has been so successful, will know, and you were Oscar nominated as well. 00:18:35 Speaker 3: It's in that final scene when. 00:18:36 Speaker 1: Agnes is watching her husband, William Shakespeare's production, his new play of Hamlet. 00:18:44 Speaker 3: But you didn't intend that. 00:18:46 Speaker 1: Piece to be there in the film, not least because that piece is 20 years old. Right. 00:18:52 Speaker 2: Yeah. So this has an interesting kind of origin story, really, the honor nature of daylight in Hamlet. So, you know, when I got the cut of the film and started working on the score, I read some music, which worked for me. But Chloe had this sort of rather kind of intense experience with this piece. 00:19:17 Speaker 3: Chloe Zhao, the director. 00:19:19 Speaker 2: The director, yes. So what happened is that she doesn't ever write the end of her films. So on the page, in the script that I read, Hamlet says, the rest is silence. And that's the end of the film. So you don't get that whole sequence in the Globe with them all reaching out. And that's not on the page and it wasn't written. 00:19:40 Speaker 1: The actor reaches out, the audience are reaching back. 00:19:43 Speaker 2: Yes, all of that. It's an amazing sequence, but it didn't exist. And as they got towards the end of the shoot, Chloe was getting more and more sort of anxious that she hadn't got the end of the film. So Jesse sent her on The Nature of Daylight, which was a piece. Jesse Buckley. Jesse Buckley, yeah. 00:20:00 Speaker 1: Playing Agnes. 00:20:01 Speaker 2: Yeah. Sent her this piece, which Chloe didn't know. And Chloe listened to it on the way to the set. and kind of had this epiphany, this kind of vision of the end of the film. And then got to the set and said, right, we're changing everything, and we're going to shoot this whole ending. So in other words, the piece was really sort of architectural. to the way the film developed. So for her, it wasn't really a matter of, oh, let's just sync this piece. It was this piece gave her the ending of the film. 00:20:49 Speaker 3: So does that mean that then when she went back to the set that day, did the actors know how and why it was changing and was the music part of the set experience? 00:21:00 Speaker 2: Yeah, they played the music on the set for 10 hours every day for like three days while they filmed that last sequence. So it was really sort of deep in the performances of the actors. And there was no way Chloe was going to have a different music at the end. 00:21:18 Speaker 1: And that's just an extraordinary artistic thing to do, because in my understanding, the music is always added on afterwards. The actors, it's never part of their experience. 00:21:28 Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, we talked about it and I said, look, you know, On Nature's Daylight, you know, it's very well known. It's been in lots of films. You know, are you sure about this? And We had sort of quite a lot of exchange about it. But ultimately, it had been so fundamental for her. And it made so much sense to her in the film. 00:21:47 Speaker 3: When did you see it for the first time, the film and in that cut? 00:21:51 Speaker 2: I guess during the scoring process, you know, I got bits and pieces. And then, you know, I got the full cut and started working on it. I mean, I think it's a wonderful piece of cinema. 00:22:02 Speaker 1: And your original... music for the close is there over the credits. 00:22:06 Speaker 2: It's on the end credit, yeah. 00:22:08 Speaker 3: And actually it flows seamlessly from one to another. What does collaboration mean to you? I mean, I feel like you were probably slightly resistant to her for the reasons you've explained. 00:22:20 Speaker 2: It's just super interesting. A lot of my work obviously is just me sitting in a room on my own. So I really enjoy the filmmaking experience, which is really a collective puzzle-solving activity. 00:22:33 Speaker 1: There's quite a lot of trust involved, isn't there? 00:22:34 Speaker 2: Yeah, you have to be working with people who you fundamentally trust, not only to make sort of good creative and artistic decisions, but also who you feel will allow you to do your best. And I think that's really important. You know, sometimes you can be in a situation where you're sort of hamstrung or controlled in not a useful way, you know. which wasn't the case at all with Chloe. I mean, I think she's a brilliant collaborator, actually. She's a visionary, I have to say. I mean, an extraordinary filmmaker. 00:23:07 Speaker 3: But do you think after On the Nature of Daylight, having had that used, do you think you might want to sort of stop it being used anymore in TV or film? You probably can't better that one. 00:23:18 Speaker 2: It was an arrival and I thought, well, that's the end of that. You know, we're done now. I mean, even that, I thought, really? You know, but people keep asking. I mean, you know, Nothing I can do about. 00:23:37 Speaker 1: It. 00:23:39 Speaker 3: Can we go back further in time, Max? Because I do want to know where your sensibility and your sensitivity to the world really comes from. I know, of course, you were born in Germany and your family moved to the UK when you were three years old. But I read you talking about the Blue Notebooks, the Iraq album, and saying that you did grow up seeing violence around you and that that being some kind of an undercurrent to your life. And perhaps that is a link to why you are so exercised by violence in war and elsewhere. 00:24:14 Speaker 2:

Yeah. I mean, I suppose I grew up in, I'd say, you know, an unhealthy family one way or another. And there was a lot of violence in the family. And I think for children, that can be obviously traumatizing. And it can make you sensitive to the suffering of others. That in a way is a good outcome of that situation, you know. So I suppose I've always felt that creativity, and especially music, you know, music for me in a way was, you might say, a kind of a refuge, an alternate reality. And it was a place where, you know, I wanted to be. And I think creativity can offer in a way solace. I think we all probably have pieces of music like that in our lives, you know, which either will remind us of something or, you know, just brighten our day. I think the other thing about creative work is it does allow us to experience how another mind sees the world. So in other words, empathy, which obviously is a, super important human quality and probably in slightly short supply these days. 00:25:33 Speaker 3: Violence in the home, but I think also. 00:25:36 Speaker 1: You were bullied at school. 00:25:38 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:25:39 Speaker 3: Being German was probably not great where you were growing up in the 70s. 00:25:43 Speaker 2: Right, exactly. There was a lot of, you know, kids are cruel, right? And yeah, I mean, in many ways, obviously I had... you know, a very privileged start in life, you know, white man, two parents, you know, all of these kinds of things. So in other words, very privileged, but in some ways, yeah, you know, it was a kind of a rough ride as well. 00:26:13 Speaker 3: And actually probably rough, you know, socially, again, the 70s are not an easy time in the UK. 00:26:19 Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's funny now to think back on just how how much society has evolved, actually. It was a very kind of bleak, honestly. If you think of the amount of prejudice there used to be, I mean, it was very commonplace, racism, all kinds of misogyny and just attitudes which nowadays we would find, you know, really unacceptable were just the norm. So, yeah, it was, like I said, I... obviously experienced those things, but at the same time, from a perspective of, you know, in a way also privilege, I would say. 00:26:59 Speaker 3: Although no one knows what any child or adolescent is going through inside and the impact on them. I'm curious about whether you think your musical trajectory would have been the same had your parents stayed in Germany, which is obviously a culture with, you know, incredible music and Bach and Schubert have been among your influences, but this experience of being an outsider in the UK, is it part of what has made you what you are? 00:27:24 Speaker 2: Possibly. I mean, I think the experience of dislocation does, even though it's challenging, of course, for kids to sort of shift cultures because there's that sort of feeling of unfamiliarity and being an alien creature. 00:27:42 Speaker 3: Is that how it really felt, being German in the

UK in the 70s? 00:27:44 Speaker 2: Yeah. I really did. 00:27:46 Speaker 3: I mean, what happens in the playground? Kids keep mentioning the wall? 00:27:49 Speaker 2: Sure. And also the thing is, I also had ginger hair, which is like, so it's a double whammy at the time. I mean, it just sounds pathetic, doesn't it, really? But it was, you know, kids are like that, right? 00:27:58 Speaker 1: Like you said, kids are cruel. 00:28:01 Speaker 2: It's hilarious, really. 00:28:02 Speaker 3: Do you remember the first piece of music that moved you? 00:28:06 Speaker 2: Well, yeah. I mean, it kind of always has, really. But certainly my first musical memory was yeah, of being really transported by this piece of Bach, Bach Double Violin Concerto. We were still living in Germany, so I would have been three, probably less than three. And just hearing this music and being sort of amazed by, well, this is very beautiful, but also having a sense that, you know, there was some grammar organizing these sounds. And I felt like I really wanted to know what that grammar was. 00:28:42 Speaker 1: You think you thought that at the age of three? 00:28:44 Speaker 2: I just felt like there was something. It was really beautiful, but there was a reason why it was beautiful. And I wanted to understand that. 00:28:52 Speaker 3: So you are classically trained as a musician. And melody is important to you. But what's the moment that really leads to the Max Richter sound, which is not a uniform sound, but which generally people do recognize? 00:29:08 Speaker 1: It's a thing. 00:29:09 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:29:09 Speaker 1: I can put it that way. 00:29:11 Speaker 2: Well, so this starts really with, yeah, I mean, I was, you know, as a kid, as a teenager, I was going through the sort of straightforward classical training and piano lessons and then university and conservatoire and all these things. 00:29:23 Speaker 3: Thinking that you would be a professional pianist? 00:29:27 Speaker 2: No, well, not really, no. At the Academy in London, I was studying composition and piano and whenever the piano wasn't going well, I'd say, it's that's fine I'm really a composer and vice versa the composer's going that's fine I'm a pianist so yeah I had a sort of get out of jail card but no I never really thought seriously about that it was always going to be composing one way or another but you know I'd always I would always been interested you know from teen years in electronic music and also I was Roughly the right age for punk, and that came along at a perfect moment for me in my sort of adolescent chaos. So lots of different kinds of musics. I came out of university writing super complicated, very difficult music, because that's what you were supposed to write. 00:30:15 Speaker 1: Difficult to listen to? 00:30:16 Speaker 2: Difficult to listen to. Very cerebral, very kind of high modernist, serious classical music. in the proper way that you're supposed to. And I found that I sort of had lost a reason for doing it in a way. I went to study with Berio in Italy, who was a very eminent, brilliant man. And he basically sort of picked apart my sort of edifice of academic justifications for writing this material and just talked about why I was even doing music, what was it for, really fundamental questions, which I hadn't really asked myself for a long time. And so I came to the realization that really what I wanted to be doing is talking to people. Music is a communicative, narrative form, a way to talk about things. So I wanted to build an intelligible language, something which had a directness and in a way, a plain spokenness and something which dealt on an emotional level with the subject matter. So that meant taking away sort of 90% of what I was doing and just leaving the sort of absolute essentials. And so that's what I did. 00:31:42 Speaker 1: And given that part of what you're doing with While the Flood Rages is about technological change, what worries you the most about that today? Because we can all see AI-generated music, not only emerging but gathering in pace in many ways. And when you see that and how it is progressing, often leaving artists behind, how do you cope with it? 00:32:09 Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I think AI in music is problematic. It's an interesting one because I think musicians and artists have always embraced technology and in a sense sort of furthered it. 00:32:23 Speaker 3: You did at an early age with building your own synthesizer. 00:32:27 Speaker 2: And, you know, the orchestra starts out a certain size in this sort of 18th century, and it just grows all the time. More and more sophistication, more and bigger instruments, different brass instruments, more bigger wind section, the strings change. And that's all driven by the wants and needs of composers to have a bigger palette, a more diverse palette of colors. So in a way, it's natural. I see AI in creative works as... kind of a solution looking for a problem. Within medical research or scientific research or mathematics, all kinds of large systems, then obviously AI systems are extraordinary. You only have to look at the AlphaFold project that DeepMind did. I mean, that's really transformative on a global level. But I don't really think that anyone has ever said, oh, the human race has run out of musical ideas. We need to outsource our creativity to an automated system. I just don't see the utility. Um, there are also, uh, issues to do with how the AI system was built. AI systems were built on data, which is stolen. That's not an exaggeration. It just was. 00:33:43 Speaker 1: Work like yours and many others. 00:33:44 Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, the sum total of musical output of humanity has been hoovered up. Uh, and it's, uh, an extraordinary sort of large-scale transfer of commonly owned material. It's an act of enclosure, essentially, something like that. 00:34:01 Speaker 1: Do you think there is a way to stop it? Would you like, even at this stage, to

put some kind of guardrails around music and say, this is not material that AI should scrape? 00:34:12 Speaker 2: I mean, I think it's too late for that because all of this happened three, four, five years ago. And, okay, in the last couple of years, people have started to talk about it, but, you know, it's too late. What I would say I think should happen at this point is that, okay, so these systems exist. People are using them. I think there should be a royalty mechanism. So if somebody uses an AR system and they make a track which is derived from a source work, an existing work, that composer of the existing work should get a royalty. It's completely possible to do it. And I think that should just be baked in to the AI system. 00:34:55 Speaker 3: But instead, what's really happening right now is that record labels are making deals with AI music companies, but the artists are not. 00:35:04 Speaker 1: Part of that. 00:35:05 Speaker 2: Well, the artists aren't part of this conversation. There have been some attempts to include artists in the conversation, but not on equitable terms. So at the moment, there's a sort of holding pattern going on where no one quite knows what to do. And yeah, a lot of the large sort of stakeholders, DSPs, record labels, these kinds of things are trying to figure out how to make deals which work. But artists aren't part of the conversation fundamentally. 00:35:37 Speaker 1: How does that make you feel? 00:35:40 Speaker 2: Well, in a way, it feels eerily similar to what happened when the legitimate Streaming platforms were set up. First of all, you had the Wild West of Pirate Bay and the early Napster and all of that. 00:35:53 Speaker 1: Napster, yeah, I remember. 00:35:54 Speaker 2: And then you got the advent of Spotify and Apple Music and all of these things. And again, the majors, the labels, made deals with the DSPs, essentially without any input from the artists. And a similar thing is happening right now. 00:36:11 Speaker 1: And what's at stake if that mechanism isn't found and implemented right now before it's too late? What happens to, not to you because you're successful enough, but what happens to the next Max Richter? 00:36:22 Speaker 2: That is really the big thing. And that because you've got a diluting of the royalty pool with, and without exaggeration, millions of AI generated tracks are being uploaded to the DSPs. You know, the overall royalty pool is being diluted so that human artists aren't able to participate as much as they formerly could. So for somebody trying to find their way and to make their way from start now is extraordinarily difficult. And really what it means is that in the future, it's very likely that the only people who can afford to make music, be artists, are people with other incomes, people who have got family backing. It's going to be very difficult for somebody without resources to do this stuff. 00:37:19 Speaker 1: So composing, making music will be a hobby? 00:37:22 Speaker 2: Well, it'll be a hobby or it'll be something which rich people can do. 00:37:27 Speaker 1: Which is very bleak. 00:37:28 Speaker 3: I mean, the other thing is, what kind of music do we get from those millions of AI-generated tracks. 00:37:35 Speaker 2: Yeah, that is in a way one issue is that we're getting a sort of, because AI music generally, these systems are predictive, aren't they? And they're based only on existing data. So you're sort of putting existing works into a blender and then taking them out in the combination requested. I mean, people call it slop. It tends to be very undistinguished and it sort of meanders around and mimics existing things. In other words, it's going to have a sort of degrading effect on taste. You know, people will get used to it. People won't, in a way, they won't mind it. They'll think it's okay, which I think is a problem in itself. You know, we'll get used to this kind of level of non-innovation, non-imagination. And it does kind of sound like music, kind of, but it isn't really in a meaningful sense. 00:38:28 Speaker 1: We'll be surrounded by the kind of hotel... Lobby type music. 00:38:32 Speaker 2: In a way, yeah. 00:38:34 Speaker 1: Max, you know, this podcast comes from Bloomberg Weekend. So I would love to ask you about that particular kind of space in the week. I know you live and work in Oxfordshire, in the countryside you built, what looks like an amazing production facility that others use as well as you and your partner. So when all those others are not there at the weekend, what is the space like? What do you immerse yourself in? 00:38:59 Speaker 2: It's very quiet times at the weekend because we do, I mean, both Yulia and I, we have lively sort of studio practices, you know. Obviously, I've got musicians coming and going a lot and collaborators. Yulia, she's a visual artist. So we're very busy during the week. You know, it's very lively sort of atmosphere. And the weekends are sort of absolute pause. It's very quiet. We're out in the woods. We have dogs and the kids are around and we just take it very easy. Do you work? 00:39:33 Speaker 1: Do you go into the studio and compose? 00:39:35 Speaker 2: At the weekend? 00:39:36 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:39:36 Speaker 2: No. No, absolutely not. It's interesting because when I was, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 years ago, I basically worked all the time. I was probably doing 80 or 110. hour weeks for about 15 years, just because that's what it takes. But nowadays I'm very much sort of nine to five. 00:39:58 Speaker 1: You've earned your weekend. 00:39:59 Speaker 2: I do nine to five and I have weekends. 00:40:01 Speaker 1: Are you listening to music at the weekend? 00:40:03 Speaker 2: Oh, sure. Yeah. There's often records playing. Yeah. I mean, I'm playing music all the time, honestly. 00:40:09 Speaker 3: Although I know you start the day with meditation and I found myself wondering if you could actually clear your head of music, given that it's your You know, it's your life's work. 00:40:20 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:40:20 Speaker 1: It's been everything. 00:40:22 Speaker 2: Most of the time I've got some little tune going around in my head. So, I mean, it's not really something I can really switch off and nor do I want to. I mean, I really like music. 00:40:33 Speaker 3: And meanwhile, this pace of change in our world carries on. 00:40:36 Speaker 1: It does. Do you watch the news, listen to the news? 00:40:39 Speaker 2: Honestly, I've put myself on a news diet. I now listen to the news in the morning, first thing, and then that's it. because otherwise I find it a bit much, honestly. Sort of 24-hour news is hard on the soul. No podcasts? Sometimes. 00:41:00 Speaker 1: Will you listen to this? 00:41:01 Speaker 2: I will listen to this, of course I will. 00:41:05 Speaker 1: Max Richter, thank you so much. 00:41:07 Speaker 2: Thank you. 00:41:08 Speaker 1: You really have given me a lot to think about before and during this conversation. 00:41:12 Speaker 2: Brilliant, thank you. 00:41:25 Speaker 1: And that's where we left it. As I mentioned, I did listen to a lot of Max Richter's music to prepare for this conversation. And if you want to see a playlist of my favorite tracks, head to my Instagram at Michelle Hussein. Jessica Beck and Chris Martlew are the show's producers. The video, because you can watch all these conversations in full, is produced and edited by Andy Hayward. Guest booking is by Elan Bird. Social media by John Horsfall. Production assistance from Indira Ray. Our perky music, as Max called it, is by Bart Warshaw. And the executive producer is Louisa Lewis. For this episode, John Canfield was running the studio. And at Bloomberg Weekend, our thanks to Brendan Francis Newnham and our executive editor, Catherine Bell. Until the next time, goodbye.