Max Richter (b. 1966)
On the Nature of Daylight (6:14)
If you've attended many orchestra concerts, you've probably experienced musical déjà-vu: "I've heard this somewhere before, right?" Thanks to Looney Toons, car commercials, and just about any indie film house, classical masterworks have been recycled time and time again decades and centuries after their premiere (some would say a little too much). Even if you've never seen a Wagner opera in your life, there is little doubt you could recognize Ride of the Valkeries.
Since the very earliest days of film making, movie music has been a thriving economy. Today, the most-known living composers work closely with filmmakers to create original orchestral scores for epic movies. Less common is the reverse: films whose scenes are directly influenced by an existing piece of contemporary music.
Max Richter's On the Nature of Daylight first appeared on the composer's 2004 album The Blue Notebooks, written in protest of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Record sales were so low at the time Richter and his family were forced to leave their English home. Now, the cinematic work has appeared in films such as Arrival (2016), Stranger than Fiction (2006), Shutter Island (2010), Disconnect (2012), Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2012), The Face of an Angel (2014), The Innocents (2016), and Togo (2019). This doesn't include the many television credits for this one six-minute work or the 2018 music video starring Elisabeth Moss.
On the Nature of Daylight has been used in film and television to provoke an almost ethereal calm, despite the composer calling the entire project a meditation on war and violence. The first track of The Blue Notebooks includes narration from Franz Kafka's The Blue Octavo Notebooks:
“Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.”
Program notes by Laken Emerson