“On The Nature Of Daylight”: My Favorite Song Without Words
Max Richter’s liminal masterpiece
Paramount Pictures
For most of my younger life, it was the vocalist that defined the song. With a saxophone-playing, band-leading father, it was understandable that he felt differently. The disagreement was an internecine sore point in our family during my more juvenile years.
“Does this song have… words?” I’d ask when my dad tried to turn me onto his sophisticated, dad-music. And he’d reply with some profound truism disguised as cheesy nonsense about how “many ideas can be expressed without words.”
“Yeah right,” I’d think. “Pshh,” I’d say aloud brashly. But as I’ve grown older, the vocals of a song have grown to mean less and less. Lyrics will always be one of the first things I turn toward in those songs with vocalists, but in almost every case it’s the accompaniment that helps to carry those words to such stunning and melodious vistas. My favorite songs wouldn’t be my favorite songs without the backup musicians that color every track.
And now as an adult, I’d be remiss to deny that many of my favorite songs don’t contain a single word. Slowly but surely I’ve come around to that righteous world view that ideas can burgeon well beyond the confines of a lyrics sheet. It doesn’t require a vocalist to evoke an idea. In fact, the expression that emerges in the absence of words is sometimes more interesting than what even the most pointed line on the page will impart.
Sometimes the words within a song are engineered with specific purpose. Like a story, there’s an end goal, body, and exposition. Some of these stories are non-fiction, and aim only to exude the concrete. But others are floaty, ethereal, and abstract. They traffic in vignettes. They’re as unmoored and open to interpretation as free form poetry.
But songs without words exist in a liminal space. In the most transcendent cases, interpretation is almost a moot point. They deliver something new and different to each listener by their very design. No two minds will hear or animate the song in the same way. The images they conjure will be as unique as our DNA.
Of course, every song is its own experience. Just because a song contains lyrics doesn’t mean it will be forever confined to that same, manufactured meaning. But few songs have ever conjured something for me an array of ideas so utterly beyond expression as Max Richter’s On The Nature Of Daylight. Part of this, though, hinges on the initial context in which I heard it.
Opening and closing the movie Arrival, it’s a song that speaks to the incomprehensible nature of time with its hauntingly simple melody. It addresses the idea that we as humans truly can’t perceive time for what it is, and that each moment continues on alongside each other — even as we stay mired in this strange, strange present moment.
Paramount Pictures | Embassy Music Corp.
It’s a song that evokes my most profound spiritual experiences and reminds me of this impossibly complicated web we’re all in. It speaks to the grandeur, mystery, and profundity of our world in its simple, floating melody. The song is the backdrop to a slide reel of a beautifully pained life rolling by. It serves as a reminder of each subtle, mesmerizing, and melancholic moment that continues on concurrently — in ways that defy our very eyes.
It says to me that the moments of our lives spent skipping through lilies and molding clay and looking up at trees on brisk fall days aren’t as gone as we fear. It’s a song that explores an almost incomprehensible idea with an opaquened sort of perfection. It soars in its pointed ambiguity and imparts hope, fear, grief, catharsis, motion, inertia, yearning, love, nostalgia, and cosmic humility all in the very same melody.
In addition to a role in the movie that helps it to stick its abstrusely alluring landing, HBO’s The Last of Us found an employment for the song that practically parallels Arrival’s in its poignancy. And like the cinematic placement of most music, the song was instilled for me with an added layer of meaning by this thoughtful new appearance.
Max Richter has said that the song was written in response to the Iraq War and the tragic loss of life that comes with conflict. But the beauty of these songs without words is that the notes are given an impossibly free reign to fall into whatever meaning the listener can conceive. It can be a song about love, war, poverty, oppression, optimism, agony, angst, or the overwhelming combination of each and every one. No one is wrong for hearing what they hear.
On The Nature of Daylight is a masterful blend of minimalism and emotive nuance that’s characterized by its simple, driven structure. The piece predominantly features string instruments, including violins, violas, cellos, and a double bass, which together create a sound that’s rich and layered while raw and simplistic. The composition begins with a solitary, violin melody that builds and gently crescendoes as accompanying strings join in.
This layering technique is a hallmark of Richter’s approach, but in my eyes there’s no song of his that better encapsulates this sort of emotional and musical coalescence than On The Nature Of Daylight. The rhythm of the piece is locked in at a deliberated, vibrato-laden legato. The slow tempo emphasizes each note throughout its chord progression. The ebb and flow of emotion takes listeners on a journey that reminds them of the springboard of ideation that opens in lieu of words and the visceral passion that can be embedded within even the simplest of melodies.
Embassy Music Corp.