Thankfully, Max Richter is no longer an obscure musician, but the fact remains, the overuse of “On the Nature of Daylight” has become grating.
#The walking dead theme song on violin full
Hans Zimmer putting on a performance that’s half recital/half gig, and totally full of bangers. The album was a critical success, but certainly not a commercial one: Richter has even gone on record saying that he and his family were forced to leave their home due to poor album sales ( ). “On the Nature of Daylight” is the second track off of Richter’s 2004 album The Blue Notebooks, which the composer produced in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a work of protest art. But whereas Zimmer’s most famous music comes from the scores of popular multi-film franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean or The Dark Knight trilogy, Richter’s song wasn’t written for film at all, making its popularity even more startling. Now, Hans Zimmer performed at 2017’s Coachella, so in terms of high art mediums infiltrating pop culture spaces, stranger things have happened. I ask you, reader, how many pieces of classical music get their own music video? Perhaps most tellingly of all, a music video for the song starring Elisabeth Moss was released in 2018. In terms of television, the track also plays at the end of an episode of Hulu’s Castle Rock titled “The Queen”, and was used very recently in the 35th anniversary episode of Eastenders. “On the Nature of Daylight” also features in such films as Stranger than Fiction (2006), Shutter Island (2010), Disconnect (2012), the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2012), The Face of an Angel (2014), The Innocents (2016), and Togo (2019). Most everyone knew the piece from its use as sonic bookends in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, but chances are most of us have heard it a number of times. Still, when the soft postminimalist melody of “On the Nature of Daylight” began to swell in the air, I was surprised to see that the eyes of six members of my eight-person team lit up in recognition– three of them knew Richter’s work by name. As expected, the round featured some well-known scores and a few pop songs, which were for the most part pretty easily identified, if not named.
#The walking dead theme song on violin movie
Proving the point, at a pub quiz I attended last September there was a film music themed round where we had to say which movie certain music belonged to bonus points were awarded if you could name the song itself. It’s nearly unheard of and yet, that’s exactly the sort of hold Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” seems to have on modern film and television.
What does constitute a unique phenomenon in film music history is the existence of a contemporary piece of classical music exerting such ubiquitous influence over the industry. The callous bombast of the music juxtaposed with the mundane silence of the unsuspecting village creates a sickening dissonance that exemplifies the power of music to work with (and against) visuals to communicate theme. Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” originally written for an opera about epic norse mythology, is repurposed in Apocalypse Now to score a helicopter attack on a north Vietnamese village. As far as classical pieces go, loads of films capitalize off of audiences’ familiarity with Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” (most famously in Apocalypse Now) or Luigi Boccherini’s “Minuet” (usually used to make fun of classical music) But, these pieces are decades if not hundreds of years older than the cinematic medium itself and, like the pop songs, they already have distinct reputations. In fact, songs like Lynard Skynard’s “Sweet Home Alabama”, Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine”, and James Brown’s “I Feel Good” frequently find themselves on lists of the most overused songs in film. Now, it’s not unusual for certain inspired songs to earn places on a variety of movie soundtracks. (I’m betting that you’ll recognize it, but in case the name of the piece hasn’t rang any bells, go ahead and give it a listen here while you read on. One of my fecund favorites, Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight”, is dangerously close to becoming trite in this way, and it is lazy filmmaking that’s to blame.
But, if you dilute the potency of a precious song through overuse, that is overuse without innovation, good songs get worn out. Our favorite songs are fecund pleasures, increasing in affectivity and growing with us over time, like a reliable friendship.
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