pepdenl everhardt padmar
Earlie Schwoyer
Ironic, that a piece seemingly about daylight should appear on a day so devoid of its presence. Weirder still that the mood conjured up by the day matches so well with Richter's work. This is because "On" is the keyword in the title, not "Daylight."
Richter's music is that of experience, similar to that of Frederick Delius, where investigation of the fleeting moment takes precedent over harmonic or motivic invention. Most classical works that we are familiar with contain a central idea that is varied, transformed, and developed to convey a sense of narrative development. Like a story, these works often play with our expectations and revolve around moments of tension and release.
Richter often creates works that are more poetic than traditionally narrative. When writing in a poetic style, he often takes a single moment and expands it for us to explore. In On the Nature of Daylight, he creates a palindrome by gradually adding layer upon layer over that foundational harmonic progression, moving toward a single climax before gradually dissolving away each of those layers until we arrive where we started.
This type of monotony of phrase, of music that circles around the same set of harmonies, exists within time instead of moving through it. He opens up this singular expression to the listener rather than guiding them through a narrative story. The music is that of adjectives rather than verbs.
The effect is one of total immersion within sound and within oneself. The predictability of the harmonic structure allows one to settle into the music instead of moving with it. It opens up space for reflection upon a single moment.
On the Nature of Daylight first appeared in Richter's album The Blue Notebooks (Idagio, Spotify), an album produced in response to the outbreak of war in Iraq in 2003. It appears again in Richter's later album Exiles (Idagio, Spotify) which contains other works of activism with the central piece, Exiles, being a response to the Syrian refugee crisis, a work that I highlighted earlier this year as a way of reflecting upon the current crisis of Ukrainian refugees being forced out of their homes.
All of these pieces deal with putting the listener in a place of inner reflection. The repetition allows our minds to delve within ourselves through the space created by the emotional landscape of the work. The music becomes whatever it is we need at that moment.
On the Nature of Daylight produces within me the same powerful effect I feel when standing among nature, observing something as simple as a blade of grass or as magnificent as an incredible tree, all of which are moments that allow me to transcend my current set of worries and obligations to enter into a higher realm where the truly important things lie.
In Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes that we all need the "tonic of Wildness" and for him going into nature was a "solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world" around him [1]. Maria Popova writes that we go into the wilderness, like churches or concert halls, to be "transfigured, recomposed, exalted and humbled. . .enlarged into something larger. We visit because there we undergo some essential self-composition in the poetry of existence. . ." [2].
c01484d022