On the Nature of Daylight

The piece is scored for two violins, viola and two cellos in B-flat minor, built on a ground bass: the lower strings begin, and the violins enter above them with an elegiac melody. Wikipedia describes its shape as palindromic. On the original recording, made with the quintet at Eastcote, Richter played the bass part from a sampler while the strings performed. The album's closing track, Written on the Sky, returns to it on its own.

Richter has tied the album to the looming Iraq war and to his own experience. Speaking about the piece in 2016, he described the imagined place children retreat to, an alternate reality of safety, quiet and sanity, and called the music so personal.

Other recordings

An Orchestral Version by the Max Richter Orchestra under Lorenz Dangel, recorded at Scoring Stage Babelsberg in 2010, appeared on a 2016 StudioRichter 12-inch beside the original and then on the 2018 15 Years Edition. A new string recording, Entropy, was made at Air Studios in January 2018, and the Baltic Sea Philharmonic under Kristjan Järvi recorded it again for Exiles in 2021. For Shutter Island, Robbie Robertson laid Dinah Washington's This Bitter Earth over the original strings. The single has gone Silver in Britain.

On screen and live

Its screen life began with Stranger than Fiction in 2006 and runs through Shutter Island, Arrival, The Handmaid's Tale and The Last of Us to Hamnet in 2025. Richter scored Hamnet's ending in the normal way and expected his piece to be replaced, but Chloé Zhao rewrote the finale around it after Jessie Buckley sent it to her. The AV Club has argued that the piece has become a cliché, and that Hamnet earns it.

setlist.fm logs it 46 times, from the Klara Festival in Brussels on 22 September 2005 onward, level with The Blue Notebooks as his most played piece; most of them in 2024 and 2025. He played it for an NPR Tiny Desk Concert in 2020 with members of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble.

Neither upload in the hypersongs web is the 2004 album recording. One is the official 2018 short film starring Elisabeth Moss, directed by George Belfield; the other is the solo Piano Version, released as a single in November 2024 and added to the 20 Year Edition of The Blue Notebooks.