Listen to the article's playlist as you read:
As the earth's axial tilt reaches its farthest point from the sun on December 21st, we in the northern hemisphere will experience the shortest day and longest night of the year, otherwise known as the winter solstice. It’s a magical moment for many—or can be; an ideal opportunity to reflect on the year gone by as well as to look forward towards the year ahead and celebrate the slow return of the light into our lives.
Music has long associations with both the winter season and the night of course—hence the existence of nocturnes, those specific compositions created to conjure up feelings of introspection, calm, mystery, and solitude. But rather than create a playlist full of Chopin and Debussy, we have opted to make our own special ode with a selection of music from contemporary composers whose works also embrace, in their own unique ways, the theme in question.
And what better place to begin than with Max Richter's Sleep—his eight-hour long opus that mirrors the natural sleep cycle? We’ve chosen to begin this playlist with the gently unfurling “Dream O (til break of day)”, with its subtle ripples of seasonal melancholy, and allowing it to flow into the peaceful aura of Dustin O'Halloran’s “An Ending, a beginning” and Jóhann Jóhannsson’s slow-moving but highly evocative “Good Night, Day,” both of which tracks have perfect titles as well as relevant moods.
From Hildur Guðnadóttir, we have added the haunting “Fólk Fær Andlit” from her striking Chernobyl TV soundtrack, whose focus on multi-layered choral voices conjures up bewitching feelings of darkness and wonder, and fellow Icelander Ólafur Arnalds is represented by his stirringly poignant “Only The Winds,” which matches swelling strings and piano to a loping electronic beat. Ludovico Einaudi’s minimalistic “Fly”, used to great effect on 2011’s The Intouchables, completes this brief excursion into nocturnal disquiet.
As the playlist proceeds, listeners will come across Philip Glass’s Glassworks: Opening, which returns us to a sense of minimalist tranquillity, continued in the dream-like optimism of Nils Frahm’s “Ambre”—a track taken from his aptly-titled album Wintermusik—and via Francesco Tristano’s captivating “Circle Song”. Anne-Sophie Mutter and Lambert Orkis’ graceful piano-and-violin lament Meditation from Thaïs ushers in a glorious shiver of melancholy that’s continued yet quietened by A Winged Victory for the Sullen’s hushed, ambient-influenced “Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears”.
To bring the session to an end, we have chosen Brian Eno’s ethereal “An Ending (Ascent),” Stephan Micus’s transcendental “Night”, and have closed with another of Richter’s Sleep compositions, “Cumulonimbus Pt 2”—one of the longer songs on the album, it serves perfectly as a winter solstice lullaby.
Words by Paul Sullivan
