There Will be Wood

Up until recently I only thought of Jonny Greenwood as 'that awesome guitarist from Radiohead'. Consequently I chiefly associated him with bizarre, dissonant but very awesome guitar riffs and tones. When I had heard that he had composed the score to the film adaptation of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood, I thought that it would be similar to the prevalence of Radiohead's music in Linklater's A Scanner Darkly (ethereal, esoteric sort of electronica).

Imagine my surprise, then, when I watched a movie with some of the most jarring and emotionally wrought classically-based string compositions I have ever heard.

For those who are acquainted with Haruki Murakami's novel and the works of Radiohead, it actually isn't overly surprising from a thematic point of view. Norwegian Wood deals with a young and profound tragedy that pervades the existence of the novel's protagonist, Watanabe Toru. The subsequent sense of (almost) hopeless depression and discord in Watanabe's life is not an uncommon theme in Radiohead's music.

Hence, it's not entirely unexpected that Jonny Greenwood should compose a score to reflect the same set of emotions.  Sure, his compositions are strongly string based, but it's not such a stretch, given previous demonstration of his musical finesse in Radiohead, that he would be capable of composing pieces for a string orchestra. Not to say that the music was by any means simple - it was powerfully moving. Without it, scenes in Anh Hung's faithful film adaptation would be lacking in a lot of emotional power.

The real shock came when I sat down with a friend and watched Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 film, There Will Be Blood. The film portrays the rise of a successful Oil Baron (played by Daniel Day Lewis) and his descent into madness as he lusts after money and power.

The key to understanding this character and the movie, though, especially within the early scenes of this film, is Jonny Greenwood's score.

The beginning scenes of this film could rather be innocently confused with 'just' another film portraying the somewhat repulsive nature of big corporations. The dissonant and darkly foreboding nature of Greenwood's score, however, do an amazingly effective job of conveying how deeply disturbed the events unfolding in the film are.

Greenwood's composition is, in a word, wrong. The broken rhythms, the string sections not agreeing with each other, the dissonance and sparseness of the music - they all alert you to the fact that something is very very wrong. Daniel Day Lewis's character is so good at acting like he's honest that without the music, you would believe that he was a good man. Such is the power of the score, however, that you can't shake the feeling that something deeply, deeply wrong is happening.

This sense of dissonance pervades the entire film and eventually builds to the point where what is happening on screen finally fulfills the promise put forward by Greenwood's haunting score. The effect is powerfully disturbing.

The music in this movie is beautiful, moving and complex. Most of all, it comes from a completely different direction to  Radiohead's Punk-Rock based roots.

There Will Be Blood went on to be nominated for eight Academy Awards. Best Original Score was not one of them.

The reason cited for Greenwood's disqualification was that his work for There Will Be Blood did not contain a large enough ratio of music developed specifically for the film to music taken from elsewhere. This was in no small part due to Greenwood adopting many of the themes from his score directly from a previous string composition of his, Popcorn Superhet Reciever - a piece he composed whilst the BBC Concert Orchestra's 'composer-in-residence'

When Thom Yorke did work independent of Radiohead, he made The Eraser, a mainly electronic album that reflected a lot of where Radiohead were going anyway. When Jonny Greenwood went solo, he became the BBC Concert Orchestra's 'Composer-in-residence', composed three piano and symphony based pieces and wrote the score to two of the best movies I've seen in recent years.

I was shocked by how different this music was from what I expected when I thought 'Jonny Greenwood' and I am in awe of precisely how much of a talented musician this man must be.

The world needs more creative forces like this one.

And yes, I am well aware that the title of this post sounds somewhat like the title to a porno.