The first hint that Jonny Greenwood might make a gifted composer came in 1997, when, bored with the syrupy, provincial strings that dominated the tail-end of Britpop, he channeled Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki for the arrangement on OK Computer's "Climbing Up The Walls". Essentially a wall of quarter notes played against each other, that noisy squall stood out in dramatic opposition to the "Bittersweet Symphony"s of the world. Where the traditional rock approach had always been to use strings to amplify melody and opulence, Greenwood was using them to create discord and ambience; in other words, he was playing orchestras like he played his guitar.
While his interest in what he's since referred to in interviews as a "wrong" string sound manifested in later Radiohead highlights like "How to Disappear Completely" and "Pyramid Song", his compositional talents didn't become readily apparent until his imaginative score for 2003's sweeping documentary Bodysong. A lush mixture of strings, pianos, percussions, electronics, and otherwise unrecognizable textures, *Bodysong'*s sprawling fourteen tracks allowed Greenwood to indulge in a level of experimentation and free-jazz complexity that wouldn't have otherwise fit on a Radiohead record.
Since then, Greenwood's graduation to mainstream film work has been pretty much inevitable, but even still, he'd probably be the first to admit that a Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love) project represents a pretty plum debut. Regardless of how you feel about Anderson as a director, few of his contemporaries manage to weave original music into the fabric of their films quite as devotedly. To score an Anderson project is to have a starring role in it; that this particular film-- a loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair's Oil!-- is set in a desolate California town circa 1920 only makes the task that much bigger.
After his initial contact with Anderson, Greenwood apparently wrote hours and hours of music for the film; in the end, the duo pared the score back to a very tidy 33 minutes, a small portion of which was lifted from Greenwood’s 2005 BBC-commissioned suite Popcorn Superhet Receiver. Nonetheless, this is all new ground for Greenwood. If the fidgety Bodysong was proof that he isn't ever likely to be short of ideas, There Will Be Blood feels tighter, more disciplined, and lonelier than anything he's done before.
Piano, percussion, and Greenwood's beloved Ondes-Martenot all feature, but it's the strings that take center stage here. While Greenwood has always been vocal about the originators and inspirations behind a lot of his techniques (Penderecki, Gorecki, and Messiaen come up often), There Will Be Blood's string arrangements nonetheless sound vanguard and exploratory in the context of Hollywood film scores. From the goosebump-inducing glissandos on opener "Wide Open Spaces" to the spiralling staccatos on "Future Markets" to the creeping dissonance in "Henry Plainview" (there's that "wrong" sound again), Greenwood's alien, experimental sensibilities lurk around each corner.
