Chelsea Spear
The music of Radiohead made for an elegant, prescient soundtrack to the early 2000s. Their ambivalent guitar heroics and discordant arrangements rhymed with the alienation many experienced during the George W. Bush era. Jonny Greenwood—the classically trained multi-instrumentalist who plays lead guitar for Radiohead and arranges their songs—brought out the dystopian mood in the band’s songs with his ability to subvert the accepted rules of music theory and build a sense of dread through simple but unexpected techniques.
In the mid-2000s, Greenwood found an outlet for this skill when director P. T. Anderson hired him to write the score for There Will Be Blood. “My reaction when Paul asked me was excitement,” Greenwood told Terry Gross in a recent interview. “I thought, ‘This is going to be a bit like being in a band with somebody—except I’m in a band with Paul and the people who are making this film.'” The eerie music he wrote for the film became an influential score for up-and-coming composers, and in the intervening years Greenwood has had the opportunity to join many other bands of filmmakers. In 2021, three films he scored—Licorice Pizza, The Power of the Dog, and Spencer—were among the most acclaimed films of the year.
Jane Campion’s minimalist western The Power of the Dog netted Greenwood his second Oscar nomination for Best Original Score. The slow-moving sense of dread that propels the film was a natural fit for the composer, and his score blends many hallmarks of his composition—like his richly melodic themes and keening string parts that pull into an atonal drone—with some new tools he learned for this project. Phil, the abusive cowboy antagonist, plays the banjo on-camera throughout the film, which Greenwood took as a challenge. “The first plan I talked Jane into was this pompous crusade to find out why the banjo hasn’t really been used in contemporary classical music (aside from a few George Crumb things),” he told Variety. “We found out pretty quickly why it hasn’t been done before.”
Instead of incorporating a banjo into his score, Greenwood found a new way to play the cello. “I learned to play my cello like a banjo (an instrument I can play a little) with the same sort of fingerpicking technique. Took a while to figure out, and I had to cover my cello with tape to mark the pitches, but Jane really liked the effect, and it’s used a lot in this film.” The picking pattern he wrote for the cello gives the score a momentum that complements both the wide shots of cattle and livestock that open the film and the discomfort found inside the Burbank family ranch.
If Power of the Dog nudged Greenwood out of his comfort zone, Spencer allows him to play to—and expand upon—his strengths. The score puts his extensive knowledge of classical music composers to good use, in part by knowing the expectations an audience has for a film about the royal family. “There’s lots of baggage attached to classical music in films about the royals,” he observed in an interview with the NME. “You either use actual Handel or pastiche Handel.”
True to form, Greenwood takes a more subversive approach. The score for Spencer teeters between the prim-sounding music viewers would associate with the Royal Family and woozy horn motifs he described as “free jazz”. In the music cue heard as she arrives at Sandringham house for Christmas, a violin plays a mournful melody that’s slowly overtaken by a trumpet playing a woozy descant.
In other scenes, Greenwood is able to lull viewers into a false sense of security, only to play with their expectations. In the crucial Christmas Eve dinner scene, he opens with a string quartet playing a mournful piece of music. As Diana begins clawing at and eating her pearl necklace, the music begins to unravel—each of the instruments sounds like they’re playing the same piece at different intervals, and the rhythm takes on a churning quality that matches Diana’s instability and relapse into bulimia.
Both Spencer and The Power of the Dog are the first collaborations between Greenwood and the films’ respective directors, Pablo Larrain and Jane Campion. For Licorice Pizza, the third score he composed this year, Greenwood reunited with his frequent collaborator P.T. Anderson for a short love theme that appears in two crucial scenes of the film.
Anderson recreates the 1970s so painstakingly throughout Licorice Pizza that the quiet moment after Gary and Alana’s first date almost feels like it takes place out of time. Nothing in the frame tells us we’re in 1973 Encino, and the unbroken two-shot allows viewers to take a breath and hang out with the characters. Like the rest of the film, the reverb-kissed harp piece that plays under this scene has a warm, nostalgic quality that sounds like a subtle version of the music that plays under other Hollywood meet-cutes. Greenwood subtly undercuts the sweetness of the melody with a piercing violin in the background, which plays into Alana’s skepticism towards Gary’s attempts to wear her down into dating him. The music also appears in a later scene, when the characters reunite, and the faster editing and the characters’ appearance in single shots underscores the ways in which they’ve grown since the start of the film.
Greenwood’s 2021 scores come at a pivotal time for Radiohead, who recently reissued their landmark albums Kid A and Amnesia; Greenwood also formed a band called The Smile with drummer Tom Skinner and Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke. As Radiohead has looked back on their turbulent body of work, it’s interesting to see how Greenwood has stepped out and looked up and around, finding the odd harmonies and prickly rhythms in other artists’ stories. 
