{"id":18057,"date":"2022-03-22T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-22T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=18057"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:13:00","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:13:00","slug":"jonny-greenwoods-excellent-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/jonny-greenwoods-excellent-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonny Greenwood’s Excellent Year"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u2014the classically trained multi-instrumentalist who plays lead guitar for Radiohead and arranges their songs\u2014brought out the dystopian mood in the band\u2019s songs with his ability to subvert the accepted rules of music theory and build a sense of dread through simple but unexpected techniques. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/em> “My reaction when Paul asked me was excitement,” Greenwood told Terry Gross in a recent interview<\/a>. “I thought, ‘This is going to be a bit like being in a band with somebody\u2014except 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\u2014Licorice Pizza<\/em>, The Power of the Dog, <\/em>and Spencer<\/em>\u2014were among the most acclaimed films of the year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jane Campion\u2019s minimalist western The Power of the Dog<\/em> 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\u2014like his richly melodic themes and keening string parts that pull into an atonal drone\u2014with 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. \u201cThe first plan I talked Jane into was this pompous crusade to find out why the banjo hasn\u2019t really been used in contemporary classical music (aside from a few George Crumb things),\u201d he told Variety<\/em><\/a>. \u201cWe found out pretty quickly why it hasn\u2019t been done before.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of incorporating a banjo into his score, Greenwood found a new way to play the cello. \u201cI 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\u2019s used a lot in this film.\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If Power of the Dog<\/em> nudged Greenwood out of his comfort zone, Spencer<\/em> allows him to play to\u2014and expand upon\u2014his 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. \u201cThere\u2019s lots of baggage attached to classical music in films about the royals,\u201d he observed in an interview with the NME<\/em><\/a>. \u201cYou either use actual Handel or pastiche Handel.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

True to form, Greenwood takes a more subversive approach. The score for Spencer<\/em> teeters between the prim-sounding music viewers would associate with the Royal Family and woozy horn motifs he described as \u201cfree jazz\u201d. In the music cue heard as she arrives at Sandringham house for Christmas, a violin plays a mournful melody that\u2019s slowly overtaken by a trumpet playing a woozy descant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014each of the instruments sounds like they\u2019re playing the same piece at different intervals, and the rhythm takes on a churning quality that matches Diana\u2019s instability and relapse into bulimia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both Spencer<\/em> and The Power of the Dog<\/em> are the first collaborations between Greenwood and the films\u2019 respective directors, Pablo Larrain and Jane Campion. For Licorice Pizza<\/em>, 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anderson recreates the 1970s so painstakingly throughout Licorice Pizza<\/em> that the quiet moment after Gary and Alana\u2019s first date almost feels like it takes place out of time. Nothing in the frame tells us we\u2019re 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\u2019s skepticism towards Gary\u2019s 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\u2019 appearance in single shots underscores the ways in which they\u2019ve grown since the start of the film. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Greenwood\u2019s 2021 scores come at a pivotal time for Radiohead, who recently reissued their landmark albums Kid A<\/em> and Amnesia<\/em>; 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\u2019s interesting to see how Greenwood has stepped out and looked up and around, finding the odd harmonies and prickly rhythms in other artists\u2019 stories.\u00a0\"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Oscar-nominated former Radiohead guitarist and arranger’s three 2021 film scores highlight his vast skill set and endless inventiveness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":607,"featured_media":18059,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[162],"class_list":["post-18057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/607"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18057"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22020,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18057\/revisions\/22020"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}