Soundtracks · Explainer ·
Jonny Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood is built from new writing, his own older pieces, Brahms and Pärt, which is why the Academy ruled it ineligible for Best Original Score in 2008.
The bar below shows how the roughly 81 minutes of music break down, and the piece ends with how to listen to it.
Score: Jonny Greenwood · Film: Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007, 158 min · album 2007, about 33 min
In January 2008 the Academy ruled that the score for There Will Be Blood could not compete for Best Original Score. The rule it cited excludes work "diluted by the use of tracked themes or other pre-existing music". It is the most useful fact about the score, because it tells you how the music is built: not as one clean piece written for the film, but as a collage of Jonny Greenwood's new writing, his older pieces and two other composers.
Greenwood is the lead guitarist of Radiohead, and he grew up studying the viola. He has named Ligeti, Messiaen, Penderecki and Paul Lansky as influences. The score sounds like the work of someone who prefers a string section to a rock band: sustained, scraping, unsettled.
scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or other pre-existing music
Academy rule, as reported by Daily Variety and quoted by Jim Emerson, RogerEbert.com
Reports at the time put the original music at roughly 35 minutes, against roughly 46 minutes of existing work. That existing work includes about 15 minutes of Greenwood's own Popcorn Superhet Receiver, written in 2006 for string orchestra, plus the third movement of Brahms's Violin Concerto in D and music by Arvo Pärt (Fratres is named in coverage of the live performances). Try the bar below.
The sound is orchestral and string-led. The earlier Greenwood pieces reused here include smear, written for two ondes Martenot and ensemble; the ondes Martenot is an early electronic instrument whose sound glides between pitches. The result is a score that sounds period-adjacent without being period pastiche. Emerson, writing in 2012, said it "sounds like it could have been heard in the period" while mixing in other music. Reviewers of the album have been warmer than the Academy: the soundtrack was nominated for a Grammy, and the album sits at 8.1 out of 10 on Pitchfork.
The score is also deliberately unsettling. Emerson describes it as intrusive and dissonant, and notes that it carries over into scenes that have nothing to do with each other. Whether that is a flaw or the point is the argument people have about this score.
Start with the album, then go to the sources: Greenwood's Popcorn Superhet Receiver in full, then Pärt's Fratres, then the Brahms. You will hear what the film took from each. The London Contemporary Orchestra recorded the score, and in September 2018 the New York Philharmonic played it live to a screening of the film, conducted by Hugh Brunt.
The score rewards good headphones: the low strings sit under everything and the high clusters are easy to flatten on small speakers. Closed-back headphones help in a noisy room.
The album was released on Nonesuch in December 2007. Availability on streaming services and on vinyl varies by country.
Int. the prop room · continuous
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A wired closed-back pair that keeps the low strings clear and shuts out a noisy room, a sensible way to hear a dense orchestral score.
Wired · Closed-back · Studio monitor
A step up in the same family, widely used for monitoring, with room for the quiet passages and the sudden string clusters.
Wired · Closed-back · Studio monitor
Noise cancelling takes the room out of the picture, which suits music that depends on sustained low notes and silence.
Wireless · Noise cancelling · Over-ear
