Jonny Greenwood Vs. Johannes Brahms: Alliances and Displacement in There Will Be Blood

CHAPTER 13 Jonny Greenwood vs. Johannes Brahms: Alliances and Displacement in There Will Be Blood

Marlies De Munck

1 Tracking the Sound

Since its release in 2007, There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film drama based on the novel Oil! (1927) by Upton Sinclair, has been lavishly praised by film critics. A fair share of the critics’ attention has concerned the film’s striking soundtrack, which contains compositions by Jonny Greenwood, who is better known as the guitar player for the British rock band Radiohead, and Johannes Brahms, the nineteenth-century composer. Anderson’s musical choices are indeed worth scrutinizing, if only for his peculiar use of squarely opposed musical styles. However, a number of crucial questions remain under- explored: How does the music function in the film? What is its impact on the viewer, and how does it influence her understanding of the story? If Anderson’s musical choices are indeed so remarkable, then we should consider the music as a prominent voice in the film. The central question, therefore, should not merely be whether Anderson has chosen music that fits the images and the narrative, but it should also be how the music operates together with or perhaps against the images and the narrative. To this we may add: What does the music contribute to the film? And How does the musical input differ from what is already conveyed on the visual and the narrative planes? These questions concern, in other words, the capacity of film music to blend into and mould what is usually taken to be a visual experience, but they also concern music’s singularity as an autonomous medium with its own distinctive way of affecting the spectator. Before venturing into these complex matters, however, let us first have a closer look at the music itself. Wholly untypical for such a major Hollywood production, Greenwood’s music for There Will Be Blood features no clear-cut themes or crafty leitmotifs, nor does it seem to care for a plain melody. Even though classical strings and piano dominate the overall sound and produce a musical timbre that may be called traditional, the music is still unusual: It sounds genuinely unheimlich and sinister, and—as some might say—it is often simply irritating. After hear- ing the soundtrack on CD, The Guardian reviewer David Peschek concluded

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi ��.��63/9789004298811_015 Jonny Greenwood vs. Johannes Brahms 235 that “Greenwood is a sophisticated musician, but despite the chromatic headi- ness of much of this music, you feel it needs the movie. In fact, you long for less austere stabbing and scraping, and something more like a good old-fashioned, carefully developed, rich and satisfying theme.”1 Greenwood’s score is presented here as a bloodless affair, more noise than music, stuck in the background from where it throws some “stabbing and scraping” into the picture. And yet, not all of Greenwood’s “austere” music was originally composed for Anderson’s film—an odd detail, perhaps, yet one that is incongruous with the claim that the music “needs the movie.” In fact, the soundtrack contains material from Greenwood’s 2003 solo album Bodysong2 and parts of the symphonic projects Smear and Popcorn Superhet Receiver, both of which were a result of his residency at the bbc Concert Orchestra in 2004. Moreover, the film also features Arvo Pärt’s well-known Fratres for Cello and Piano, as well as two feisty outbursts of the illustrious finale theme of Brahms’s violin concerto in D Major—all music that has done pretty well without the movie. Finishing with a rickety performance of the stale church song “There Is Power in the Blood,” the unorthodox mixture of sounds and styles seems likely to result in a nightmarish soundtrack, and, in a way, that’s precisely what it is—though not for any of the reasons mentioned above. The extensive use of pre-existing and unoriginal works rendered the soundtrack ineligible for an Academy Award nomination, even though it was suggested, off the record, that the score was actually disqualified because “the Academy decided, quite subjectively, that the viewer comes away from ‘Blood’ predominantly recalling the unoriginal works.”3 While this unofficial explana- tion certainly provides a plausible reason for the exclusion of Greenwood’s score, it nevertheless provides a rather awkward criterion by which to judge the quality of a film’s soundtrack: The longer it sticks in one’s head, the better it is. To be sure, Brahms’s violin concerto will undoubtedly remain “stuck” in the spectator’s head as it blasts off immediately after the last scene. But even

1 David Peschek, “CD: Jonny Greenwood, There Will Be Blood OST,” The Guardian, January 4, 2008, accessed March 10, 2013, www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/jan/04/popandrock .shopping4. 2 Bodysong was originally composed in 2003 as a soundtrack for the film of the same name. Perhaps, then, what Peschek really meant in his comment was that the music needs any movie, not Anderson’s in particular. It would be interesting to further pursue the question of whether this music intrinsically differs from non-filmic music and whether and how this difference is reflected in its aesthetic qualities, but unfortunately, such a task falls beyond the scope of the present paper. 3 Kristopher Tapley, “Digging into Oscar’s Controversial Music Branch,” Variety, February 12, 2008.