Jonny Greenwood

The MasterNonesuch *****

In theory, Jonny Greenwood’s film scores shouldn’t work as well as they do. They don’t function like conventional film scores, with character themes and action motifs.They deliberately deny empathetic access to the inner lives of the character or the underlying drama of a scene.

But Greenwood’s scores for There Will Be Blood and We Need to Talk About Kevin work precisely because of their very dissonance and strangeness. The music’s contrariness, or contrapuntal juxtaposition, actually magnifies a scene’s dramatic action and amplifies a character’s psychological and emotional intensities, illuminating rather than illustrating what happens on the screen.

Greenwood, the Radiohead guitarist/multi-instrumentalist and award-winning composer, has evolved a unique sound and style, which is informed by freeform jazz and avant-garde music but retains a surprising expressiveness.

Greenwood’s most recent foray into concert music, 48 Responses to Polymorphia, is both a celebration and a reimagining of Penderecki’s seminal 1961 sound-and-noise composition. Greenwood, almost uniquely among film composers, straddles the worlds of film and concert music, and shamelessly confounds one with the other.

The Master develops the ideas and sounds of There Will Be Blood, his previous collaboration with director Paul Thomas Anderson. Unlike his previous scores, The Master also functions as a conventional thematic score as it charts the relationships of a single character: self-destructive war veteran and cult acolyte. Greenwood combines taut melodic lines, stuttering pulses and dynamic orchestration with dense textures and roiling colours, which either coalesce tenderly in long harmonic passages or collide violently in shrieking bursts of noise.

The Master is a stunning score of striking emotional energy, at once tender and lyrical, and of rare visceral force, jarring and exciting, which gleefully pushes what is possible in film music. nonesuch.com

Download tracks:Overtones, Able-bodies Seaman, Barton Sparks, Sweetness of Freddie