Modern Masterpiece: There Will Be Blood

Following a recent Jonny Greenwood binge (in particular the score for the Phantom Thread), I got thinking about his beginnings in film music and his almost immediate establishment as a force in the film scoring world. For Greenwood, his debut score for one of the landmark films of the decade, There Will Be Blood, put him at the forefront of neo-classical, experimental scoring in film. Personally, this is a film that changed the way I looked at cinema and more importantly, how I approach writing music and scoring for screen. Rising to considerable fame as part of Radiohead, Greenwood, has always brought his knowledge of string technique and classical composition to the bands sound making his style suitably adaptable for the big screen. All in all, scoring a Paul Thomas Anderson is a main role in itself and Anderson has always treated the score in a film as an equal to the visual elements, something that is apparent in TWBB. 

Although being snubbed at the oscars on a somewhat pedantic technicality (maybe not too pedantic, after-all, there is only 35 minutes of original music, and 46 minutes of pre-existing music within the soundtrack), the casual and well fitted pre-existing tracks that Greenwood blended with the soundtrack work in collaboration with each other in a jarring sort of way, but in a good-jarring way. In contrast to his own ‘wrong’ sounding string sections, which play around with huge stretched glissandos, sliding in and out of consonance and dissonance. A sort-of constant restlessness and tension which only resolves at tender moments throughout the film. Adding some extra depth and texture to the score, Greenwood’s use of sliding strings connotes the object of desire and the slip into greed and isolation within the story. 

Tracks like Henry Plainview stand out as ‘tone-setters’ for the film. During the opening sequence in which hardly any dialogue is heard,  the camera pans down onto the rocky horizon and Greenwoods dense, viscous strings begin to smear the soundscape before finally focussing into unison only to fall into dissonance again. The opening sequence for TWBB is a masterclass in film making and Anderson’s encyclopaedic knowledge becomes glaringly obvious.  Future Markets. A chunky staccato string opens this section with a contrastingly still and beautiful legato string passage. Throughout the score there are these contrasting moments - polarising almost, highlighting the tension in the narrative. 

Overall it is a score that is so well fitted to the film, the music very much becomes a character in the story, the shadow of which ebbs and flows with the narrative throughout. Much like Greenwoods previous work, this is a tight and disciplined score which captures the somewhat alien and isolating mood of the narrative through ambient dissonances and heavy texture on the strings.  The true shame of all of this is that film scores which try their hand at experimenting are usually snubbed in favour of an accompaniment that will be more accessible to the commercial audience. With the more experimental scores not having enough credibility for the studios. But scores like Under the Skin and The Social Network take steps in the more unusual sonic landscape, something we will hopefully hear more of as time goes on. 

Stuart Douglas

Further links:

There will Be Blood on Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yXqEzUoFY4

There Will Be Blood on Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/album/0K7xCNs6QjWl1B2mPKCnk3?si=0O2nWkpKS4iNXkyKAhrb7A