The Score That Refused to Help

Jonny Greenwood is looking at ninety minutes of unfinished film on a hard drive. The picture has no title yet. Paul Thomas Anderson has sent it across the Atlantic with a polite request: write something. The opening fifteen minutes carry no dialogue. A man alone in a New Mexico shaft in 1898, breaking rock for silver he does not find. The wind. The pickax. The convention of the form says the music here should sound like Copland — clean horizon, lonely man, noble solitude. Greenwood writes the opposite. He writes a piece that does not feel like landscape. It feels like an accusation.

The cue is called "Open Spaces." Recorded in London with the BBC Concert Orchestra under Robert Ziegler, the strings climb a half-step at a time and never land. They glissando through the keys you can name into the space between. The notation looks like the score for a piece that knows it should have already resolved and has decided not to. Underneath the silent prospector chipping at a wall, the music is making a case. It is not telling you he is alone. It is telling you he is dangerous.

Greenwood came to orchestral writing the long way. A guitarist who taught himself Penderecki and Messiaen and Lutosławski by score, who had already written pieces for orchestras before he wrote for pictures. When Anderson's cut arrived he did not ask what the scene needed. He asked what the scene was hiding. The picture was hiding a future. The film had not yet shown you what kind of man Daniel Plainview would become. The score already knew. By the time Daniel Day-Lewis speaks his first line, twenty minutes in, the music has already told you not to trust him.

This is the contract most film music keeps and a few break. The standard arrangement between picture and score is supportive: the music tells you when to feel something, what to feel, where the cut is going. A score that fulfills its contract is invisible, and most film music is. Greenwood broke the contract on purpose. He wrote a counter-script. Watch the first reel of "There Will Be Blood" with the sound off and you have a slow, beautiful Western about oil. Put the music back and you have a horror film about appetite. The score did not underline the picture. It disagreed with it.

The lineage is small but real. Herrmann's strings under the shower in "Psycho," eight bars that said the thing the camera would not. Penderecki's "Threnody," forty-eight strings refusing to resolve, which Greenwood quoted directly. Eduard Artemyev under Tarkovsky, dissolving the score into the room tone until the seam between music and the world disappeared. A small canon of composers willing to argue with the picture they were hired to serve, and a much larger one willing to do its homework for it.

Anyone scoring anything that moves has a choice that most people never make consciously. The composer can support the picture or interrogate it. The first is a job. The second is a position. The position is harder to hold because directors can fire you for taking it, and most do. Anderson did not. His career is partly the proof of his nerve, and Greenwood's is the proof of what becomes possible when the composer is allowed to know more than the picture has told.

Listen to "Open Spaces" without the film and it is a piece of music that does not resolve. Watch the first reel with the sound off and it is a man chipping at a wall. Put them together and you have something neither could have been alone — a story told by someone who knew its ending before the camera turned on.