Jonny Greenwood Scored One Battle After Another for Anderson
6 min read
Jonny Greenwood performing in Amsterdam.
Jonny Greenwood performing in Amsterdam.
Jonny Greenwood scored Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, and reviewers have reached for words like nerve-shredding to describe it.
He is nominated for film composer of the year at the 26th World Soundtrack Awards, held in Ghent on 10 October.
Nearly Two Decades With One Director
Greenwood has scored a substantial run of Anderson’s films, and the partnership is among the most sustained in current cinema.
Director and composer relationships of that length are rare and they change what a score can do. Neither party is establishing anything, so the music can start from a much more specific place.
It also means the audience has expectations, which is a resource and a constraint at once.
Anderson’s films have used Greenwood’s scores structurally rather than decoratively, often letting music carry a sequence where dialogue or editing would otherwise do the work.
A Rock Musician in the Orchestra
Greenwood’s primary job remains playing guitar and other instruments in a rock band, and he has scored films alongside that for nearly twenty years.
That combination was unusual when he started and is considerably less so now, largely because he demonstrated it could be done seriously.
What distinguishes his scoring from most rock-musician crossovers is the orchestral writing, which is genuinely written rather than arranged by somebody else from sketches.
The Ondes Martenot
Greenwood is closely associated with the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument invented in the 1920s and played with a keyboard and a ring on a wire.
It produces a continuously variable pitch with a distinctive vocal quality, and it sits in a register that no acoustic instrument occupies.
Very few musicians play it, and its presence in a score is immediately identifiable, which makes it a signature in a field where signatures are rare.
Strings Used Against Themselves
The recurring technique in his film work is writing for strings in ways that produce tension rather than warmth.
Clusters, sustained dissonance, extreme registers and unstable tuning are all standard in his orchestral writing, and none of them are what a string section is conventionally used for.
That approach draws on twentieth-century concert music rather than on film scoring tradition, which is why the results sound unlike anything else in mainstream cinema.
Concert Music Alongside the Films
Greenwood has written concert works and held a residency with a professional orchestra, which is unusual for a musician from a rock background.
That is not decoration. Writing for an orchestra outside a film context requires a different kind of structural thinking, because there is no picture supplying the shape.
The film scores benefit from it. A composer who can build a twenty-minute concert piece can build a cue that develops rather than simply sustaining a mood.
What Nerve-Shredding Means Here
Descriptions of a score as nerve-shredding usually indicate sustained dissonance, unresolved harmony and rhythmic instability held for longer than is comfortable.
Doing that well is harder than it sounds, because tension that never resolves stops registering as tension after a few minutes.
The craft is in the release: knowing when to let something settle so the next escalation has somewhere to go.
The Ghent Field
The film composer of the year category also includes Alexandre Desplat, Hildur Gudnadottir, Daniel Pemberton and Max Richter.
Those five represent almost the full range of approaches available in current film scoring, from full symphonic writing to minimalism to electronics.
A category assembled that way is less a competition than a survey, which is arguably the most useful thing a specialist award can do.
Awards for Film Music Specifically
The World Soundtrack Awards exist because film music is otherwise assessed inside general film awards, where it competes for attention with acting and directing.
A dedicated ceremony with an accompanying concert treats scores as music rather than as a production department.
For composers, that distinction matters. It is the difference between being recognised for supporting a film and being recognised for writing.
Why the Second Wave Matters
The awards announce their nominations in stages, with a further round due in early September.
Staged announcements are partly a publicity mechanism and partly practical, since eligibility windows close at different times for different categories.
For a festival-attached award, it also spreads coverage across a longer period ahead of the October ceremony.
Scoring a Film That Is Already Loud
A film with a high level of tension in its editing and sound design leaves a composer less room than a quiet one.
Adding music to an already dense soundtrack risks producing noise rather than intensity, and the score can end up fighting the sound effects.
The usual solution is for the composer and the sound designer to divide the frequency spectrum between them, which requires collaboration that begins well before the mix.
The Band and the Films
Maintaining a career in a major rock band alongside a serious film scoring practice requires the two to be scheduled around each other rather than balanced.
Both are all-consuming when active, and neither can be done in the gaps left by the other.
The practical arrangement appears to be sequential rather than simultaneous, which is why the scoring output clusters in particular periods.
Anderson’s Use of Music
Paul Thomas Anderson’s films use score in a way that is closer to European art cinema than to American studio practice.
Music arrives and departs abruptly, sits at unusual volumes, and occasionally does the opposite of what a scene appears to require.
That approach only works with a composer willing to write against the picture, which is precisely what makes this partnership durable.
What the Ondes Martenot Actually Does
The instrument was invented in the 1920s by Maurice Martenot, a French cellist and radio operator, and it is one of the very few early electronic instruments still in serious use.
It is played two ways. A keyboard produces conventional pitches but can be moved laterally for vibrato, and a ribbon controller with a ring worn on the finger produces continuous glissando across the entire range, which is what gives the instrument its distinctive sliding quality.
Its most famous concert use is in Messiaen’s orchestral writing, where it sits above the orchestra doing something no other instrument can. That association is why the sound reads as both futuristic and archaic at the same time.
Fewer than a hundred original instruments were built, and the pool of players who can handle the repertoire is correspondingly small, which makes any appearance in a film score a deliberate choice rather than a convenient texture.
Why String Dissonance Works on Film
The technique of writing clusters and unstable tuning for strings comes out of mid-twentieth-century concert music, and it entered cinema through horror before spreading much wider.
It works because the human ear treats a sustained dissonance as an unresolved question. The body responds before the mind identifies why, which is exactly what a film wants from a score.
The reason it is not used more is that it is genuinely hard to write. A cluster that simply sits there becomes wallpaper within seconds, and the effect depends on movement inside the chord that most listeners never consciously register.
Composers who can do it well are usually those who have written concert music, because that is where the technique was developed and where the craft of sustaining it across long structures is taught.
What Is Actually Being Tested
Two things. Whether a nineteen-year partnership can still produce a score that surprises, or whether the shorthand eventually becomes a formula.
And whether a score built on sustained tension survives outside the film, because nerve-shredding is a difficult listening proposition on a record.
Two decades with one director, an instrument almost nobody plays, string writing borrowed from the concert hall, and a nomination in a field of five very different composers.
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