As well as being lead guitarist of the rock band Radiohead, Jonny Greenwood has forged a hugely successful career as a composer of film scores. Credits include soundtracks for the films The Power of the Dog (2021, directed by Jane Campion) and We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011) as well as numerous films in collaboration with the director Paul Thomas Anderson – 2018’s Phantom Thread (for which Greenwood was nominated for an Academy Award) and 2007’s There Will Be Blood, from which this quartet is taken. 

As a child, Greenwood played both the recorder (an instrument he would continue to play into adulthood) and viola. It is his affinity for string writing, and his knowledge of both rock and classical traditions, that sets him aside a film composer. The score for There Will Be Blood, for example, features quotations from the works of Arvo Pärt and Johannes Brahms (as well as some of Greenwood’s own previous compositions) and is characterised by Greenwood’s signature lush string-textures. IndieWire called the soundtrack “One of the most memorable scores this side of the year 2000”, while Variety noted the evocative nature of the music: “Jonny Greenwood’s musical compositions almost become another character in the film. Think Bernard Herrmann and Taxi Driver, another portrait of a twisted soul, with sound effects and music to match”.  

Indeed, this is music that conjures the darkly unsettling world of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, on which the film is based. In ‘The Prospector’s Quartet’, repeated notes played on the cello seem to evoke the machinery of oil extraction, while churning melodies in the strings grow in their foreboding intensity. Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for his performance in the film. As IndieWire noted, “Greenwood’s work, which is string-heavy and beautifully unsettling, is as memorable as Day-Lewis’ performance … Close your eyes and you can almost feel the oil pulsing beneath the ground”.