Ever since I started taking the subway to work, I’ve been listening to Jonny Greenwood’s score from There Will Be Blood. I listen to it almost religiously—it evokes an unsettling feeling that seems well-suited to being stuck underground with a group of (often angry) strangers. The subway tends to bring out the worst in people; commuters can be rude and ruthless. When I see people jostling for seats or aggressively pushing past one another, I imagine them all speaking with the voice of Henry Plainview: “I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.” So nothing sounds more apt on the morning train than a little dum-dum-dum-dum-DUM-DUM-DUM-DUM-dum-dum-dum-dum-DUM-DUM-DUM-DUM! By the time I get to my desk at work, I usually feel compelled to yell out, for no particular reason, “There’s a whole ocean of oil under our feet!”
Naturally, I was pretty excited to buy my ticket to this event: On September 19 and 20, Wordless Music Orchestra will perform the score from There Will Be Blood at a screening at the United Palace Theater in New York. Greenwood, who has since collaborated with P.T. Anderson on The Master,1 will be there, playing the super-creepy-sounding ondes Martenot.
He’s also apparently composing the score for Anderson’s forthcoming adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice! ↩