Jonny Greenwood’s score for There Will Be Blood. Tense, massed and corrosive, in constant nervy tremolo, at times loping in Bartoky pizzicato. It’s what few scores are today: a fully-developed character, without which the movie simply wouldn’t be what it is. An integral voice as important as setting, protagonists, pacing, plot.

From the start, with that slow pan from hill to quarry, it shivers the screen in trumpeting discord. The tone for the entire movie’s set — acid green and always on the cusp of exploding into violence, unresolved & shaking, sonically begging for resolution. Which Daniel Plainview brings with bowling pin in the final frames.

Can you imagine the film without the score? I can’t. And with modern film I almost always can — most scores are superfluous at best, at worst pandering to some misguided notion of a film audience dependent on treacly cues in the form of piano arpeggi or string crescendo to decide how to feel.

Here, Greenwood’s score is about the only thing — aside from Paul Dano in a few scenes, and Dillon Freasier, the child who plays H.W. — that consistently stands up to Daniel Day-Lewis’ obsessed, possessed presence for sheer force & focused savagery. For every shot of oil-masked Day-Lewis staring at a burning derrick, wild-eyed with halfgrinning greed, face pooling out of black like some mug out of a Caravaggio canvas, there’s an equal passage where Greenwood’s score howls out of silence with just as much awful glee.

Whether or not Greenwood composed the music specifically for the film is immaterial to me (He was denied an Oscar nomination because parts of the score come from his pre-existing piece “Popcorn Superhet Receiver”). What matters is that it colludes with and bears up the film as much as do its leads, and helps deliver it home as the mesmerizing, ugly, monomaniacal life study it is.
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
   
   
Jonny Greenwood - There Will Be Blood

Photograph of Katherine with Doves

Language arcs away to white

Curves with soft fluttering
White soft arc
And then is arcing
Gone

	Like her soft jawline
Gracing down from earlobe
  and arc-sweeping up to chin

		Like paralleling
Proud bowing arc
 Of dove-white
  Soft dove-breast 

Arcing gone
		      To two soft white dovings

   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
   
   
(The Katherine Hepburn Photo)

Kohina

This, the little silver niche.

Draw around yourself curtains of
bleep, 8-bit hymns &
sine wave chorales.

You can shake yourself
til your gears wobble and clink;
wave your Lost-in-Space tube-arms
to the blocky beats.

These are the noises of our lives now;
our children will program robo-robins
to pitch their warbles
to metallic scratches.

These are the murmurs of the great silver expanse.

These are noises of death & of
bustling binary fertility.

Oven Bird

O happy
	en-moling
    fluff-pot, 

		Secreting yourself
		    away in
	chewy bole-bubble, 

Peep from
      branch-crater,
                   wriggle out & meet
           Cooling air like

biscuit newly risen,

      and like crab, like snail,
  like bee,

         Build your cell and

    Please 

seal well

   
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

Snail shells are homes — always in-progress, always excrescing, always spiralling & nautilising outwards homes — for the artists, musicians, songs, poems, writers, people, places, planets, plums that I regularly burden with gush.

At least this way all the shameless enshrining can be contained.

Think of them as cockle shells built for endless barnacling.
   

   
2-11-08

Banshee Birth
   

At Town Hall I wished
His cover of Cohen’s “The Guests”
Would never end.

And then he had us all hum —
To feel the ghost behind our heads.
& in our necks.

The massed chest-drones were
Soft yellow fibers
Being braided through everyone.

A year later,
At the Warsaw in Brooklyn
He talked about being rapt
Before old videos of Otis

And when Antony sang
He’d seize moments, notes,
And shake them into endlessness
Just like Otis:

With fearlessness
With tender madness
With grinning pain

So again come ghosts:
He wrings their necks
In exorcising vibrato

Just as he calls them forth:
The banshee birth
   
   
   
Antony & The Johnsons Cds

Essay by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com

To me, watching Ivo Pogorelich play Chopin as he does here in the 1980 Chopin competition in Warsaw is not much different to me than watching Otis Redding sing “Shake” or Iggy Pop writhe on stage to something off Funhouse. It’s like seeing Coltrane blow holy hell out of his sax. It’s like hearing Patti Smith sing stairs up into the night on “Birdland.” Or Howlin Wolf throttle his guitar neck and sing the rafters into splinters. It’s pure channeled soul: the kind that’s wracked and hurt & fearful and writhing but swept up and organized in a solid mountain of feeling. The heart’s blood, black and wild, captured & focused in a sealed vial of white glass.

From what I understand, Martha Argerich, a judge at the Chopin competition from which this video’s taken (and a legendary Chopin interpreter in her own right), walked out when Ivo was eliminated. I can see why. If for no other reason that these are two Chopin interpreters who capture what’s hardest to capture in this composer’s works: delivering all the massive shifts in feeling without making it seem fragmented, schizophrenic, and doing so with tremendous technique.

Chopin’s works speak to me in part because they depict extremes of emotion side by side as they really (and uncomfortably, sometimes) exist in the human heart; Ivo speaks to me because he seems to understand this intuitively in how he plays. He switches from the most delicate and aching touches to the most hammering fortissimos without making you think he’s just playing up contrast/shock-value. His rubato, his pacing, it all shows a piano player who feels (rather than has read) that Chopin was a revolutionary of the heart’s mapping as much as he was of the keyboard’s.

This is how he plays the Scherzo no. 3: as the story of one human heart struggling and battling, in tragedy and absurdity, unifying it all by making the emotional vicissitudes (which are so characteristic of Chopin’s Scherzos) seem less like hodgepodge extremes yoked together and more like different portraits of the same human face — like Monet’s haystacks seen in varying shades of light. All of a piece, despite the changes, despite the furious switching.

Anyone else out there a huge Chopin fan? Any other interpreters you can recommend?