I saw There Will Be Blood last night at the cast-and-crew screening at The Ziegfeld, and I’m calling out Jonny Greenwood for the best score of 2007. From the opening minutes until the bitter end some 160 minutes later, I was leaning forward in my seat, amazed and delighted that such audacious dissonance could be possible in a big budget American film - and a Western, no less. The music is what Ligeti might have composed for a John Ford epic, the unholy spawn of a union between Clint Eastwood and Krzysztof Penderecki. Not since Corigliano’s Altered States has a score so elevated what might have otherwise been an upper-middling genre flick. Don’t get me wrong — the film is very good on it’s own terms, and Daniel Day Lewis turns in another fine Oscar-contender. But the music is what feels utterly unique and bold, transforming a very familiar landscape into an alien world of great depth and beauty. Von Stroheim’s Greed could have played to this music.

So who is this Greenwood fellow, I wondered, turning to the internets? Well, well. He’s the guitarist of a rock band I’ve never listened to but who seem quite highly regarded, a band called Radiohead. You’ll have to excuse my ignorance of post-1983 rock music, but please clue me in… are Radiohead as good as this? I’ll have to go and P2P them some time. But first, let’s P2P some of this Greenwood fellow.

This track comes from a Radiohead bootleg found on Limewire, and is actually used in the film, although it was recorded separately a few years ago. Knowing the post-production process, I’m guessing this was probably used as temp music, and then they never came up with anything they liked as much, so they just licensed this track (and one other, Popcorn Superhet Receiver) to use in the film. In fact, the very first music cue in the film is a startling dopplering tone cluster that sounds lifted straight out of Popcorn Superhet Receiver. These two tracks are not on the soundtrack release which is undoubtably stuffed full of all the other excellent music and arrives on the venerable Nonesuch label next tuesday, December 18th.

So do check out the film. It opens December 26th and is definitely worth hearing on a big screen.

The album’s page at Nonesuch is here. The official site for the film is here. You can buy the CD here, among many other places. There’s an interview with Greenwood and director Paul Thomas Anderson here. And there’s a wonderful real-audio stream from the BBC of Popcorn Superhet Receiver here.

Alberto Iglesias has turned in his sixth excellent score for Pedro Almodovar on the new film Volver, which many are saying is one of Almodovar’s best. The jury at Cannes gave the best actress award jointly to the entire female ensemble cast, and Almodovar took the screenplay award. Almodovar describes the film in his shooting diary:

It is a pop comedy (pastel colours wouldn’t suit it), a false local film that involves a drama with surrealist elements, it isn’t a horror film, but some characters inhabit the darkness within the houses, the dim back rooms, it is an intimate story but with so much action that it seems like a domestic “Indiana Jones”.

The ongoing work from Almodovar and Iglesias recalls the great historic long-term collaborations between Hitchcock/Herrmann and Fellini/Rota, and Iglesias is indeed the creative heir to both Bernard Herrmann and Nino Rota, delivering lush, classic scores with the crisp momentum of Herrmann, the irony-free humor of Rota, and the emotional power of Morricone.

There is no US release date set for the film or the soundtrack, but you can order the CD from Amazon in France here. Almodovar’s shooting diary he wrote during the making of the film is here. And there’s an interesting page of musical recommendations from Almodovar here.

This new release from Harkit Records out of the UK appears to be the most definitive and complete release yet of Komeda’s brilliant score for Polanski’s 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby. It *appears* to be, but it’s hard to be definitive, because like so much else surrounding Polanski, and particulary this film, the specific details are always somehow shrouded in mystery.

The liner notes to this version contain many compelling factoids such as:

Directed by Roman Polanski, whose pregnant wife, he actress Sharon Tate, was murdered in 1969 by Charles Manson and his followers, who titled their death spree “Helter Skelter” after the song by The Beatles, whose leader, John Lennon, would one day live (and in 1980 be murdered) in the Manhattan apartment building called The Dakota — where Rosemary’s Baby had been filmed.

and

To keep the rituals and chants as realistic as possible, director Roman Polanski had Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan and composer of “The Satanic Bibles,” serve as an assistant in the ritual scenes. In return for his help, LaVey was allowed to play Satan in the “impregnating sequence.”

That’s all well and good, but couldn’t the liner notes tell us something about the difference between the two tracks both called “Main Title” which seem to be alternate versions?? Which one is the actual Main Title?? I’m posting track 1 from the CD. There have been several releases of this soundtrack over the years, and no amount of Googling can sort out the details — accusations abound of re-records, mislabeled tracks, shoddy remastering, bootlegs, etc etc. Suffice to say that this release contains a lot of astounding music, which sounds like it was taken straight from the mag masters of the film. There is also a “jazz” version of the main theme recorded live in a Warsaw club in 1989 which starts out as a breathtaking avant garde vocal interpretation but then devolves into kitsch jazz after the 80 second mark, and two takes of Komeda improvising around the theme at the piano, apparently while writing it. These improvisations are remarkable in their spontaneity and rawness - not a view of the composing process one usually gets on a soundtrack CD. It actually seems unlikely to me that Komeda would have agreed to their release if he were still alive.

Krzysztof Komeda was the Polish Jazz master who scored 65 films, including ten for Roman Polanski, the first being Polanski’s 1958 student short Two Men and A Wardrobe. He died from head injuries sustained in a mysterious accident shortly after completing the score to Rosemary’s Baby. (Anybody know that story? The details on that are also mysteriously impregnable to Google searches).

You can buy this version of the Rosemary’s Baby soundtrack here, or from the label in the UK here. Harkit has also just released another excellent Komeda/Polanski score, The Fearless Vampire Killers, which you can find here and here. Komeda has an official (posthumous) web site here.

Evelyn Glennie is the world’s foremost virtuoso percussionist. She is a cultural ambassador for percussion music, a motivational speaker and teacher, and an awesome marimba player and drummer. She speaks in an outlandish Scottish brogue, and has been the recipient of over 80 international awards, including the OBE. She can create emotionally searing music with chopsticks and a tin cup. This track, written by Brazillian composer Ney Rossauro, is typical of Glennie’s astounding physical technique and hyper-precise rhythmic counterpoint, but her recorded catalog includes a wide range of different types of music, including Richard Rogers covers and collaborations with Björk.

Thomas Riedelsheimer has made an exquisite, fascinating film profiling Glennie, Touch The Sound, which is now playing in New York and is making the rounds elsewhere. I saw a special screening of the film a few weeks ago and was blown away. Much of the film centers on a live performance inside an abandoned factory with Glennie and fred Frith, but you also get to see her hammering giant Taiko drums in Japan and drumming on a Hell’s Kitchen rooftop in NYC, among other things. Rarely do you get to see an artist of Glennie’s stature this close up and intimate, and rarely do you get this kind of intelligent view into the creative process. The music in the film is perfectly chosen, and the sound design and mix are the best I have heard in ages. The film is also a profound work about hearing itself. Not to be missed!

The soundtrack from the film is not yet available in the US, but you can find more info about the CD here. Touch the Sound has an english language web site here. There’s a good overview of the film on Glennie’s site here. You can find Evelyn Glennie’s Her Greatest Hits CD here, which includes Eldorado and many other great tracks. The artist has a web site here.

Nelson Riddle’s exquisite arrangements are the perfect frame for Sinatra’s crying into his beer after Ava Gardner left him in 1955, and the combination of Riddle’s unexpected harmonic tangents with Sinatra’s new-found earnestness give the record an unprecedented emotional weight. In The Wee Small Hours of The Morning was Sinatra’s first 12″ album, and a landmark of 20th Century popular music, cited as a major influence by everyone from Tom Waits to Miles Davis. We can also credit Sinatra and Riddle here with one of the first “concept albums”, a coherent collection of music with a common mood, and a beginning, middle, and end, rather than a random collection of popular tunes or an overview of a particular composer’s catalog.

Check the woodwinds… the opening phrases here, reminiscent of Stravinsky (!), are a stellar example of Riddle’s genius.

You can find In The Wee Small Hours of The Morning here.

Bernard Herrmann was the greatest film score composer of the 20th Century, and Vertigo is arguably his finest score. While Hitchcock was one of the great film auteurs, his best work is unimaginable without Herrmann’s music. North By Northwest is their most exciting score, Psycho the most terrifying, and The Birds the most eerie and experimental. But Vertigo is the most haunting and psychological, giving perfect external expression to the character’s interior states.

I’m taking this from the 16-track 1995 restoration release, featuring the London Sinfonia Conducted by Muir Matheison, which features the most complete and definitive version of the original score. You can find this version here. There’s lots more information about this and other scores at The Bernard Herrmann Society.

I’m in Los Angeles. It’s a desert. You have to drive everywhere. It’s a good idea to listen to music while you’re doing all that driving. This work by Steve Reich is some of my favorite driving music, especially when driving in the desert. Try it for yourself.

This 1985 piece was Reich’s first large work for orchestra and chorus, and was striking at the time for it’s embrace of melody, of all things. I’ve always loved everything Steve Reich did since I first heard his radical 1966 tape-loop composition Come Out, but this piece is somehow even more mesmerizing than the purely minimalist works like Come Out and Music For Eighteen Musicians, in that it takes those same rhythmic structures and overlays them with beautiful melodies.

You can find The Desert Music here. The artist has a web site here.

Go ahead and roll your own version of music history if you like, but just don’t leave out ol’ Varèse. Two of the 20th Century’s grand masterpieces, Ionisation and Poème électronique, come from the mind of this French-born American composer who was once characterized by Henry Miller as The Stratospheric Colossus of Sound, and by Nicolas Slonimsky as “a huge French peasant”.

Ionisation is written entirely for percussion and two sirens. It was composed in 1931, and reflects Varèse’s interest in scientific ideas as musical organizing principles. In a uniquely mid-century dialogue between the American arts and sciences, supposedly a recording of Ionisation was played regularly by the scientists at Oak Ridge in 1940 who were working on the atom bomb.

In this 1977 recording Pierre Boulez conducts the New York Philharmonic on a CD which also includes stellar recordings of several of Varèse’s other works, including Amériques and Arcana. You can find it here. There is a fascinating audio archive about Ionisation here, which includes a long interview with Nicolas Slonimsky, the wunderkind who conducted the world premiere of Ionisation in New York City in 1933, among other things.

In the liner notes for the CD release of Altered States, Ken Russell writes of first discovering John Corigliano at a concert in Los Angeles in 1979:

“Reading from my program that he was a contemporary composer I braced myself for thirty minutes of plinks and plunks that pass for music these days. I was in for a surprise, a shock, a revelation.

Not since Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin have I been so excited in the concert hall… I knew I was looking at a composer of the stature of Ives and Copeland. If only he could compose the music for Altered States instead of some commercial Hollywood hack we directors are usually saddled with, I thought wistfully. But that’s just a dream.

I should have known better — Hollywood is the place where dreams come true.”

Corigliano’s incredible 1980 score was nominated for an Oscar, but lost to Fame. Corigliano has only written two other film scores; Revolution (1985) and The Red Violin (1998), for which he finally did win an Academy Award. Altered States is out of print, but you can find a used copy here. He has many excellent recordings of his other work available, including his Symphony No. 1. The Red Violin Score is also available.

Milan has just re-issued this 1992 score to Cronenberg’s film in a re-mastered (whatever) version as part of their Silver Screen series.

Howard Shore’s tunes, played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, with Ornette Coleman improvising on top? …?? I use the word masterpiece too much around here, so let’s just say it’s the best film score of the 1990’s. Lush, dark, wondrous… every track is a gem.

If you like your music riddled with DRM, you can buy the un-remastered version from the iTunes Music Store. Or get the new souped-up version from Amazon here.