Jonny Greenwood on Anna Schmidt

Jonny Greenwood talks about Krzysztof Penderecki for a film by Anna Schmidt. In his few weeks at music college before Radiohead signed, a teacher showed him Penderecki's scores and played him Polymorphia. “I didn't know you were allowed to do that. I didn't know you could be that free,” he says. His relationship with the music since has been “a mixture of stealing and photocopying and listening to it a lot”, and he was starstruck when he met the composer briefly after a London concert in 1993. The first thing he heard live was the Viola Concerto, and he assumed speakers were hidden somewhere, making all the extra harmonics; that it was only the orchestra stuck with him.

His 48 Responses to Polymorphia grow out of that piece's closing C major chord and try to do with Max/MSP, the software he uses in Radiohead, what Penderecki did with early electronics in the 60s. One passage has the orchestra start in unison and branch off along the veins of a leaf, a nod to Penderecki's arboretum and meant to make him smile when he opened the score. The rest of Radiohead came to hear it played, and Greenwood was delighted by how young and excited the crowd were.

A string group told the band early on that orchestral players call pop sessions balloons, because the parts are all long slow notes, and Radiohead set out never to treat players like a synthesiser preset. At Penderecki's house, over a formal tea with cake, the composer played a recording of Polymorphia, pointed at the speakers and said the violins should be a little louder, which reminded Greenwood of someone in a band apologising for their mix. The charge that Penderecki betrayed the avant-garde when his music turned tuneful amuses him; it is the same curse as bands hear about their early records.