Jonny Greenwood on NPO Klassiek

After the premiere of his violin concerto æþm at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, Jonny Greenwood tells Camiel Jansen that sitting through it was nerve-wracking, waiting the whole way for a mistake. He used to come to the hall constantly on days off during Radiohead tours, and finds being on the other side of the platform very strange.

He wants an orchestra treated as one living thing instead of a set of sections, and learns the players' names, because to him it is a band with 48 people in it, each of whom had some kind of morning before turning up. He is obsessed with string players, he admits, and argues that a young person carrying a cello case, having given years to it, is considerably cooler than one carrying a guitar.

The piece grew out of an earlier work and then discarded almost all of it, keeping a single short phrase. He started again because he wondered what would happen if he did what composers are supposed to do and gave nine months to one thing.

He traces an influence to composers who studied electronics and then realised an orchestra could make the same sounds, and gives Steve Reich as the example of acoustic music that sounds digitally treated.