Jonny Greenwood's “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” gets its West Coast premiere

Jonny Greenwood's orchestral piece “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” has its West Coast premiere tonight at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, where Benjamin Shwartz conducts the Magik*Magik Orchestra. Tomorrow night Greenwood is across town at Golden Gate Park, playing Outside Lands with Radiohead. The concert is the Wordless Music Series' first in the city, on a programme with music by Arvo Pärt and John Adams and the former Kronos Quartet cellist Joan Jeanrenaud among the soloists. Ronen Givony of Nonesuch runs the series to bring indie-rock listeners into classical music.

Greenwood wrote the piece for the BBC Concert Orchestra as the BBC's composer in residence, and they premiered it at LSO St Luke's in April 2005. The title comes from a shortwave radio catalogue, and the music is built on the idea of white noise, written by layering his violin parts in a digital editor and then copying them out by hand. He names Olivier Messiaen and Krzysztof Penderecki among his influences. Excerpts are in his score for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, as “Henry Plainview” and “Proven Lands”.

The series also gave the piece its US premiere in January, and on that night Greenwood was on stage in London. While the Wordless Music Orchestra played it in New York, Radiohead were playing In Rainbows start to finish at 93 Feet East on Brick Lane. In New York, the church of St Paul the Apostle, at Columbus Avenue and West 60th Street, held an orchestra of 48, which Brad Lubman kept together without a baton. Greenwood's piece closed the programme, given on two nights, after Gavin Bryars's The Sinking of the Titanic and John Adams's Christian Zeal and Activity. WNYC recorded the concert, and NPR put it online in February.

In April the Alabama Symphony Orchestra played it in Birmingham, in its Classical Edge series of new music for a younger audience, and all 1,300 seats in the Jemison Concert Hall were sold.

“Popcorn Superhet Receiver” in America, 2008