The New York Times Magazine follows Jonny Greenwood to Poland

The New York Times Magazine has published a long profile of Jonny Greenwood by Alex Pappademas, online today and in Sunday's magazine as “Kid A+”. At its centre is 12 September last year, when Greenwood went to Alvernia Studios near Krakow to record new versions of two orchestral pieces for the record he shares with Krzysztof Penderecki, due on Nonesuch this month.

Penderecki, 78, came to the studio in the afternoon. While he was out for photographs, Greenwood handed his own copy of the Polymorphia score to Filip Berkowicz, artistic director of the Sacrum Profanum festival, who had arranged the session. He asked Berkowicz to get it signed and told him twice to say it was Berkowicz's idea. It’s terrible to be star-struck by a septuagenarian Polish man.¹

The two pieces, “48 Responses to Polymorphia” and “Popcorn Superhet Receiver”, are both tributes to Penderecki's work of the early 1960s, played by 48 strings under Marek Moś. Both hide jokes for a composer who keeps an arboretum. One section of the “48 Responses” score is a drawing of a purple oak leaf, and the players start on one note and slide away along its veins. In part of “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” the orchestra swaps its bows for lacquered Peruvian seedpods. Steve Reich, who heard Greenwood play his Electric Counterpoint at a Krakow steel plant the night before, calls the piece's guitar-pick pizzicato the first new approach to pizzicato since Bartok¹.

Greenwood dates his love of Penderecki to a London concert in 1992 or 1993, where he thought he could hear speakers in the room; it was only strings. Nigel Godrich remembers the first orchestra to see Greenwood's string parts for Kid A and Amnesiac bursting into giggles, unable to play them.

Greenwood and Paul Thomas Anderson tell their beginning differently. Greenwood says Anderson got hold of a bootleg of an orchestral concert of his, laid it against There Will Be Blood and asked for more. Anderson says the arrangements inside Radiohead songs had already told him Greenwood could score a film, before he ever saw Bodysong, the 2003 documentary Greenwood scored, at a film festival in Rotterdam.

Anderson reckons Greenwood wrote him about 90 minutes of new music for There Will Be Blood, but because the final score also used parts of “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” and a Bodysong piece, it was ruled out of the Oscar for best original score. Yeah, we got maneuvered out of the big one! I just wanted to see Jonny in a tuxedo.¹ Greenwood is now writing the music for Anderson's next film, an untitled period piece with Philip Seymour Hoffman as a charismatic religious leader.

Much of The King of Limbs was pieced together with looping software Greenwood programmed. Asked whether he will still be composing in his seventies, he talks of laptops in the orchestra, sound for installations and speakers. I worry about being a fogy and just writing for orchestras. Like, really, I should be doing more electronic stuff, I feel.¹