Jonny Greenwood: “I sometimes feel a bit embarrassed to play guitar”

Jonny Greenwood has mixed feelings about the instrument that made his name. I sometimes feel a bit embarrassed to play guitar,¹ he told NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, in a four-minute feature broadcast on 15 September around his score for The Master. He finds it old-fashioned and traditional, he says, in a world where kids have grandparents who were in punk bands, and then catches himself. It's very old and traditional, but then, so is an orchestra and so is a string section.¹ It is a contradiction he says he can't resolve.

In the early 1990s Greenwood played the viola in Oxford. I was headed for the back of the viola section in some orchestra¹, he says, if he practised hard enough. His writing for orchestras later caught the eye of film directors, and after There Will Be Blood in 2007 Paul Thomas Anderson asked him back for The Master, wanting music with the feel of a cult.

The orchestra is what he enjoys writing for, because it is 48 people rather than one sound. It's not, you know, a preset on a keyboard. It's all these people who have opinions and who are making decisions about how to play.¹