Jonny Greenwood's Power of the Dog score is out, built on a $100 cello

Jonny Greenwood's score for Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog is out today on Lakeshore Records and Invada Records, as the film opens in cinemas ahead of its arrival on Netflix on 1 December. Two of its 16 short pieces, “West” and “25 Years”, came out first, on 25 October, with a note from Campion that read Jonny Greenwood, our composer, is a genius. Simple as that.¹ It is his second score in a week, after Spencer.

The music was recorded at the height of the pandemic, when orchestras could not gather, and Greenwood told Variety, in a rare interview, how he faked one. He had a viola quartet for one day and six cellists for another, playing while scenes from the film ran; the colder they played the better it fitted, so there is little vibrato. The rest he built himself on his own cello, tuning a string to each pitch and recording every note one at a time, because he can't play it well with a bow. It is a cheap old $100 instrument with a sticker inside reading “Stephen Bennett”, which his wife thinks was a schoolchild's name. I'm sure it's the cello's real name. “Stephen” is all over this score.⁵

His main thought was that the film, set in Montana in 1925, belongs to the modern era, and at the start he sent Campion photographs of 1920s drum kits. It's too easy to see cowboys and think it's 1870.⁵ Phil Burbank, the rancher Benedict Cumberbatch plays, is cultured and well read as well as fierce, which let Greenwood write complex music for him and simpler, sweeter music for his brother George.

He talked Campion into his first plan, to find out why the banjo is hardly used in contemporary classical music. It didn't work as a solo instrument, and Phil plays a banjo on screen anyway, so Greenwood learned to fingerpick his cello like one, with tape on it to mark the pitches; Campion liked the sound enough to use it a lot. To keep sweeping strings off the wide-open scenery he thought of the atonal brass in 1960s Star Trek, and wrote duets for two French horns, recorded in a big church in Oxford so the reverb would act as a third instrument.

Kirsten Dunst's Rose gets a detuned, computer-controlled pianola as the texture of her unravelling. He wrote software in Max/MSP to stand in for the paper roll and slid the tuning with a wrench while it played. For one key scene he suggested Johann Strauss Sr's Radetzky March, played as a duet for piano and banjo; the brief was a bad but famous piece, and he thinks he nailed it.

The Power of the Dog (Music From the Netflix Film)