Educational Post

Starting with the piercing convergence of violins that announces the title shot, Johnny Greenwood's soundtrack for There WIll Be Blood is a great film score, in my opinion. His original compositions span a wide stylistic range, with influences from Stravinsky, Satie, and others. The majority of them are characterized by an almost unbearably tense mood, with swarming strings or driving drumbeats adding to the nervy minimalism of the film. The music becomes a little distracting, at times, threatening to rend the fabric of the film apart, but the razop-sharp cinematography and performances of There Will Be Blood are always threatening to split the movie open, and part of Paul Thomas Anderson's genius is to ride this fine line the whole way. One track that really stands out, though, is by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. It's from his Fratres series. It's played in the middle of the film, I believe during or around the part where Plainview and the con man pretending to be his brother are ambling through the woods and surveilling the land for his great pipeline. It's one of the few pieces not written by Greenwood and not on the soundtrack. (A violin concerto by Brahms is another.) But Greenwood made an excellent call adding it to the movie.

Here's the "Fratres for Violin, Strings, and Percussion":



From Wikipedia:

Fratres is a composition by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, existing in versions for a wide variety of instrumentations and exemplifying Pärt's Tintinnabuli style of composition. Its duration is about 12 minutes.

It exists perhaps most prominently in its versions for violin, string orchestra, and percussion and for violin and piano. Most other versions are very similar to these two: for instance, the versions for viola and piano and cello and piano are almost exactly the same as the former, whereas the version for string quartet is more similar to the latter.

Structurally, Fratres consists of a set of nine chord sequences, separated by a recurring percussion motif. The chord sequences themselves follow a clear pattern, and while the progressing chords explore a rich harmonic space, they nevertheless appear to have been generated by means of a simple mathematical formula.