{"id":304826,"date":"2026-02-18T20:25:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T20:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/304826\/"},"modified":"2026-02-18T20:25:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T20:25:10","slug":"im-surprised-we-all-enjoyed-the-tour-so-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/304826\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I\u2019m surprised we all enjoyed the tour so much\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonny Greenwood is clearly eager to meet. We had agreed a rendezvous at a pub near Oxford station but as I stagger around the city\u2019s interminable roadworks a familiar figure strides towards me, trademark hair flopping in the breeze. \u201cPub\u2019s no good,\u201d the Radiohead guitarist declares sadly. \u201cI know a quiet caf\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\n

So over herbal beverages we discuss the vast orchestral score that Greenwood, 54, had emailed me just an hour earlier, and which the Hall\u00e9 Orchestra will be premiering in Manchester this month. \u201cFinished yesterday,\u201d he says, sounding proud and relieved.<\/p>\n

Both feelings are understandable. Now called simply Violin Concerto, the work began life at the 2019 Proms bearing a more dramatic title: Horror vacui, literally \u201cfear of empty spaces\u201d. There certainly weren\u2019t many empty spaces in Greenwood\u2019s teeming score. He had written the piece for a solo violin and 68 other string players, all with their own staves \u2014 producing dense pitch clusters reminiscent of his avant-garde composer hero, Krzysztof Penderecki.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt that Prom was really like a workshop because there was no time between rehearsal and concert to adjust anything,\u201d he says. \u201cSo I went back to the score and just started again. I decided I would devote a year to rewriting it and see what happens.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Jonny Greenwood: why the future is classical<\/a><\/p>\n

Three things strike me about the score he sends me. The first, most apparent when the violin soloist (Daniel Pioro in Manchester) leads a kind of \u201ccall and response\u201d passage, is that Greenwood uses a classic \u201cnote row\u201d. All 12 semitones are repeated in strict order, even if inverted or reversed, a composing technique pioneered in the early 20th century by Arnold Schoenberg. \u201cYes, finger on the pulse of classical music there,\u201d Greenwood quips. \u201cOnly 100 years out of date.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Radiohead<\/p>\n

Radiohead in 1995, from left: Phil Selway, Jonny Greenwood, Thom Yorke, Colin Greenwood and Ed O\u2019Brien<\/p>\n

GIE KNAEPS\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

The second is that sometimes the conductor is instructed to move the baton in a slow horizontal sweep. As the baton points to individual musicians they start to play. \u201cI wanted to get away from the inflexibility of the bar line,\u201d Greenwood says, \u201cbut also to give the conductor scope to be more musical \u2014 not just beating time but playing the orchestra like an instrument.\u201d<\/p>\n

And the third point of interest? Greenwood says that when he wrote the piece he had the names of all 68 orchestral players on the wall in front of him. \u201cI always feel that I\u2019m writing not for an orchestra but about an orchestra,\u201d he says. \u201cI am inspired by talking to orchestral musicians. They are all individuals. They all have their own personalities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The teenage Greenwood was an orchestral player. \u201cYes, back of the violas in the Thames Vale Youth Orchestra,\u201d he says, \u201cdreading the moment when the conductor would say, \u2018Can we hear the violas on their own?\u2019\u201d He also did A-level music at Abingdon, the independent school in Oxfordshire where the five members of Radiohead first met. \u201cI learnt how to harmonise Bach chorales and it\u2019s been very useful,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

He then enrolled on a music course at what was Oxford Poly. That didn\u2019t last long. A few weeks into his course the band (then called On a Friday) landed an EMI recording contract and Greenwood\u2019s music student days were over \u2014 officially anyway. In reality he never stopped absorbing musical influences, pop and classical, and he still hasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel I got more experience of orchestral musicians in my early days with Radiohead than I would if I\u2019d stayed at college,\u201d he says. \u201cWe got string players involved in our sessions. I would write out stuff on manuscript paper for them to play, and they flattered me so nicely and gave me so much good advice that I thought, I shouldn\u2019t be scared of this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Radiohead: \u2018The wheels had come off a bit. We had to stop\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

From his teenage years he was hooked on the apocalyptic scores of Penderecki and the ecstatic, complex modes of Olivier Messiaen, and he is still smitten by 20th-century French music. \u201cI love Henri Dutilleux\u2019s string music,\u201d he says. \u201cSo beautiful. And I\u2019m still exploring harmony. I\u2019ve just been trying to get to grips with Neapolitan sixths. I guess I\u2019m always dithering between David Bowie\u2019s advice to get slightly out of your depth, because that\u2019s when you do your most interesting work, and Clint Eastwood\u2019s remark in Dirty Harry: \u2018A man\u2019s gotta know his limitations.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

What are his limitations? \u201cI still feel like I\u2019m trapped in pop song thinking,\u201d he says. \u201cAll my ideas seem to have a natural three or four-minute span, and I find it daunting to expand them. I guess that\u2019s because I grew up in an era when if you wrote a song more than four minutes long you worried that you would turn into Genesis and end up singing about unicorns.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Leonardo<\/p>\n

Greenwood\u2019s score for One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Chase Infiniti, is nominated at next month\u2019s Oscars<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

The chief outlet for Greenwood\u2019s orchestral creativity has been film scores, particularly for the movies of Paul Thomas Anderson. He has now collaborated on six of the American director\u2019s intense psychological dramas, from There Will Be Blood in 2007 to last year\u2019s One Battle After Another. \u201cThe bit I like best,\u201d Greenwood says, \u201cis the start of the process, when you are talking with the director about underlying themes and how the music can enhance them \u2014 what sort of style and instrumentation and so on. You feel like you are in a sweet shop; you can pick anything, go in any direction. It\u2019s a shame, in a way, when the process has to solidify and the music becomes fixed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Does he feel, as John Williams once said, that a film composer is like a magpie, pinching styles from across music history to suit whatever the movie requires? \u201cWell, I do come across many creatively successful people who seem to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of their field,\u201d he replies. \u201cPaul [Thomas Anderson] is like that, he has seen thousands of films and analysed them all. And it feeds his own creativity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Isn\u2019t that rather like saying there\u2019s nothing new in art, just new ways of arranging old ideas? \u201cWell, I had a teacher at school who said that if you steal ideas from one or two people that\u2019s plagiarism, but if you steal from three or more that counts as inspiration. That\u2019s good advice, I think.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Jonny<\/p>\n

Greenwood curates a Late Night Prom culminating in the world premiere of his Horror vacui in 2019<\/p>\n

MARK ALLAN<\/p>\n

How specific is Anderson about what sort of music he wants? \u201cHe will say things like, \u2018This is a big adventure scene so we need some big-ass strings at this point,\u2019\u201d Greenwood replies. \u201cThe nightmare is when he has used some amazing piece as his temporary working soundtrack and he wants you to write something similar. I remember for There Will Be Blood he was using part of Brahms\u2019s Violin Concerto. We agreed that probably it would be best if I didn\u2019t try to imitate that so he used the Brahms in the finished film.\u201d<\/p>\n

All this orchestral and film composition was put on hold last year when, after a seven-year hiatus, Radiohead reunited and embarked on a 20-concert European tour. Did Greenwood feel he was stepping back into an earlier version of himself? \u201cIt was great to revisit songs that we always felt were good and to find lots of other people now agree with us,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd it was really nice to be playing and listening to Thom [Yorke] again. But I found it strange not to be doing anything new on the tour. I guess we are all doing new music elsewhere now so that\u2019s where our creative energies are going.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 How Radiohead reinvented rock (with help from a composer)<\/a><\/p>\n

So a new Radiohead album is unlikely? \u201cI\u2019ve no idea,\u201d Greenwood says. \u201cI mean, I\u2019m surprised that the tour actually happened and that we all enjoyed it so much. But venues get booked so far in advance. To do another we would have to decide now, and even then it wouldn\u2019t happen for 18 months.\u201d<\/p>\n

The tour wasn\u2019t without its controversy. Pro-Palestinian activists called for a boycott, citing a gig Radiohead played in Tel Aviv in 2017. Greenwood in particular has longstanding links with Israel. He is married to an Israeli artist, Sharona Katan, whose nephew served in the Israel Defense Forces and was killed in the Gaza war. He also has a performing partnership with the Israeli singer Dudu Tassa. They have performed together in Israel and were due to give concerts in the UK last year until the threat of protests led to the dates being cancelled<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very hard to talk about this,\u201d Greenwood says, \u201cbut I think music and art should be above and beyond political concerns. You know I made an album [Jarak Qaribak, released in 2023] involving Israeli, Iraqi, Egyptian and Syrian musicians? If I\u2019m supposed to stop working with musicians because I dislike their governments then I wouldn\u2019t work with any of them. The fact is, what defines us as musicians isn\u2019t our nationalities. But that point doesn\u2019t seem to get through.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aside from that issue, Greenwood\u2019s life seems blissful. He divides his time between family homes in Oxford and Le Marche in Italy, where he explores old churches and their organs. \u201cSome of them have double black keys, so F sharp and G flat are actually different pitches,\u201d he exclaims. On a farm called Shufra di Shufra<\/a> he has also established a successful olive oil business, about which he talks as passionately as he does about Neapolitan sixths and Dutilleux string quartets.<\/p>\n

And the accolades keep on coming. His music for One Battle After Another<\/a> is in the running for best original score at next month\u2019s Oscars, the third time he has been nominated. Will he attend? \u201cNot sure,\u201d he says. \u201cI went last time and they took me aside and said, \u2018We\u2019ve got something for you.\u2019 I was expecting a lavish goody bag. They gave me a chocolate shaped like an Oscar.\u201d
Jonny Greenwood\u2019s Violin Concerto is performed at Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, on Feb 26, halle.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jonny Greenwood is clearly eager to meet. We had agreed a rendezvous at a pub near Oxford station…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304827,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,278],"class_list":{"0":"post-304826","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}