Film Score in Mainstream Media Alert: The New Yorker’s classical music critic Alex Ross has lovingly written about Johnny Greenwood’s hynoptic music for There Will Be Blood and it’s classical piece doppleganger, “Popcorn Superhet Receiver”.

Much lauded by big city print critics, but maligned by the Academy Awards because of pre-existing material (classics and Greenwood’s own), There Will Be Blood is one of the most effective soundtracks of 2007.

Ross examines the work, and despite painting modern film music as dishwater (and sometimes you think he’s not far off), understands what a good score means to a film — something many acid-tongued crix know little about.

“There may be no scarcer commodity in modern Hollywood than a distinctive and original film score. Most soundtracks lean so heavily on a few preprocessed musical devices—those synthetic swells of strings and cymbals, urging us to swoon in tandem with the cheerleader in love—that when a composer adopts a more personal language the effect is revelatory: an entire dimension of the film experience is liberated from cliché.”

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