"Greenwood’s Strings" by Jake Ahlquist
I’ve never had an office, apart from the sad, windowless closet I occupied as a grad student. I don’t own a desk. Some days I work at my kitchen table, but more often I sit on my couch or in bed with my computer on my lap. Music, rather than location, is what grounds me as I write. But I am fussy about what I listen to. I can’t handle lyrics, or even voices, when I’m working on fiction, and so I have turned to film scores: Jonny Greenwood’s music for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread.
There Will Be Blood is the harsher, darker work. It has few of the sonic hallmarks one might expect from a mythic tale in the same tradition as Giant or The Searchers. Instead of whistles, banjos, or country-fried vocals, Greenwood suffuses the grand orchestral sound of classic Westerns with modern dread. His early 20th Century California is dissonant, threatening, and he uses shrieking, droning strings to conjure the film’s central figure, Daniel Plainview, a primeval monster who crawls to his fortune through the muck of capitalism.
The title of the album’s first track, “Open Spaces,” might describe the powerful interval at the song’s core or Anderson’s vision of the American West. I prefer to think of it as an invocation, a command to spill out the strange and mysterious contents of my mind into a Word document until my cranium is void. It’s almost too easy to see the connection between oil speculation and fiction writing. The blank page is the writer’s desert wasteland: nothing grows, little survives. Riches are never guaranteed, but if you tap the right spot, liquid gold might just surge up from a hidden reserve and flood the barren surface.
The score can be terrifying, but a kind of melancholy love theme recurs on three compositions: “Prospectors Arrive,” “Oil,” and “Prospectors Quartet.” It’s no accident that the tracks where this aching three-note air asserts itself are all named after Daniel Plainview’s work, which is his deepest love. On the album’s more discordant tracks, we feel the violence of Plainview’s monomania, but when this love theme plays we hear the sweet sound of opportunity ringing in his ears. Is there a more American love story than the tale of a monkish genius pursuing his trade to the exclusion of all else? These tracks are especially motivating on the days when my will to persevere is at its weakest. Love your work, I think to myself while tapping away, and one day it will love you back.
Greenwood’s score for Phantom Thread is also anchored by variations on a minor-key love theme, this one named after the film itself. Arranged in turn as a grand overture, a chamber piece for violin and upright piano, a menacing baroque featuring a full orchestra, and finally as a dueling violin duet, the insistent reprisal of this title composition hints at the film’s cyclical structure, in which two lovers—a master dressmaker, Reynolds Woodcock, and his model and muse Alma Elson—jockey for control over their craft, their house, and one another. In its final rendition, two violins scream furiously at one another until they are spent, the final notes resolving into quiet harmony.
Although the score for Phantom Thread forgoes percussion instruments, it draws on the percussive potential of strings and piano to playful, erotically suggestive effect. The film features no nudity or sex, but the thumping and patter of Greenwood’s strings are enough to make a listener blush. And while all these raunchy descriptors might imply that this is exactly the wrong music to aid one’s productivity (as anyone who’s tried concentrating in spite of amorous noises from the next apartment can attest), I find that the score for Phantom Thread often leads to my most generative bursts of writing. It sets a tempo.
Greenwood himself has a brilliant ear for the life of dresses. A track named “The Hem” calls to mind the bump and weave of a Singer sewing machine, the pop of a needle and the soft squeak of thread drawn through stretched fabric. On another track, “The Tailor of Fitzrovia," I hear a woman humming to herself in approval as she tries on a beautiful gown for the first time, her jewelry tinkling while she adjusts in front of the mirror. I can see Woodcock’s team of assistants putting on this record when the boss is away, and can imagine myself co-working with them in the back of the tailor’s shop, all of us trimming and stitching and hemming to the rhythm of the music.
It’s fitting that my own novel-in-progress is set in Hollywood. My story doesn’t resemble There Will Be Blood in form or content, but like Anderson’s film it is a story about family, business, and the evil that can lie at the nexus of those two worlds. I wouldn’t compare my book to the film or score of Phantom Thread, either, except to say that it, too, draws much of its dramatic energy from a toxic and unyielding romantic connection. That said, I hope Greenwood’s influence will be felt in some small way by the reader, that his chords and rhythms will have wormed their way subconsciously into my work. If not, I still owe his strings a debt of gratitude. They have tethered me to my keyboard long enough to get a bit of writing done.
Jake Ahlquist completed his MFA at Temple University. He lives in South Philadelphia.
