From 17 October, music by Jonny Greenwood appears at the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen as part of Am I doing it right?, choreographed by Carling Talcott-Steenstra for the triple-bill Koreorama no.2, the company’s new choreographic laboratory. The ballet, which is in rep until 6 March 2025, uses music from Greenwood’s large-scale string orchestra works Popcorn Superhet Receiver and 48 Responses to Polymorphia, as well as selections from his score to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.
48 Responses is a 19-minute response to Krzysztof Penderecki's 1962 masterpiece Polymorphia for 48 string instruments. Both summon an astonishing array of effects from the strings, including microtones, slapping the instruments, and playing on the tailpiece and behind the bridge, creating flickering harmonic clouds and scurrying, insectoid textures. Penderecki, who died in 2021, has been a powerful influence on Greenwood’s music since the early 1990s; the composer conducted his own work alongside Marek Mos and AUKSO’s premiere of Greenwood’s piece in Poland in 2011.
Popcorn Superhet Receiver (2005), commissioned by BBC Radio 3, was Greenwood’s first large-scale work, and germinates many of the stylistic and harmonic features found in 48 Responses to Polymorphia and his violin concerto Horror Vacui; indeed sections from it were later reworked for There Will Be Blood. The 18-minute work for 34 strings, cast in four parts, is crafted from luscious swells of strings and unsettling dissonances. It is inspired by Greenwood’s recollections of background noise and mechanical drones from his childhood:
…as a kid, the family car only ever had the same four cassettes in it…On long journeys, when the family refused to hear them yet again, I used to listen to the engine noise, and found that if I concentrated hard enough I could hear the music from the cassettes still playing in the background. I’d do this for hours, until I could nearly hear every detail fighting to be heard through the drone of the car.
Both works have previously appeared on the dance stage. The Australian Ballet danced extracts from 48 Responses in 2013, choreographed by Benjamin Stuart-Carberry, as part of Polymorphia. Popcorn Superhet Receiver was choreographed by Goyo Montero for El Sueño de la Razón, inspired by Goya, for Staatstheater Nuremberg Ballet in 2010; it was also basis of the Stephen Petronio Company’s 25th-anniversary show Ghost Town, which premiered at New York City’s Joyce Theatre in 2010.