The Australian Chamber Orchestra will be performing Jonny Greenwood’s ‘Popcorn Superhet Receiver’ in May next year. The Australian published an interview with the Radiohead guitarist and BBC’s Composer-in-Residence.
Greenwood says he loves the variables of live performance: the “slight inconsistencies” of any ensemble, the idiosyncracies of musicians, the musical imperfections that make them “humans, not robotic things”.
“What I learned was that a room full of strings playing a tune or just making a sound is like nothing else,” he says. “You can’t even record it, really. You can’t reproduce the experience of sitting in a room and hearing these sounds, and that’s what I keep coming back to. It’s all about the live event for me.”
He recalls how he was once transfixed while sitting in the audience during a Penderecki cello concerto. “I just remember finding it hard to believe it was only a stage with strings in front of me. I kept wondering where all the electronics were coming from, where are all these textures were, but it was all just being made from these old instruments.”
Among all the instruments Greenwood plays, it’s his fascination with the ondes Martenot that stands out. “It’s surprisingly easy, it feels very natural to play,” he says. “What appeals to me is that it was invented with the intention of making music from electricity in quite a pure way. That was the motivation, at least as it seems to me. It was just done very well the very first time it was tried. The first one was made in 1928, it’s a really early idea and they just made it very musical.”
Greenwood has great faith in the potential for contemporary classical music to evolve. “An orchestra is a piece of technology like anything else,” he says. “In the same way as there’s still life in the piano or the guitar, there certainly is in an orchestra, because it’s a collection of musicians, and the variety of sounds they can make is limitless.”
Greenwood wrote Popcorn Superhet Receiver by playing the string instruments into a digital editing program before transcribing the lot with a pen and paper. However he warns that computers have a way of stifling creativity, and is reluctant to rely too much on electronic aids.
“You try and make things sound good on a computer and everything ends up quite sort of traditional,” he says. “It leads you down certain paths, which can be nice, but it’s like anything, like Photoshop: you end up working in certain ways even though it’s meant to be limitless. You find yourselves using the same sort of route.”
Greenwood seems to enjoy finding a balance between the electronic and physical worlds. He tells how he was once trying to write a score while on tour with Radiohead. At the time, he was becoming frustrated with the mistakes he was making on the page, so he went off to a shop for supplies.
“I needed to get some scissors and glue,” he says. “I came back and I was pasting it on and I suddenly realised that’s where the computer thing comes from, of ‘cut, copy and paste’. So I was for the first time in my life doing an analog version of something I was used to doing on a computer.” He pauses, then continues in a softer voice: “I kind of like it when technology goes backwards like that.”
Radiohead news on this day..
- Radiohead’s Wall Of Ice EP: more clues – 2009
- Radiohead Live in Mansfield [live report] – 2008
- Couleur3 broadcasts Rock’oz Arenes – 2006
- Thom Yorke in Australia’s Sun-Herald – 2006
- Thom posting from Lausanne – 2006
- RADIOHEAD’S HOSTILE TAKEOVER – 2003
- YOUR QUESTIONS FOR RADIOHEAD – 2003
- RADIOHEAD KICK OFF N-A TOUR WITH DIFFERENT SET – 2003
