Jonny Greenwood

In Paul Thomas Anderson's films, music is not just significant -- it's often front and center, impossible to ignore. Anderson prominently featured Aimee Mann's emotive ballads in "Magnolia" and Jon Brion's pump-organ symphonies in "Punch-Drunk Love," and his use of music reaches new heights of inspiration in "There Will Be Blood." In this visceral tale of greed, hypocrisy and sociopathic hatred in oil-rich, turn-of-the-20th-century California, the toxic sentiments seem to bubble up from (and seep back into) the volatile orchestral score by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, working in movies for the first time.

"It was a far freer musical experience than I expected," Greenwood said. "There were no real click tracks, no points to hit or duck at exactly the right second. It felt like we were always recording minutes of music, rather than seconds."

Greenwood, whose band's "In Rainbows" is one of the year's best-reviewed albums, moonlights as composer in residence for the BBC Concert Orchestra.

Horror films were a reference point for "Blood," Greenwood said. He and Anderson also discussed "early American church music and what that would have sounded like in these isolated towns." Daniel Day-Lewis' eyes "were probably the biggest single influence," he said, for the mood of unspoken malice. "But there's also a kid in the middle of the story, so I tried to get some sweetness and hope in the music too."

The score's unnerving dissonance begins with the blast of strings that accompanies the first shot and never lets up. "We were limited to period instruments, but within that we tried to disconcert the viewer," Greenwood said. "It's the sense that something's gone wrong, a broken orchestra. For one cue, we detuned the strings to unplayable slackness. And some of the more conventional chamber stuff has awkward hesitations written into it. I'm really interested in mistakes."

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