There Will Be Music

Last night I watched There Will Be Blood. It was incredible. Daniel Day Lewis was amazing as oil man Daniel Plainview. I can fully see why he won best actor for his performance. However, what struck me the most was not the acting, but the music. The story takes place mostly during the turn of the century, early 1900s. Classical music during that time was in a very strange state. It was music that didn't really fit in anywhere. It wasn't pleasing to listen to and, I imagine, offered those who played it no aesthetic satisfaction. The Avant Garde movement in classical music was marked by strange techniques in composition, new and often unpalatable sounds, and an overarching sense of one-upmanship. Some composer would invent a strange technique, employ it in his compositions and gain brief fame. Other composers would scramble to outdo him by being louder, harsher, and just plain weirder! Composers of the Avant Garde were crazed by this notion. All concern for beauty and musicality were thrown out the window and replaced by obsession with these new ideas. For instance, a popular compositional technique during this time was the use of "tone clusters". The composer would notate that the players play any pitch of their choosing between a set pitch range. The result was a howling, eerie, volatile sound. It was music for music geeks (which is why the idea of it very much intrigues me), but it just wasn't pretty.

So what does all this have to do with the movie? First, I love that they chose to use classical music from the time period in which the story took place. This is a music without a home. Nobody listens to this music for enjoyment. It is studied in music history classrooms, cringed at, and then forgotten. However, it seemed very much at home as a backdrop to the oil crazed exploits of Daniel Plainview. Which leads me to the most striking reason I loved the music in this movie. It represented the main character perfectly. In a general sense, the whole idea of the Avant Garde composers clawing at each other to see who could be the best is a direct reflection of the outlandish and sometimes heinous behavior of Plainview. Each time, he would do something more shocking than the last time as long as it got him what he wanted; be it oil, or the pipeline to carry the oil. Under the microscope, the music itself is an auditory representation of the main character. The film music opens with a large tone cluster. Strings play indeterminate pitches slowly moving to a unison strain, only to reverse and widen back into the horrible howl from before. This happens multiple times in the film. The aural instability one experiences represents Daniel Plainview's own emotional odyssey. One minute, he's a smooth talking oil man convincing an entire town to drill for oil. He's in unison. The next, he's flying off the handle at a Standard oil man who barely makes a comment about his son. It was brilliance.

I don't like classical music from the early twentieth century. It isn't pleasant to hear. But this wasn't a pleasant story. It was a very real story, made only more real by the superb musical score chosen to accompany it. An unpleasant, but perfect fit.