Alex Ross on Greenwood's "There Will Be Blood" Score

From The New Yorker:

That mood of loss may explain why the work has such a powerful effect in “There Will Be Blood,” which, beyond the melodrama of Daniel Plainview’s external rise and internal collapse, shows a primeval American landscape on the brink of violent transformation. English composers from Elgar and Vaughan Williams onward have lingered lovingly over musical depictions of pastoral hills and fields, implicitly resisting the march of progress. Greenwood, too, writes the music of an injured Earth; if the smeared string glissandos on the soundtrack suggest liquid welling up from underground, the accompanying dissonances communicate a kind of interior, inanimate pain. The cellos cry out most wrenchingly when Plainview scratches his name on a claim, preparing to bleed the land

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