Author: Dylan

Ah, that’s good news. Caught by an At Ease reader at the Ether Festival, he also spilled that maybe, just maybe, there’ll be a small tour, similar to the Spain/Portugal 2002 dates, to try out the new material.
At Ease also points out, correctly, that Jonny hinted that he’d like to do a fanclub tour. Hmmm.
(Thanks to At Ease.)

As previously reported, this April begins Jonny’s three-year term as the BBC Concert Orchestra’s Composer in Residence. To commemorate this, a concert will be held on April 23rd featuring the premiere of ‘Superhet Popcorn Receiver’, the first of Jonny’s works commissioned by BBC Radio 3.
The concert will be held at LSO St. Luke’s in London, and ticket prices are a surprisingly reasonable £12.50-£15. See what happens when you venture outside popular music?
Tickets are available online at the LSO web page– there look to be 41 left (click on the balcony- all lower tier seats are sold) , so I’d shag ass if I were you.
(Thanks to “the little birdie” in the LSO Ticket Office.)

As you know, Jonny and the London Sinfonietta performed on both days of this weekend’s Ether Festival. The setlist, if you’d like to call it that, was identical both nights- beginning with Jonny’s 12-minute composition ‘Piano for Children’, described as “an half-tuned childlike piano, cradled by strings, which begins to decay in both time signature and tuning” by one reviewer. It was followed by ‘Smear’, Jonny’s Odnes Martenot composition (which has been played a few times already).
Then, Thom came out and joined Jonny and the Sinfonietta on ‘Arpeggi’, a new song whose lyrics will seem a bit familiar to frequent Radiohead.com visitors. Finally, vocalist Lubna Salame and the Nazareth Orchestra (an amazing band of traditional Arabic musicians- highly recommended) came onstage for a performance of ‘Where Bluebirds Fly’- which had not yet been played live.
Sounds like an amazing evening…
Thankfully, given the, er, “wired” tendencies of concertgoers this day and age, one can already find MP3 audience recordings of said songs. Check your favorite message board or file sharing service- they’re there.
I’ll spare you the offical reviews, which range from mildly interested to negative to glowing, as they always do. Better to decide for yourselves, no?
The official setlist was as follows:
György Ligeti Ramifications
Olivier Messiaen La Fete des belles eaux
Henri Dutilleux Ainsi la Nuit ‘Miroir d’Escape’
Jonny Greenwood Piano for Children
Henri Dutilleux Ainsi la Nuit ‘Litanies’
Mohammed Abdel-Wahab Enta Omri
Interval with screenings of Radiohead TV
Henri Dutilleux Ainsi la Nuit ‘Nocturne’
Jonny Greenwood smear
Farid El-Atrash Tuta
Krystof Penderecki Capriccio
Henri Dutilleux Ainsi la Nuit ‘Litanies 2’
Radiohead Arpeggi and Where Bluebirds Fly
(Thanks to everyone that wrote in…and we mean everyone.)

The below interview with Jonny was published in the Daily Telegraph earlier this week:

As the guitarist with Radiohead, one of the most successful and adventurous rock bands in the world, Jonny Greenwood is used to strutting his stuff for people he doesn’t know in places he’s only heard of. But none of that prepared him for his first encounter, late last year, with the BBC Concert Orchestra, when they tried out the first piece he has written for them as their composer-in-residence. Weeks later, nursing a pint in a pub in Oxford (he lives in a village nearby), Greenwood still seems slightly dazed by the experience.
 
The awed excitement he owns up to feeling as the musicians arrived at the BBC’s Maida Vale studio is almost groupie-ish. “I’m very romantic about Maida Vale and all the great orchestral recordings that have been made there,” says the floppy fringed, studenty-looking character who shelved his music degree three weeks into his first term at Oxford Brookes University after Radiohead signed to Parlophone in 1991.
Fearless experimenter: Jonny Greenwood with the BBC Concert Orchestra
As the Concert Orchestra grappled with Greenwood’s first proper score – a 20-minute sequence inspired partly by radio static and partly by the long, discordant chords in the Polish composer Penderecki’s Threnody For the Victims of Hiroshima – it all got too much.
“As long as I looked down and just listened it was OK,” he decides. “But, if I concentrated on watching all those people spending time on my stuff…” He remembers being almost hypnotised by the presence of a white-haired woman cellist. “That really blew me away. That was when I knew I had to shut my eyes.”
Most unnerving of all was not knowing how a fairly abstract concept, which he had some difficulty scoring, would sound once an orchestra got hold of it. For one thing, Greenwood had never worked with a conductor before.
Although he insists that Robert Ziegler was “great”, it wasn’t like working with his regular band “where you have one-to-one contact with everybody. Here everything had to be done through the conductor.”
And not everything came out right. “The orchestra were great at explaining what they could do and why certain things couldn’t be done. But there was one section where they just burst out laughing because it sounded so wrong, one irritating repetitive chord rather than a burst of hissing white noise. And I had to grin and bear it, and move on to the next part. Which worked, thank goodness.”
It was Greenwood’s fearlessly experimental attitude that first brought him to the attention of Radio 3 controller Roger Wright. Wright heard a piece called Smear, which Greenwood wrote for the 2003 Fuse festival in Leeds. It featured the onde martinot – one of the earliest electronic instruments – and a small string section from the London Sinfonietta.
“It was more of a sketch than a finished piece,” Wright says, “But it had a strong sense of colour and a personal voice. I could tell that he was trying to create a new sound world.”
Wright’s decision to offer Greenwood a gig with the BBC Concert Orchestra was made “because they are the most flexible of our groups” and also because Anne Dudley’s three-year tenure was coming to an end. Greenwood didn’t hesitate. “My first thought was, ‘I’m going to get my hands on an orchestra and all the sounds in the BBC archive.” He hopes in a future commission to re-model some classic TV and radio theme tunes with the Concert Orchestra.
The announcement of his appointment coincided with a public outcry from a group styling themselves the “friends of Radio 3”, who denounced what they saw as the network’s betrayal of its heritage.
If Greenwood was their intended target – and Wright doesn’t believe it – the “friends” picked the wrong enemy. Classical music was Greenwood’s original passion. He learned the viola at home in Oxford years before he picked up the guitar at 16. His first band was the Thames Vale Youth Orchestra, and he still remembers how “the first time I heard a proper orchestra, the sound just blew me away.”
Unlike the army of pop-crazed youth who have allegedly given up on orchestral music, Greenwood insists that “it’s not finished at all. The traditional orchestra is still a magical group of instruments. Despite the promise of samples, there’s a lot that only an orchestra can do.”
His favourite orchestrator currently is Penderecki, but his first big hero was Messaien. “It was like a pop thing. Being at school and realising he was still alive, I equated him with the bands I liked at the time, the Fall and Sonic Youth.”
The indie-classical connection was, he concedes, partly “a reaction against the more prissy kids who were studying music with me whose idea of pop music was Enya and the Beatles, and who couldn’t understand what was great about Joy Division.”
It also encouraged an unusually partisan approach to the classical canon. “I had that schoolboy thing of being either passionately into things or against them.” Bach he found epic and grand; Mozart, by contrast, was merely “impressive, not moving”. Greenwood strikingly compares this to the way he “loved the Pixies but never got into AC/DC”.
Over the past year, juggling his extensive interests in rock and contemporary classical music has become his life’s work. Days after his first workshop with the Concert Orchestra, he was being filmed in a band led by Jarvis Cocker for the next Harry Potter film.
Once he’s sorted out his first BBC commission, or maybe even before, he’ll be back in the studio to record another Radiohead album. He and the band’s vocalist Thom Yorke are then scheduled to appear together at the Warp label’s Ether festival on the South Bank on March 28.
Greenwood has organised an evening of startling variety, which promises, among many other things, arrangements of Radiohead songs performed by the London Sinfonietta, a fresh take on Smear, and a new piano piece Greenwood has just begun writing for the Sinfonietta’s pianist John Constable.
He describes this mighty splurge as “an overreaction” to Radiohead’s decision to take six months off after their last tour. Greenwood doesn’t do time off. During a previous break in band activities in 2002, he devised a soundtrack for an art movie, Body Song. This led to his getting the Smear commission from the curator of Fuse, Django Bates.
Despite all this extra-curricular activity, Greenwood is still “100% committed to Radiohead” and says that the solitary work of composition is “nowhere near as much fun as being in a band”. And he is particularly anxious to get Thom Yorke’s feedback to his first BBC piece.
“I’m planning to play it to him as soon as I see him.” And if Yorke says he doesn’t like it? “I’ll believe him! He won’t though. He’ll find what’s good about it and highlight that.”

Thanks to Jimmy for sending this in…

Ah, actual news…
At Ease is reporting that Jonny was on the official board, dropping a few hints here and there.

Jonny Greenwood was on the official message board typing on his Apple (“you must know we’re all macpod bores”) today. Jonny was asked a lot of questions on the upcoming Easter weekend, where he will be playing the Royal Festival Hall.
Someone asked if Jonny is going to be conducting and another if he’s still playing the ondes. Jonny: “Not conducting.. don’t have the steeley glare. *frown* see ? But looking forward to it yes very much. I think I’m playing it (Ondes Martenot) at the concerts this weekend.”
And if he minds that so many Radiohead fans are going to the shows. Jonny: “Not at all…why would we ? There’ll be a couple of radiohead songs after all. As long us they’re up for other things too…”
Some on Radiohead’s current rehearsing:
Jonny: “we’re all kind of *hungry* for new new new at the moment. Good songs..
…And if we can expect anything new soon: “Well, we’ll have to do *something* with all the new songs..”
And then touring…
Jonny: “A fanclub tour’d be a blast… I’d need to persuade everyone though. (…) I want to go back to Hong Kong very much. And we must go to s america, iceland, and e. europe too..” On the Iceland show Jonny said: “oooh came so close last year…..but want to and still talking about the place all the time. shite answer i know..”
And then some triangle advice. Jonny: “forget it.too stressful….288 bars rest, one hit. What if you’re early ? What if you’re LATE ?”
Finally…. someone asked if he’s celebrating Easter: ‘no, i’ll be in a concert with a sweat on. but happpy easter to you! He died for our sins, you know. Have an egg on me. better go soon… still more music to print out. Hope it sounds ok, so hard to guess till the rehearsals. (…) Well, the music for the weekend’s all printed now…too late to change now….aaaagh!

Thanks to At Ease.

Mel from w.a.s.t.e. was kind enough to send along some more information about Jonny’s upcoming performance at Ether 2005:
Following the success of its sold-out concerts for the last two ETHER festivals, the London Sinfonietta returns for two evenings of experimentation, collaboration and cross-genre juxtaposition on 27 and 28 March 2005. The concerts include traditional Arabic song, new music from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke, plus pieces by pioneering classical composers Ligeti, Penderecki and Messiaen, chosen by Greenwood as music which has inspired him and Radiohead.
Radiohead Television will also be screened throughout the night, featuring video, animations and music from the band’s Hail to the Thief as well as unreleased tracks.
For those lucky duckies with tickets for the show, don’t forget to sneak in cameras and a pen and pad, so you can furious scribble notes to later send to us.