page_title: Jonny Greenwood
section_title: Solo work
hierarchical_section_title: Jonny Greenwood / Career / Solo work
caption_attribution_description: English: Jonny Greenwood and London Contemporary Orchestra in Geneva (2015)
context_page_description: Jonathan Richard Guy Greenwood is an English musician and composer. He is the lead guitarist and keyboardist of the alternative rock band Radiohead, and has written a number of film scores.
  Along with his elder brother, Radiohead bassist Colin, Greenwood attended Abingdon School in Abingdon near Oxford, England, where he met the future band members. The youngest of the group, Greenwood was the last to join, first playing keyboards and harmonica but soon becoming lead guitarist. He abandoned a degree in music when the band signed to Parlophone; their debut single "Creep" was distinguished by Greenwood's aggressive guitar work. Radiohead have since achieved critical acclaim and sold over 30 million albums. Along with the other members of Radiohead, Greenwood was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019.
  Greenwood has been named one of the greatest guitarists of all time by publications including Rolling Stone. A multi-instrumentalist, Greenwood has also played instruments including bass guitar, piano, viola, and drums. He is a prominent player of the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument.
context_section_description: In 2003, Greenwood released his first solo work, Bodysong, the soundtrack for the documentary of the same name. The soundtrack incorporates guitar, jazz, and classical music. In March 2004, Greenwood's first work for orchestra, Smear, was premiered by the London Sinfonietta. In May, he was appointed composer-in-residence to the BBC Concert Orchestra, for whom he wrote "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" (2005), which won the Radio 3 Listeners' Award at the 2006 BBC British Composer Awards. The piece was inspired by radio static and the elaborate, dissonant tone clusters of Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960). Greenwood wrote the piece by recording individual tones on viola, then manipulating and overdubbing them in Pro Tools. As part of his prize Greenwood received £10,000 from the PRS Foundation towards a commission for a new orchestral work.
  
  Greenwood composed the score for the 2007 film There Will Be Blood by director Paul Thomas Anderson. The soundtrack won an award at the Critics' Choice Awards and the Best Film Score trophy in the Evening Standard British Film Awards for 2007. As the soundtrack contains excerpts from "Popcorn Superhet Receiver", an earlier piece, it was ineligible for an Academy Award nomination. Rolling Stone named There Will Be Blood the best film of the decade and described the score as "a sonic explosion that reinvented what film music could be". In 2016, film composer Hans Zimmer said the score was the one that had most "stood out to him" in the past decade, describing it as "recklessly, crazily beautiful".
  Greenwood curated a compilation album of reggae tracks, Jonny Greenwood Is the Controller, released by Trojan Records in March 2007. The album features mostly 70s roots and dub tracks from artists including Lee "Scratch" Perry, Joe Gibbs, and Linval Thompson; the title references Thompson's track "Dread Are the Controller". In 2008, Greenwood wrote the title music for Adam Buxton's sketch show pilot meeBOX. In February 2010, he debuted a new composition, "Doghouse", at the BBC's Maida Vale Studios. Greenwood wrote the piece in hotels and dressing rooms while on tour with Radiohead. He expanded "Doghouse" into the score for the Japanese film Norwegian Wood, released later that year.
  In 2011, Greenwood scored We Need to Talk About Kevin, directed by Lynne Ramsay, using instruments including a wire-strung harp. In 2012, he worked with Anderson again, composing the score for The Master. On 13 March 2012, Greenwood and Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, one of Greenwood's greatest influences, released an album comprising Penderecki's 1960s compositions Polymorphia and Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, Greenwood's "Popcorn Superhet Receiver", and a new work by Greenwood, "48 Responses to Polymorphia". In 2012, Greenwood accepted a three-month residency with the Australian Chamber Orchestra in Sydney and composed a new piece, "Water". In 2013, Greenwood, Yorke, and other artists contributed music to The UK Gold, a documentary about tax avoidance in the UK. The soundtrack was released free in February 2015 through the online audio platform SoundCloud.
  Greenwood collaborated with Anderson again on the soundtrack for the film Inherent Vice (2014); it features a new version of an unreleased Radiohead song, "Spooks", performed by Greenwood and two members of Supergrass. In 2014, Greenwood performed with the London Contemporary Orchestra, performing selections from his soundtracks alongside new compositions. Greenwood wrote the music for another of Anderson's films, Phantom Thread, in 2017; it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score and earned Greenwood his sixth Ivor Novello award. In the same year, he reunited with Ramsay to score her film You Were Never Really Here. At the 2019 Proms, Greenwood debuted his composition "Horror vacui" for solo violin and 68 string instruments. That September, Greenwood launched a record label, Octatonic Records, to release contemporary classical music by soloists and small groups. Greenwood wrote that he started the label to ca
caption: Greenwood performing with the London Contemporary Orchestra in Geneva, 2015
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