Above: Daniel Plainview takes his injured son H.W. to safety after the explosion.
The night before I read my essay “Part Notes” at KGB Bar as part of SVA’s D-Crit Reading Series, I found myself stealing a free few hours to go see Paul Thomas Anderson’s breathtaking new film, There Will Be Blood.
About halfway through the film, there’s a gas explosion at one of Daniel Plainview’s derricks, and his adopted son H.W. is thrown back and hits his head from the blast. I was so emotionally engrossed in their relationship that for several minutes I did not realize that that the music playing beneath the scene was Arvo Pärt’s “Fratres,” the very piece of Pärt’s that’s the subject of “Part Notes.” And it’s not just any version of the piece: it’s the version I first heard, recorded on Tabula Rasa with Gideon Kremer on violin and Keith Jarrett on the prepared piano. My concerns about the datedness of an essay from several years ago faded: here was a bracing, delicate, and original use of Pärt’s thrilling piece. It seemed as relevant to me as ever.
Most of There Will Be Blood is scored by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and it suits the content perfectly. But during the film’s three hours someone—maybe Greenwood, maybe Anderson—added additional classical pieces to frame major actions and ideas. Brahams’s Violin Concerto figures into the score, along with the work of a few others. Pärt’s piece plays almost in its entirety, its three acts dividing the scenes surrounding the explosion at the derrick, the resulting fire that burns through the night, and the difficult morning that follows.
The skittering of Kremer’s violin is perfectly suited to the anxiety of this moment, and his phrasing of the notes at the highest end of the violin’s range reminds us not just of films like Psycho where these notes correspond to danger, but also hint at the specifics of H.W.’s head trauma: by morning, the ringing in his ears will fade as he falls deaf.
Meanwhile, Jarrett’s prepared piano growls in thudding counterpoint. The prepared piano is like the derrick, a broken machine. Its rhythm is slow and plodding, like a piston sinking into the ground. Its low voice is the voice of Daniel, the father. And its dissonance is one we feel in the dramatic action of the scene: as H.W. struggles through the night, his father’s teeth glitter behind an oil-smeared grin as he watches geiser burn. This black gold is all his.
Even the emptiness of the piece and of this particular arrangement plays a role. In the morning after, the earth is scorched, the boy is sick, and the camp is shaken. Much of this storytelling is done with no words, simply the action on screen and the evocative movement of “Fratres.”
Correction: I recently got a note from reader Stephan Wurster: “I don’t think that was Gidon Kremer’s version of ‘Fratres’ (which is my favorite as well). I used to play the cello a long time ago and for me that definitely was a cello version.” Wurster suggested it might be a recording by the Orchestra of Flanders, I Fiamminghi, conducted by Rudolf Werthen. My interest piqued, I phoned a friend who has some connections at Paramount. It turns out Wurster’s hunch was correct. Hats off to him, and my apologies for pointing readers to the wrong place. Pick up the real recording used in the film here.
