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Editorial Reviews
Original soundtrack to Oscar-nominated writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's 2012 film. The music was composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. The soundtrack comprises 11 compositions by Greenwood along with four recordings from the movie's era. Performers include the London Contemporary Orchestra, AUKSO Chamber Orchestra, and Ella Fitzgerald, among others. This is the second Anderson film that Greenwood has scored. Their previous collaboration was the critically praised soundtrack for 2007's Academy Award-winning There Will Be Blood.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely sublime and haunting film score for one of the most anticipated films of the year
September 15, 2012
Format:Audio CD|Amazon Verified Purchase
For those not yet in the know, The Master is director Paul Thomas Anderson's latst film, one which - at least according to quotes I've read from Anderson - tells a tale which bears similarities to Scientology and its leader L. Ron Hubbard. Not surprisingly, even before release, the movie has stirred up its share of controversy.
But on to the music.... released before the film and a joy to hear. Jonny Greenwood, of Radiohead fame, has done an impressive job creating the score.
The first piece, Overtones, is a lovely classical introduction, and weaves throughout the rest of the album, at least in bits and pieces. Another highlight is the glorious Ella Fitzgerald singing of a man she "shouldn't see" in Get Thee Behind Me Satan. The theme, desire and ambivalence, is captured in her inimitable style - for this piece it is smooth and languorous. As wonderful as this song is, I confess to a special fondness for Changing Partners, sung by Helen Forrest. It has such yearning and passion! I listen to it repeatedly.
Accurate to the timeline of the film, set in the 50s,the music is sublime - sensual, haunting, and with undercurrents of sadness and mystery. Perhaps "bittersweet" best captures the overall feeling. At times, it seems reverent. The vocal selections mix well with the instrumental compositions.
Film scores are tricky. When done well, they add depth and resonance to movies. But at their worst, they are jarring, unrelated to a film's theme, and unbalanced. I'll leave it to you to decide whether you think the music works with the movie. My take is that this is an album which stands solidly on its own, not to be missed.
But on to the music.... released before the film and a joy to hear. Jonny Greenwood, of Radiohead fame, has done an impressive job creating the score.
The first piece, Overtones, is a lovely classical introduction, and weaves throughout the rest of the album, at least in bits and pieces. Another highlight is the glorious Ella Fitzgerald singing of a man she "shouldn't see" in Get Thee Behind Me Satan. The theme, desire and ambivalence, is captured in her inimitable style - for this piece it is smooth and languorous. As wonderful as this song is, I confess to a special fondness for Changing Partners, sung by Helen Forrest. It has such yearning and passion! I listen to it repeatedly.
Accurate to the timeline of the film, set in the 50s,the music is sublime - sensual, haunting, and with undercurrents of sadness and mystery. Perhaps "bittersweet" best captures the overall feeling. At times, it seems reverent. The vocal selections mix well with the instrumental compositions.
Film scores are tricky. When done well, they add depth and resonance to movies. But at their worst, they are jarring, unrelated to a film's theme, and unbalanced. I'll leave it to you to decide whether you think the music works with the movie. My take is that this is an album which stands solidly on its own, not to be missed.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Vinyl|Amazon Verified Purchase
It's quite a rare thing for a soundtrack album to have so much resonance and power that it stands by itself as a musical experience to be witnessed separate from its accompanying film. I haven't yet seen "The Master", but Jonny Greenwood has created an album of stunning depth and emotion. How often do any of us ever listen to a soundtrack album before we see the film, anyway? I think most of us Radiohead fans would answer that question in the same way when it comes to this particular soundtrack, but Greenwood has outdone himself in showing us his massive talent with displaying an understanding of different musical genres across the board.
This soundtrack is very reminiscent of his "There Will Be Blood" score with it's slightly staggered syncopated string jabs, deep melancholic bass melodies, and an overall feeling of weirdness. His scores are just as uncomfortable as the characters that act to this music, but Greenwood always knows when to bring the heart-achingly human elements of melody and tunes-smith into the otherwise frenetic frays of his discordant classical noise.
There are some older tracks peppered in from Ella Fitzgerald, Helen Forrest, and Jo Stafford which take absolutely nothing away from Greenwood's compositions. If anything, they give the classical proceedings that much more flavor; the instrumentals are harrowing to say the least, and the voices are a welcome and fluid break.
My only complaint with this soundtrack lies with a physical manifestation of the vinyl packaging and not the music. The vinyl version only contains 12 tracks, where the CD version contains the full 15. In fact, there is a sticker on the jacket which reads "includes CD of the complete album". Uhh, what? Us vinyl collectors get stiffed three tracks? Why does the label think we're buying the stinking vinyl in the first place?? Sure, they give you a CD with all the tracks, but is there a sufficient reason why three short tracks were omitted? The tracks that are not on the vinyl are "Time Hole", Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree", and "Atomic Healer", tracks that total under five minutes in length combined. I know some may argue that "hey, it's only five minutes, what's the big deal?" I would argue that I bought the soundtrack on vinyl to have the FULL version on vinyl! Pretty simple! When you look at the dead wax on each side of the record there is more than enough space for extra tracks. We're talking about a 45 minute soundtrack here! Very disappointing.
Getting back on track, this is a beautifully rendered soundtrack by Greenwood that will merit repeated listenings on its own, and will only garner the artist more respect, as if he needed more! A performer, and an album, to be cherished.
This soundtrack is very reminiscent of his "There Will Be Blood" score with it's slightly staggered syncopated string jabs, deep melancholic bass melodies, and an overall feeling of weirdness. His scores are just as uncomfortable as the characters that act to this music, but Greenwood always knows when to bring the heart-achingly human elements of melody and tunes-smith into the otherwise frenetic frays of his discordant classical noise.
There are some older tracks peppered in from Ella Fitzgerald, Helen Forrest, and Jo Stafford which take absolutely nothing away from Greenwood's compositions. If anything, they give the classical proceedings that much more flavor; the instrumentals are harrowing to say the least, and the voices are a welcome and fluid break.
My only complaint with this soundtrack lies with a physical manifestation of the vinyl packaging and not the music. The vinyl version only contains 12 tracks, where the CD version contains the full 15. In fact, there is a sticker on the jacket which reads "includes CD of the complete album". Uhh, what? Us vinyl collectors get stiffed three tracks? Why does the label think we're buying the stinking vinyl in the first place?? Sure, they give you a CD with all the tracks, but is there a sufficient reason why three short tracks were omitted? The tracks that are not on the vinyl are "Time Hole", Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree", and "Atomic Healer", tracks that total under five minutes in length combined. I know some may argue that "hey, it's only five minutes, what's the big deal?" I would argue that I bought the soundtrack on vinyl to have the FULL version on vinyl! Pretty simple! When you look at the dead wax on each side of the record there is more than enough space for extra tracks. We're talking about a 45 minute soundtrack here! Very disappointing.
Getting back on track, this is a beautifully rendered soundtrack by Greenwood that will merit repeated listenings on its own, and will only garner the artist more respect, as if he needed more! A performer, and an album, to be cherished.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
By Jon Broxton
Format:Audio CD
Despite living in Los Angeles, and despite being a very casual acquaintance of someone who I know for a fact is one, I know very little about Scientology. You occasionally see them set up on Hollywood Boulevard, offering `stress tests' to unsuspecting tourists, and you hear odd stories about Tom Cruise in the tabloid news, but beyond that my actual knowledge of the details of the late L. Ron Hubbard's much-derided `celebrity religion' is sketchy at best - little more than lurid tales of science fiction, aliens, past lives, and the like. In Paul Thomas Anderson's film The Master, the word `scientology' is never uttered, but it's clear what is going on, and the film is a less-than-pretty expose of the origins of the religion.
Set in the 1950s, the film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie Quell, a WWII navy veteran with post-traumatic stress whose assimilation back into to civilian life is less than easy. A womanizer and a drunk with a violent temper, Freddie seems to be on the path to self-destruction, until he meets Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a charming, well-educated `self-help' guru, who travels the United States with his serious wife Peggy (Amy Adams) and a cadre of acolytes and sycophants, espousing his book - "The Cause". Finding meaning in Dodd's words and exercises, and despite his damaging and self-destructive personal issues, Freddie quickly becomes a trusted confidante, but before long his volatile personality clashes with Dodd's calm demeanor, threatening to bring down the entire organization from within. Although the core concept of the film - an unyielding examination of the cult of personality and new age religions - is an interesting one, and despite crackerjack performances from Phoenix and Hoffman especially, Anderson's pacing and direction unfortunately makes the film something of a chore to experience, burying any deeper points Anderson wanted to make underneath layers of uncomfortable silences and impenetrable stares.
The music for The Master is by British composer and rock musician Jonny Greenwood, who is still best known for his time spent as lead guitarist of the alternative rock band Radiohead, but who has been shown to have a great deal of classical compositional talent, both in his film work, and in his classical commissions for the BBC Concert Orchestra. Much like his scores for Norwegian Wood, We Need To Talk About Kevin, and his last work for this director, There Will Be Blood from 2007, The Master is a difficult work which will alienate a great deal of its audience. Written mainly for a string orchestra, it clearly bears the musical characteristics of Greenwood's classical hero, Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, as well as echoes of some of the most challenging composers from film music's history, including Alex North, Lenny Rosenman and Jerry Fielding.
The score veers from the tonal to the atonal, the consonant to the dissonant, the pleasantly harmonic to the virtually unlistenable, often within the same cue, mirroring the schizophrenic unpredictability of Freddie's personality, and the clash of calmness and violence between Freddie and Dodd. The opening "Overtones" is a perfect example of this, in which Greenwood has a bed of strings and a subtle pipe organ - possible to hint at a spiritual element - play a sequence of chords that are by turns warm and welcoming, and chaotically noisy.
This sense of musical displacement continues throughout almost the entire score, from the babbling woodwinds in "Time Hole" and the mesmerizing harp scales and strangely playful oboe textures in "Alethia", to the unexpected world music nuances of "Atomic Healer", the pseudo-religioso church organ and string chords of "The Split Saber", and the vicious Threnody-like dissonance of "Baton Sparks". It wants to be pious and reverent, and has all the trappings one would expect to hear in church music that has a great deal to say, but Greenwood cleverly twists his music to be a representation of Dodd's own teachings: they pick at the surface of things, fudge the details, blur the corners, and make bold statements about the world and his importance within it, but they have no emotional core, no sense of direction, and little in the way of tangible substance to grasp on to.
"Able-Bodied Seamen" is one of the score's standout cues, underpinned as it is by an insistent subtle percussion beat, and with all manner of woodwind and string-based flutterings dancing over the top. It has a vaguely Indian, perhaps Moroccan influence to it which is quite appealing. The barest hints of thematic consistency peek through the haze in `Back Beyond" and the conclusive "Sweetness of Freddie", while the penultimate cue "Application 45 Version 1" is just over five-minutes of repetitive, hypnotic build up and release, maintained by a relentless col legno beat in the strings and a grinding cello phrase. For the most part, though, this is a score about textures and feelings; shades of light and dark, good and evil, chaos and harmony. It's a clever score, which juxtaposes and often plays in jarring counterpoint to the action on screen, but nevertheless retains a compositional excellence and mastery of orchestral technique that is never anything less than impressive.
The score is rounded out by a quartet of period songs, ranging from Ella Fitzgerald singing "Get Thee Behind Me Satan" to Jo Stafford's "No Other Love", and a Madisen Beaty rendition of the classic "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me", which sounds ridiculously upbeat and cheerful in these surroundings.
Having been denied a chance at gold due to a technicality with the score for There Will Be Blood in 2007, I can definitely see this score picking up an Academy Award nomination next spring. It's the type of score the Academy likes: serious music written by a composer better known for his work in other genres, for a critically acclaimed film, and which places emphasis on modernistic techniques and challenging collisions of sound. There's a reason North and Rosenman picked up so many nominations over the course of their careers. This is not a score for the easily bored, or anyone who craves thematic consistency of major key harmony in their scores; I myself don't really *enjoy* listening to The Master for musical pleasure per se, but I do know intelligent musical composition when I hear it, and Jonny Greenwood has it in spades.
Set in the 1950s, the film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Freddie Quell, a WWII navy veteran with post-traumatic stress whose assimilation back into to civilian life is less than easy. A womanizer and a drunk with a violent temper, Freddie seems to be on the path to self-destruction, until he meets Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a charming, well-educated `self-help' guru, who travels the United States with his serious wife Peggy (Amy Adams) and a cadre of acolytes and sycophants, espousing his book - "The Cause". Finding meaning in Dodd's words and exercises, and despite his damaging and self-destructive personal issues, Freddie quickly becomes a trusted confidante, but before long his volatile personality clashes with Dodd's calm demeanor, threatening to bring down the entire organization from within. Although the core concept of the film - an unyielding examination of the cult of personality and new age religions - is an interesting one, and despite crackerjack performances from Phoenix and Hoffman especially, Anderson's pacing and direction unfortunately makes the film something of a chore to experience, burying any deeper points Anderson wanted to make underneath layers of uncomfortable silences and impenetrable stares.
The music for The Master is by British composer and rock musician Jonny Greenwood, who is still best known for his time spent as lead guitarist of the alternative rock band Radiohead, but who has been shown to have a great deal of classical compositional talent, both in his film work, and in his classical commissions for the BBC Concert Orchestra. Much like his scores for Norwegian Wood, We Need To Talk About Kevin, and his last work for this director, There Will Be Blood from 2007, The Master is a difficult work which will alienate a great deal of its audience. Written mainly for a string orchestra, it clearly bears the musical characteristics of Greenwood's classical hero, Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, as well as echoes of some of the most challenging composers from film music's history, including Alex North, Lenny Rosenman and Jerry Fielding.
The score veers from the tonal to the atonal, the consonant to the dissonant, the pleasantly harmonic to the virtually unlistenable, often within the same cue, mirroring the schizophrenic unpredictability of Freddie's personality, and the clash of calmness and violence between Freddie and Dodd. The opening "Overtones" is a perfect example of this, in which Greenwood has a bed of strings and a subtle pipe organ - possible to hint at a spiritual element - play a sequence of chords that are by turns warm and welcoming, and chaotically noisy.
This sense of musical displacement continues throughout almost the entire score, from the babbling woodwinds in "Time Hole" and the mesmerizing harp scales and strangely playful oboe textures in "Alethia", to the unexpected world music nuances of "Atomic Healer", the pseudo-religioso church organ and string chords of "The Split Saber", and the vicious Threnody-like dissonance of "Baton Sparks". It wants to be pious and reverent, and has all the trappings one would expect to hear in church music that has a great deal to say, but Greenwood cleverly twists his music to be a representation of Dodd's own teachings: they pick at the surface of things, fudge the details, blur the corners, and make bold statements about the world and his importance within it, but they have no emotional core, no sense of direction, and little in the way of tangible substance to grasp on to.
"Able-Bodied Seamen" is one of the score's standout cues, underpinned as it is by an insistent subtle percussion beat, and with all manner of woodwind and string-based flutterings dancing over the top. It has a vaguely Indian, perhaps Moroccan influence to it which is quite appealing. The barest hints of thematic consistency peek through the haze in `Back Beyond" and the conclusive "Sweetness of Freddie", while the penultimate cue "Application 45 Version 1" is just over five-minutes of repetitive, hypnotic build up and release, maintained by a relentless col legno beat in the strings and a grinding cello phrase. For the most part, though, this is a score about textures and feelings; shades of light and dark, good and evil, chaos and harmony. It's a clever score, which juxtaposes and often plays in jarring counterpoint to the action on screen, but nevertheless retains a compositional excellence and mastery of orchestral technique that is never anything less than impressive.
The score is rounded out by a quartet of period songs, ranging from Ella Fitzgerald singing "Get Thee Behind Me Satan" to Jo Stafford's "No Other Love", and a Madisen Beaty rendition of the classic "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me", which sounds ridiculously upbeat and cheerful in these surroundings.
Having been denied a chance at gold due to a technicality with the score for There Will Be Blood in 2007, I can definitely see this score picking up an Academy Award nomination next spring. It's the type of score the Academy likes: serious music written by a composer better known for his work in other genres, for a critically acclaimed film, and which places emphasis on modernistic techniques and challenging collisions of sound. There's a reason North and Rosenman picked up so many nominations over the course of their careers. This is not a score for the easily bored, or anyone who craves thematic consistency of major key harmony in their scores; I myself don't really *enjoy* listening to The Master for musical pleasure per se, but I do know intelligent musical composition when I hear it, and Jonny Greenwood has it in spades.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
A brush with classical music and some retrospective ideas
Johnny Greenwood has collaborated with writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson on some of his other films and the two seem to have found a playing ground that provides a compatible... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Grady Harp
1.0 out of 5 stars
Terrible
This is without a doubt the most abrasive and unpleasant movie score I have ever heard. Naturally it goes to an equally awful film by P.T. Anderson. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Matthew Cash
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Master Needs More Variety
Although Greenwood soundtrack underscores the movie quite well, most of these minimalistic tracks don't stand up on their own. Not nearly as good as There Will be Blood.
Published 4 months ago by BDW
5.0 out of 5 stars
The master score
Product was just as described like new. Good music as well by greenwood. Good prices on products too. Thank you
Published 5 months ago by john schmid
3.0 out of 5 stars
the Master sound track review
Watched the rather avant garde movie liked the sound track which contained two old big band tracks including Helen Forest No Other Love and ( I think) Isham Jones Sweet Sue. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Claire M Clasen
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb Score for an American Classic
The music that Jonny Greenwood composed for "The Master" has to be one of the best scores for a film in ages. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Reticuli
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