The Power of the Dog

The Power of the Dog (Soundtrack from the Netflix Film) is the score for the 2021 film The Power of the Dog, composed by Jonny Greenwood. It was released by Lakeshore Records and Invada Records on November 17, 2021. The score album features 17 tracks, and featured a range of modern instruments used in scoring, despite being set in the 1920s. The score ranged from contemporary music to dark ambient and orchestral sounds, achieved by blending instruments in the sounds. Greenwood's score received positive critical response and received several accolades and nominations at various ceremonies, including Academy, Golden Globe, Grammy and BAFTA award nominations. Background Campion recruited Jonny Greenwood to compose the score for The Power of the Dog. Speaking to the Variety, she said "He thought a lot about instruments and creating a palette for the instruments in the way that designers often do". While writing the score, Greenwood rendered the 1920s music of Montana as uncanny, foreboding rhythms which feel essential to the film's mix of oddity and dread in the concluding moments, that culminates "a disquieting cascade of disparate notes". Greenwood said "I’m a big fan of these musical scales that are called modes of limited transposition. As well as major and minor scales, you have modes. And some modes are more interesting than others. The one used there has four different tonal centers, so it’s like having four keys at once—which means that you never really resolve harmonically to the home chord." Greenwood wanted to avoid the "sweeping strings" typical of Westerns, opting instead to use atonal brass sounds in order to emphasize the "alien and forbidding" nature of the film's landscapes. He was inspired from the music of Star Trek: The Original Series (1966), which had a contemporary brass sounds. To achieve this, he hired a couple of French horn players from the orchestra and recorded it in a church in Oxford, intending that "that reverb in the church would be the third instrument". He was not satisfied with the sound of Phil's banjo on screen, as he "wanted to tap into the darker side of the instrument, which would almost mirror Phil’s personality". As an alternative, he used to play the cello like a banjo on his own, using the same fingerpicking technique.