BEAT HAPPENING Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood tried to turn a string orchestra into a drum machine in Popcorn Superhet Receiver

For rock stars with lofty ambitions, working in classical idioms has long held a certain allure. But only a few have gotten it right: Frank Zappa’s perversely spiky creations earned the admiration of Pierre Boulez and other formidable interpreters, but Paul McCartney’s treacly oratorios and Elvis Costello’s workmanlike scores are closer to the norm. Given the excitement that British rock band Radiohead has generated among young classical composers and performers, it’s hardly surprising that guitarist Jonny Greenwood has recently been stretching in a series of well-received concert pieces. More than a mere dabbler, however, Greenwood was named composer-in-residence of the BBC Concert Orchestra in 2004.

This week, the invaluable Wordless Music series presents the U.S. premiere of Greenwood’s Popcorn Superhet Receiver, a string-orchestra piece he composed in 2005. Eager to program the work but lacking an ensemble, series founder Ronen Givony tapped violist, singer and composer Caleb Burhans to recruit the new Wordless Music Orchestra. The group debuts on Wednesday 16 with a concert that includes Greenwood’s piece and two appealing rarities, Gavin Bryars’s The Sinking of the Titanic and John Adams’s Christian Zeal and Activity.

The secret of Greenwood’s success in the classical realm is that he combines formative training as a violist with the same sense of curiosity and ingenuity that fuels the dense, adventurous orchestrations he creates for Radiohead tracks such as “How to Disappear Completely” and “Pyramid Song.” The genesis of Popcorn Superhet Receiver, named for a kind of shortwave radio, came during an attempt in the studio to “turn a string orchestra into a drum machine,” as Greenwood describes it.

“I knew you could get white noise out of an orchestra, like [Krzysztof] Penderecki does with a big smear of all the tones and quarter-tones,” Greenwood explains by phone from England. “I wrote out all this music thinking it’s going to sound like a 909 drum machine, and it just sounded awful, because you’ve got all these imperfections in dynamics between the individuals.”

Rather than scrapping his efforts, Greenwood embraced that wildness as the piece emerged. “I went into it thinking consciously of there being 36 different musicians on stage, rather than ‘the violins’ and ‘the cellos,’ ” he says. The result—a disorienting blur reminiscent of works by 1960s avant-gardists Penderecki and György Ligeti—went on to win the Listeners’ Award at the BBC British Composer Awards. Among the many admirers who downloaded a clandestine recording was director Paul Thomas Anderson, who dropped bits of Popcorn Superhet Receiver into a rough cut of There Will Be Blood, then tapped Greenwood to create a new score around that piece (issued on CD by Nonesuch in December).

Yet despite the attention Greenwood’s piece attracted, Givony unexpectedly found himself in the enviable position of being the first to inquire about presenting the work in the U.S. Burhans suggested holding the concert in January, when most freelance musicians would be available, and took on the task of contracting performers. “I wasn’t trying to get average, everyday players,” Burhans says. “I wanted people who were playing contemporary music, but also knew Radiohead and Godspeed You! Black Emperor—and people that would want to be part of a project that wasn’t just another gig.”

Among the musicians enlisted were members of Alarm Will Sound, Flux Quartet, NOW Ensemble and So Percussion. “They’re all people who’ve spent the last 10 or 15 years not only listening to Steve Reich and John Adams, but also tons of Radiohead,” Givony says. “It’s kind of funny to bring it back that way, because their influence is so formidable in contemporary music.”

From his perspective, Greenwood sees the blurring of musical genres in Wordless Music as a healthy development. “People studying music have such a wide collection and interest, and it’s inevitable that the music they end up composing is going to be a mix of all that stuff,” he says. “You don’t meet people who are just into jazz or Romantic classical music anymore.”

Wordless Music presents Jonny Greenwood’s Popcorn Superhet Receiver at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle Wed 16 and Jan 17.