The Lord of the Score

[Bêthberry]

This is the title of an article/interview with Howard Shore from the Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail. Tonight marks the North American premiere of the symphony Shore adapted from the movie trilogy's score.

A couple of fascinating observations here about the decision to root the music in Wagner and the attention paid to details of the leitmotivs.

>>>

The lord of the score


Composer Howard Shore tells GUY DIXON about his 3½-year musical immersion in Middle-Earth, before heading to Montreal for tonight's North American premiere of his Lord of the Rings symphony

By GUY DIXON
Monday, February 23, 2004 - Page R1


It's now a well-established fact that the world -- our world, not Middle-Earth -- is made up of two types of beings: those with the gene that makes them diehard J. R. R. Tolkien fans and those without it.

Countless otherwise ordinary people in the general population feel a certain compulsion toward Tolkien's alt-mythology and the way it spins a simple story of good and bad into epics of wizards, elves, hobbits and warrior men. Then there are those who have found themselves being dragged to one of the three Lord of the Rings films by their kids, spouses or dates.

For the latter, there's Toronto-raised composer Howard Shore. His purpose, he says, is to be a kind of emotional guide to help viewers know how they should feel toward the characters and scenes. This is useful if you don't already know, or don't care if you ever know, your Elrond from your Eomer. (Elrond, for the record, is an elf lord. Eomer is one of the human warriors.)

Yet the hugely popular books and now movies have made the film score itself so popular -- having already won Oscar, Golden Globe and Grammy awards -- that Shore has adapted the entire trilogy into a six-movement, two-hour symphony, which he will conduct at its North American premier tonight in Montreal.

The piece originally came from a request by the conductor of the Hollywood Bowl for two movements from the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring. Now with the trilogy complete, the symphony has six parts and is written for a 100-piece orchestra and 100-piece choir. It had its world premier, naturally enough, in Wellington, New Zealand -- where the trilogy was shot -- and will be played in various cities around the globe. Not bad for background music.

"I don't really like that word 'background,' " Shore corrects. "Think of is as 'a piece of.' It's a component of the film, the music score. And it's only by balancing all the different components of cinematography, of editing, direction, acting, music, that all of those things balanced together create a work like Lord of the Rings."

The music has, to say the least, taken on a commercial life of its own. The widely popular soundtrack albums have also been collected as a three-CD box set, and with the DVDs of the films containing extra footage, Shore has had to write additional material. He is still working on the score for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King DVD.

"Peter [director Peter Jackson] re-edits the movie into this longer version, and I do a new recording. It's like a complete movie production," all over again, Shore says.

Then -- had enough yet? -- the entire score of all three films, all 12 hours with more than 50 recurring leitmotifs, are in the process of being collected into a CD set of eight or nine discs. Unless you are utterly riveted by, say, the lilting theme for the hobbit's Shire, plowing through all 12 hours runs the risk of becoming as lengthy as Frodo's journey to Mordor and Mount Doom.

The shorter symphony, though, could help pick apart the themes within the music and show its influences -- a little how the films themselves distilled Tolkien's excesses. Despite the story taking place many thousands of years ago, the music is rooted in the 19th century, with Wagner at its core, Shore says.

"Wagner allowed us to feel something when he wrote certain ideas. Before that, music was just music. It may have been expressing ideas. But it wasn't really until Wagner that these things can relate to objects, leitmotifs to places, and you can have these emotional feelings relating to the music when you hear it," he argues.

Early film scores that tap into those operatic ideas were also an influence. "The film itself is based in the tradition of forties and fifties epic filmmaking, and the music is used in that same operatic way," Shore says, adding that he worked closely with the screenwriters throughout the shooting, visiting the New Zealand set numerous times and maintaining a video link with Jackson from Shore's home in the forests of Tuxedo, N.Y.

Once a member of the Canadian rock band Lighthouse and later musical director for Saturday Night Live, the veteran film composer describes himself as almost constantly writing, often on the road, with side projects in chamber music and operatic works.

"Peter and I worked very closely on the piece and very closely on how to use the leitmotifs." For instance, Shore goes to some length to describe one fairly short scene in the latest film where the hero king Aragorn takes the sword reforged from the shards of the broken sword Narsil. "You hear the music of Elrond because Elrond brought it from Rivendell [the elf haven], which is where the sword came from. And then as Aragorn grasps the sword [now called] Anduril, the music references Minas Tirith, which is the city over which he will rule." (And dear Tolkien fanatics, even though I have seen the film and interviewed Shore but once, if there is a mistake in the names or nuances, you can throw this writer to the ghastly orcs.)

With this level of detail and the sheer length of the films' scores, Shore took more than 3½ years to complete them, and there are still tidbits to finish. Has it been daunting? "Very," the 57-year-old composer says. "My career -- it's been very linear in a way. It hasn't been until The Lord of the Rings that I actually created a piece on that scale. Now, having done that," he trails off for a moment. "Our journey through The Lord of the Rings is very much like The Lord of the Rings. You felt like you were Frodo having this grand task to do. And then once you've done the task, you felt like your world had changed."

In truth, this level of attention to detail, matching the music to all of these places and characters of Middle-Earth, is somewhat lost on the moviegoer. And you have the sneaking suspicion that the real attraction of buying the soundtrack or seeing the symphony is to relive the films. You wonder how many Ringsfans can hum more than a few bars of the Shire theme, perhaps the most recognizable tune in the films, or know that the ring itself has four musical themes, or truly care all that much about the distinctions between the music of Lothlorien and Rivendell?

The shorter symphony could help encapsulate and make all of this more accessible.

But there is a lesson to be learned in removing the music too far from the film. Once in the late seventies, I think it was, I was taken to a concert of Holst's Planets and John Williams's Star Wars music held in Vancouver's Pacific Coliseum. The audience became unruly because it was also billed as a laser show with Star Wars-like effects, and the weak, low-tech lasers flashing at the end were too little, too late for that particular crowd. Maybe Rings fans will be more accommodating.

<<<

[Finwe]

Amazing... definitely amazing... Howard has done it again!

D'you think they have a sort of schedule of where the symphony is playing? I'd probably be shedding tears of joy after listening to that. I tend to do that while listening to most of Howard's music, especially his Middle-earth music.

[Gorwingel]

I am lucky enough to be attending one of Howard's performances this July in Seattle, and I can't wait

I do think there is some kind of schedule somewhere Finwe. I have actually not heard much about the other stops on the tour, but maybe Howard has an official website or something like that where the stops are listed.

I may have to invest in that 8 disk set

[mollecon]

8 disc set? Ugh... I had heard the idea was to send out three 2-disc sets - sort of 'extended edition' soundtrack for each movie. That would have been more manegable.

[Bêthberry]

What I found interesting was not the information about upcoming CDS but Shore's comments concerning the choices he made when writing the score.

His purpose, he says, is to be a kind of emotional guide to help viewers know how they should feel toward the characters and scenes. This is useful if you don't already know, or don't care if you ever know, your Elrond from your Eomer.

Clearly he had in mind people who had not read the books.

His thoughts on Wagner are interesting also, for they are musically-based rather than mythologically based. I would have thought Wagner was chosen for his relationship to the old Germanic mythologies.

[mollecon]

Yes, the inspiration from Wagner is definetely musical - the use of leitmotif especially. But of course, a pretty obvious choice for a score of this nature. I think it would have been very difficult to hold the pieces together any other way in a score of this magnitude. Shore has said that it was his chance to write an opera

[Mister Underhill]

That bit about being an “emotional guide” was what jumped out at me too, Bb. My first reaction was to think, “Hmm... if you need the music to tell you how you should feel, something’s wrong.” Upon reflection, though, I think Shore is at least partly right.

A good score is a complex animal. It can set mood, mirror (or set) the pace of a scene or sequence, create tension and suspense, support – or subvert – the on-screen action, and, yes, tell us how we should feel.

It’s certainly a delicate craft. When a score simply repeats what we’re already getting from other elements of the film, or when it tries too hard to make us feel something that just isn’t there, then you have bombast, heavy-handedness, ponderousness.

I think that Shore’s score, like PJ’s direction, does sometimes bludgeon the audience rather than seducing them, but that’s a matter of taste, I guess.

[Lathriel]

I read that article in the Globe and Mail and I cut it out. It will go in my LOTR scrapbook.

Note to Bethberry: Peter Jackson said that after New Zealand Canada was one of the countries with the highest LOTR fanbase at last night's red carpet.