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The Chord of the Rings:
Howard Shore
2005 Newsday feature

by Marion Lignana Rosenberg

Hobbits, we read in the prologue to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book of his Lord of the Rings trilogy, “love peace and quiet and good tilled earth.” This being so, the pre-holiday rush at Times Square’s Virgin Megastore surely would have seemed to them the abode of the damned. Thumping bass lines made the air shudder; tourists and locals stumbled and jostled, staring open-mouthed at flashing video monitors.

A whisper, sad and graceful, called out from beneath the din. In the video department, The Return of the King, the final film in director Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, was drawing to an end. The dialogue was inaudible, but wisps of music folded and unfolded—themes first heard in Fellowship, evoking friendship and resolve, innocence lost and the longing for home.

Some of Jackson’s computer-generated imagery already looks quaint, but Howard Shore’s Oscar-winning score sounds more achingly beautiful than ever. As chord progressions from Fellowship underpin a song of quiet acceptance of death, Shore’s music brings listeners “there and back again”—the name of Bilbo Baggins’ journal, appended by Frodo, who returns from his quest to destroy the ring of power only to find that there is no going home for him.

Comparing Rings

Shore’s complete Fellowship of the Ring score was released last month in a deluxe four-disc set: three CDs containing all the music he wrote for the film’s extended version, plus a DVD offering the score in Dolby Surround Sound. Speaking by telephone from his home north of New York City, Shore, 59, commented on his use of leitmotifs (recurring musical themes), which has led many to compare his Ring music to that of opera’s most famous Ring composer, Richard Wagner.

“I’m actually more interested in Italian opera than in Wagner’s work, though I do think it’s wonderful,” the soft-spoken composer said. “I wasn’t purposely trying to make connections between us. But I think if you write 12 hours of music based on ring mythology in a mid-19th century style, there could well be similarities.”

Nonetheless, the Lord of the Rings soundtracks have inspired the kind of painstaking study usually reserved for massive works like Wagner’s Ring of the Niebelungs. The Fellowship boxed set includes a 45-page booklet by Film Score Monthly’s Doug Adams, with musical examples and analysis keyed to specific tracks and time cues. (The Two Towers and Return of the King boxed sets are scheduled for release by early 2007.)

Keeping track of it all

Adams gives an example of the kinds of musical transformations that occur throughout Shore’s three scores. “The first three notes of the ‘Shire’ theme rise stepwise up a major scale to forever call the hobbits back to their verdant homeland, while the Ring’s ‘Seduction’ theme rises three steps up a minor scale to bend all races to its will.” Shifting in rhythm and harmony, this motif also reappears in music evoking the fellowship that joins forces to destroy the ring, the elves’ magical realm and other elements of Tolkien’s mythology.

Asked how he kept track of the more than 80 motifs that weave their way through the three scores, Shore laughed. “Just a good filing system! As I was writing the piece over close to four years, I would jot down the motifs and put them all in a folder.” The real challenge, he said, came in depicting the many different cultures and immense time span of Tolkien’s fantasy world.

“Tolkien created such a vast universe: Middle Earth of 5,000 years ago. I was trying to create a sense of history, to bring in Tolkien’s languages with the chorus, to show the beginnings of culture, in a way. That’s why voices are so important in the recording.”

Pulling elements together

Through the course of the trilogy, vocal and instrumental styles evolve. “Fellowship is more based in a folk sound, with artists like Enya; it’s gentler,” the composer said. Return of the King, by contrast, features four arias for soprano Renée Fleming. “The folk instruments in Fellowship—the pennywhistle, for example—become the flute of Sir James Galway.”

In addition to the London Philharmonic Orchestra, adult and children’s choruses, the Fellowship score also features grunting rugby players for the dwarves’ guttural chants and an unusually rich instrumental palette. The droning, harmonically saturated music of the elves, for example, makes use of monochord, ney (cane flute) and sarangi (Indian string instrument).

Shore’s music has taken on a life of its own in the concert hall apart from Jackson’s films. With the help of conductor John Mauceri, the composer adapted his scores into a six-movement “Lord of the Rings Symphony,” which has played to standing ovations all over the world.

Critical reception has been mixed. When Collegiate Chorale offered the Carnegie Hall premiere of the Fellowship portions of the symphony in November, The New York Times dismissed Shore’s music as “toothless.” The composer, who called the performance “sensational,” chuckled when asked if the classical music establishment has been receptive to music by a so-called film composer.

“Well, it’s been mixed. I think it’s like that when the films are so tremendously successful. But I think of the music as a true expression of what I felt about the story. Taking it to the concert hall was just the pure joy of playing this music, which was created for the recording studio, in a live situation.”

In February, Shore will conduct the Cleveland Orchestra in “Lord of the Rings Symphony.” Asked whether he ever foresaw such a thing when he played in the Toronto rock orchestra Lighthouse and directed the Saturday Night Live Band, he replied, “You know something? In my mind, I did. With Lighthouse, at 20, I was already conducting symphony orchestras. To be working with one of the great orchestras in the world is a dream come true.”

In addition to soundtracks—he also composed the score for David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence and is working on projects for Martin Scorsese and others—Shore is writing an opera based on Cronenberg’s movie The Fly, as well as chamber music. While he relishes “dealing with ‘pure’ music—no imagery, no book,” Shore emphatically does not see such work as “higher” or more valuable than his film scores. “I would consider Wagner’s Ring to be one of the greatest pieces of art ever created, and is it not written to a myth, a story, an idea?”

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