“So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide,” replies Gandalf, as we hear a musical echo of our once-happy hobbits. “I wish the Ring had never come to me,” a lost Frodo laments midway through The Fellowship of the Ring. Shore’s hobbit music provides a hope in the darkness, a melody to anchor these films and remind our heroes that all is never lost. This music is pastoral, it is genial, and, crucially, it does not share an orbit with any musical danger. Because so much of the trilogy is filled with desperation and darkness, it is incredibly important that Shore’s music begins in a light, almost willfully-naïve setting. As the home of the hobbits, it is where we begin and end our story, our home to return from there and back again.īut it is also important musically. Hobbiton is an important place for The Lord of the Rings. So, what makes The Lord of the Rings sound so distinctively like The Lord of the Rings? What gives this inimitable film trilogy such a unique place in film music history? 1.
Quite an achievement when you consider it was also the first fantasy film to win Best Picture, ever.
Nor do they fully encapsulate what a phenomenon these films were - the third film, Return of the King still stands alongside Ben-Hur (1959) and Titanic (1997) as having won the most Academy Awards in history. Such numbers, however, don’t quite do Shore’s Rings achievement justice. Shore - a former Saturday Night Live musical director - wrote well over one hundred separate musical themes for these films, and for their hobbits, elves, and dwarves. Howard Shore’s scores for Peter Jackson’s three Rings films ( Fellowship of the Ring in 2001, The Two Towers in 2002, and Return of the King in 2003) are so complex they stand practically alone in film music history. In addition to three CDs, the package also includes a fourth disc repeating the entire score in DVD-audio with a 5.1 Surround Sound mix.I once described the music for The Lord of the Rings as epochal. It's a downbeat ending that looks forward to the resolution of the story told in the final film. After that resolution, however, the overarching quest for the ring remains, and the score concludes with Björk sound-alike Emiliana Torrini plaintively singing "Gollum's Song," which expresses hopelessness. While there are light, even-toned sections, there is also much dramatic, stirring music, in keeping with a film that, after tracing the complicated fantasy plot, settles at its conclusion into a structure familiar from many Westerns - in effect, the Indians attack the fort, and the cavalry saves the day. Much of the music is extrapolated from themes created for the first movie, but this score is more various, appropriate to a film in which the protagonists split into different groups and pursue separate adventures for much of the screen time. Also included is a 45-page booklet featuring extensive liner notes by Doug Adams going into great detail, with sheet music examples, about composer Howard Shore's approach to writing music for the epic story.
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In fact, at three hours, eight minutes, and 44 seconds, it goes on longer than the theatrical version of the movie itself and contains some music not actually heard in the film. The single-disc soundtrack album that was released initially crossed the 70-minute threshold, but this expansion, following a similar one for the first installment in the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, adds much more material. When it opened in theaters, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers ran one minute short of three hours the subsequent DVD version added another 44 minutes.