Sunday, September 1, 2013

Howard Shore - Music to The Lord Of The Rings

Classical music is by no means dead, and is in fact alive and well.  It's just moved from the symphony hall to the movie theater.  Few films make this case like The Lord Of The Rings, with an Oscar winning score written by Howard Shore.

Film is a different medium than the concert hall, and so we've seen changes to the music.  It plays a supporting role now, and so alternates between understated (in the background) and over the top (dialing drama up to eleven).  It's very easy to get this wrong, and Howard Shore does a remarkable job keeping the score focused.  That may be why he won the Oscar for Fellowship Of The Ring.

His challenge was to create separate musical themes for a number of different races: hobbits, men, dwarves, elves, orcs.  Each theme had to capture a mood suggestive of the traits that Tolkien wrote into that race in his books.  Shore did an exceptional job including not just an orchestra, but a chorus in much of this.

For example, the Ride of the Rohirrim, to relieve the siege of Minas Tirith required a theme that included rustic instruments to evoke a more rustic people (at around 2:30 in this soundtrack).



But the music sounds a little one dimensional when you just listen to it.  You need to watch the actual scene to see how the music comes to the fore and fades to the back, enhancing the film (scene and music begin around 2:30).  I think it's quite striking how the rustic violin theme really comes to the fore as the horses begin their charge:



Perhaps what comes closest to an individual, stand-alone musical experience is the music for the scene of Boromir's death in the first film.  THis piece makes particularly good use of vocal parts as essentially a new instrument in the orchestra:



I think that this was one of the finest scenes in a fine film, but it is perhaps the only one where the music is not upstaged by the acting.





Classical music isn't dead.  It's winning Oscars at the Academy Awards.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

True. And some of it is better than the stuff from 50 years ago, but maybe not quite as good as the stuff from a few hundred.

Still. I find it amusing that people who think they hate classical can sit in a theater and listen to a couple hours of it with out complaining - or perhaps realizing.

Old NFO said...

+1 on Richard, and I just wish my ears were good enough to actually enjoy it!

Dave H said...

Richard's got a point, and it's not just in movie theaters.

I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker half my age a couple of years ago. We were discussing classical music and I said I hadn't really listened to it much until I was in my mid 20s.

"No, you listened to it as a kid," he replied.

"What are you talking about?"

"You watched Bugs Bunny cartoons, didn't you?"

He had me.

libertyman said...

Lots of people minimize John Williams' contribution to music, but man he has a knack for wonderfil themes. So yes, classical music is far from dead.

Good post as always.

libertyman said...

wonderful themes

Bob said...

The division seemed to come at the end of the 19th century, with the death of Romanticism in classical music. How were composers going to match the melodies that Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Brahms, Dvorak and others had already written? Some artists (Rachmaninoff) were capable of it, many were not, so you ended up with false paths such as 12-tone, minimalism, etc., that the great mass of people were not willing to follow you down. At the same time, the sort of lyrical romantic melodies that the great composers wrote were still in demand, and found their way to film scores.

Some of the 20th century classical pieces that people *do* love weren't written purely for the composer's own satisfaction, but as contract work: Copland's music for Appalachian Spring, for example, was written on spec for a dance company. Copland, writing for himself, tended to write the sort of jarring, nails-on-blackboard pieces that gave 20th-century classical music a bad name with the public (although *not* the critics).

Candide said...

Opera, without singing, and with the libretto related to, but independent of, the orchestra.

Compare and contrast with Richard Wagner, who described his operas as "music dramas," where the singing and the orchestra were inextricably entwined, and where the orchestra's playing of leitmotifs often carry meta-information about what the singer is saying. Example - in Gotterdammerung, Hagen, plotting to murder Siegfried, sings a hearty "Welcome, hero!" as he approaches. But the orchestra is blaring out, fortissimo, the leitmotif of the curse of the ring. (To hear it, click example 9.9 here

If Wagner were alive today, he'd be writing music for the movies. He'd also be writing the scripts.