Saturday Night at the Movies

by Jenny Nelson

  Howard Shore has experience by the bucketful. He began his career as a performer, as so many film composers do, playing saxophone in a band called The Lighthouse. They opened for Jimi Hendrix, toured with Jefferson Airplane, and in a concert in Philadelphia were even supported by Elton John! Shore moved into the world of television when his school friend Lorne Michaels invited him to work on Saturday Night Live. As music director for the hit US show, the composer soon learned about musical improvisation and, no doubt, how to work under pressure, and he scored his first film, I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses, in 1978. He had composed about sixty or seventy scores before Tolkien came calling, so while it may be easy to think of him now solely as the ‘Middle-earth’ composer, it’s worth remembering his output spans horror (Se7en), comedy (Mrs Doubtfire), real-life dramas (Spotlight) and even ‘tween’ romances (The Twilight Saga: Eclipse). Whether his music is unsettling or light, there is a real poise to Shore’s scores and he brings a conscientious approach to each of his projects.

  Shore had already scored film adaptations of popular texts, from The Silence of the Lambs to Looking for Richard, based on Shakespeare’s Richard III, and he willingly immerses himself in the original source material. Speaking in 2015 about his early work with David Cronenberg, he described himself as an avid reader drawn to projects that required research: ‘I really like to delve into the subtext, the dreamlike world that cinema creates, and I’m very happy in that world. So whatever David was interested in, I became interested in, and we did a lot of literary adaptations together like Crash and Naked Lunch.’

  Howard Shore’s music appeared in The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) before he even knew about the film because Peter Jackson and his team used his cues from Crash, The Silence of the Lambs, Before and After, The Client and The Fly in their temp score after the first couple of months of shooting. Despite being very different projects thematically, the director explained why these scores had such an appeal: ‘Howard’s music from other films had a mystery, a dark beauty to it, which is his style. It’s emotional and his music very much connects with the heart. I really liked what some of his older pieces were actually doing to our picture. It became a natural idea at that stage to have a conversation with Howard.’ He was also aware he needed someone who could engage fully with the demands of the project, ‘who would be prepared to enter into the spirit of the film, to be very committed, to spend more time on the score, to work closely with us, and to be a collaborative member of the team’.

  When asked to describe his reaction to the offer of scoring The Lord of the Rings, the composer replied, with characteristic calm, ‘I had read the book, like so many people, in the 1960s. I didn’t know about the film until Peter Jackson called and asked me. He just called to chat, I hadn’t really met him until I went to New Zealand, and I met Peter and Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, and it was amazing what they were creating. You wanted to be a part of it.’ Witnessing the scope of the project, Shore must have seen this as a culmination of everything he’d learned about scoring up to that point, and his preparation involved researching the director’s early work, seeking out some of his lesser-known films such as Forgotten Silver, as well as undertaking a painstaking study of the text. He apparently spent four months on research before writing a note.

  It’s inaccurate to refer to The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003) as ‘sequels’ to The Fellowship of the Ring, not only because they were filmed concurrently but because they are essentially three acts to one story, and Shore composed the music with that in mind, knowing the three films would be available to watch in one sitting on DVD.

  After the composer’s initial visit to the set in 2000, he returned to New Zealand around ten or twelve times during the shoot, immersing himself in the natural landscape and the constructed fantasy worlds. The temp tracks, comprised of his earlier film scores, were a useful starting point for Jackson’s and Shore’s early discussions, especially for a director who admits ‘music is a very difficult thing to communicate about’: ‘Howard was extremely gracious when it came to the temp. He listened and we discussed why we chose different tracks [and] why a particular piece of temp seems to work.’ They would get into a rhythm of long-distance communication when Shore was working back in New York, and the thousands of miles between them might have proved fruitful in that they allowed the composer to retain some objectivity, or overall clarity, about the story, while working firmly within Tolkien’s world. Set apart from the daily pressures of the film shoot, Shore could create his large-scale score, bit by bit: ‘The task was daunting of course. I mean, the book was one of the classics of the twentieth century, and you had a lot of responsibility to tell the story well, with this much heart and soul and truth that you could put in the music. So I just set about the task, I just immersed myself in Tolkien’s world for almost four years.’

  Beyond the original text, and the ongoing filming, there were other elements at play that helped Shore: he cites Tolkien illustrators John Howe and Alan Lee, who created a lot of the artwork, as particular inspiration, as well as Richard Taylor, creator of Weta Workshop, who created the actual artefacts of the story: ‘The armour, the costumes, a lot of the design work was in his shop, and you could tour and be inspired. So not only were you taking Tolkien’s work from the page but you were also seeing how it was going to be brought to the screen.’

  The score was to be orchestral, without any electronic accompaniment, because, as Jackson explained, ‘The Lord of the Rings reflects a very ancient world so I wanted music that was appropriate to the era. I didn’t want anything too revolutionary. I wanted it to feel like it belongs to Middle-earth.’ Shore has said it was impossible to approach it as a movie score, likening it more to an opera, with Wagnerian leitmotifs woven within the films for clarity, offering a musical map to help the audience navigate their way through the different cultures and connections. The composer was aware that this was a film for both Tolkien fans and newcomers alike, and aimed to write a score that would honour the book while also bringing it to as broad an audience as possible. As he acknowledges, this was a far more complex story than many of his previous films: ‘Film music is very much point of view, and here the point of view was to express the story with as much clarity as possible, to tell Tolkien’s great story in a way that audiences would simply understand it if they had not read the book, or if they had read it but didn’t remember it.’ The intricacies of the leitmotifs, representing entities from the Shire to a sword, and even different aspects of the ring, from the power it wields over certain characters to the evil lying within it, brought out the best in Shore, who seems to have delighted in building this musical universe, with creatively calculated and painstakingly constructed pieces. The musicologist Doug Adams described roughly eighty-seven leitmotifs in his detailed book The Music of The Lord of the Rings (2010), although more have been identified, with even more after the release of The Hobbit trilogy.

  Working between New York and New Zealand, weaving this intricate musical tapestry, discussions became more frequent regarding the placement of music on the screen: ‘Peter was really the focus for the spotting, as to where music would actually be in a scene and how it was representing the story. The Lord of the Rings is considered one of the most complex fantasy worlds ever created, so it was important to show clarity in the storytelling. We began by using the technique of themes and motifs very early on – we started in the Mines of Moria.’ Shore has described how useful he found it to start within the centre of the story and work outwards, and this particular section was recorded with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and a sixty-voice Maori Samoan choir in preparation for a screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. At this early stage it was clear that the collaboration involved all three screenwriters, and that the additional input was welcomed by the composer: ‘Fran had great perception about the relationships in the story – Gandalf ’s relationship to Bilbo, Gandalf ’s relationship to Frodo, Frodo to Bilbo, Sam’s relationship to Frodo, all
really important to me in developing my musical ideas and in how to structure the piece. Philippa was very well read on the subject of ring mythology, very old concepts of what the ring represented down through the ages, not just in The Lord of the Rings but through other mythologies, and she was able to really guide me into the historical nature of the piece.’

  Shore’s score also leans towards the operatic with the use of voices. Boys’ choirs were selected for their purity of sound to depict elements such as the innocence of the hobbits and the friendship between Sam and Frodo. Soloists including Enya and Elizabeth Fraser provided otherworldly, ethereal qualities, and again Philippa Boyens was an influence, steering Shore to experiment with different voices and languages: ‘It was through discussions with Philippa that the idea came to use Tolkien’s languages, that were so prevalent in the book. His languages were used in poems and song lyrics, and I wanted to put those languages back into the story, and the way I could do that was through the use of the choir, the adult and the children’s choir.’ Boyens wrote most of the text, a Tolkien scholar was recruited to translate them, and a linguist then taught the choir the correct pronunciation.

  The composer started out working with early cuts of the film and later adapted the music to fit, impressing Jackson with his flexible responses to edits or rewrites. By the time he started work, the screenplays had already been written, but because it had initially been planned as a two-part series, then just one film, and finally a trilogy, there were countless changes made during filming. ‘The beautiful thing about our process was if edit changes were made,’ he recalls, ‘I would go back into the studio and re-record. During the compositional process, which is really the creation of the music, when you’re spotting with the director, you’re asking the questions, “Why is there music? What is it accomplishing in the scene?” You have to ask the general question as to which point of view in the scene is the music most representing.’ Here concise communication – being able to explain what was required for each scene, each piece, to convey – was key.

  Shore points to a pivotal scene in The Fellowship of the Ring, where Frodo stands before the Council of Elrond and says, ‘I will take the ring.’ ‘It’s edited with glances and gestures: you glance at Gandalf, a gesture from Aragorn, and you see his friends looking at Frodo in a way that had to be captured in music. This had to be composed in a way that was very specific to the editing. I recall working very hard on this particular scene with Peter, just to make sure that all of those glances, the way the scene unfolded, was done in a perfect way.’

  Jackson particularly enjoyed partaking in the musical aspects of production because he had become so used to being the one in control of the film shoot, giving steers and feedback and orders, yet when he sat in on the recording sessions, the composer was in charge, and Jackson was fascinated to watch him in action: ‘One of the things I learned from Howard was how much modification can be made when you’re actually on the score stage. I had this preconception that all the work is done beforehand and when you get onto the scoring stage there’s only a limited amount of further work that can be done. Howard conducts his own scores, so he’s totally in command of what happens in every way. To me it was interesting to find out that creativity doesn’t necessarily come to an end on the scoring stage.’

  Shore consciously creates an environment that is conducive to adaptation, and he believes ‘recording is very much a search for the great performance. I like to keep things buoyant and creative, right up to the final dub.’ He holds the London Philharmonic Orchestra, with whom he has a long-standing association, in extremely high regard, having first worked with them on The Fly. The LPO was the principal orchestra on the Lord of the Rings trilogy and on the first Hobbit film, and Shore has said he wrote the music specifically for the ensemble.

  Howard Shore and Peter Jackson while working on The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 2003.

  Jackson has claimed the crew found the production of The Two Towers the most difficult of the three films because they felt it had less of an impactful beginning or end, but Shore’s music helps create an effortless transition to part two, welcoming back the audience and tacitly reminding them of the connections between characters and cultures. Before he started composing, he asked to watch a rough cut of The Return of the King, so he could get the third act of the story in his mind. The director was in London for the recording sessions for the three films because, as he sees it, ‘part of the job is supporting the composer’, and he adapted the order in which he edited The Two Towers to assist Shore. Jackson was mindful that because he had been attending awards ceremonies to receive accolades for The Fellowship of the Ring, he had fallen behind on the edit, so when Shore asked for the film’s final scenes first, he obliged: ‘He said, “I’d like to write the climatic music, and then go back and fill in the pieces in the middle.” So at that point I jumped ahead and cut the last couple of reels of the film for Howard. I adjusted the order of my editing because it made sense to Howard.’

  Due to tighter deadlines, Shore and Jackson honed their working methods, and the composer’s ability to respond quickly to changes proved vital. He would re-score pieces from scenes that had been edited in the morning, write up the amended pieces after the session and record them with the orchestra the next day. The experience was gruelling, with both director and composer working sixteen-hour days over a period of five or six weeks.

  A continued extension of the musical universe, the score for The Two Towers is a popular choice whenever Classic FM devotes Saturday Night at the Movies to the Lord of the Rings films, and it is always difficult to fit in the many listener requests, with ‘The White Rider’, ‘The Riders of Rohan’ and ‘Forth Eorlingas’ remaining firm favourites. While it might lack the initial invention of The Fellowship of the Ring and the grandeur of The Return of the King, it is perhaps the most intriguing of the three scores. Shore was not eligible for the Academy Awards due to a rule forbidding sequel scores that incorporate themes from the previous film, but that was revised the following year so he was allowed to enter for The Return of the King, for which he duly won two awards: Best Original Score and, along with Fran Walsh and Annie Lennox, Best Original Song for ‘Into the West’.

  It definitely feels as though Shore pulled out all the stops for the final instalment in the trilogy, whether to match the required emotions and resolutions within the third act or perhaps because he was by now completely entrenched in the fantasy world: ‘By the time we got to the final film,’ he reflects, ‘we were really working as a great team . . . It took almost four years to compose, orchestrate, and then to conduct the piece and to record and produce the recordings. During that period, we worked out a very fluid method, where I would play Peter new pieces. We would have a note or two on that, I would make some changes on the way themes and motifs were used in the scene, tempos might be adjusted for editing. It was an ongoing process, right into the recording, where Peter would always allow me to do the best performance that I could with the orchestra.’

  While Shore started scoring the middle of The Fellowship of the Ring and worked his way out, he started at the end and the beginning simultaneously for The Return of the King. Jackson was conscious that the music for the end was crucial, describing the final forty minutes as ‘the most important music of all three films’, so their work on this part was particularly thorough. The score retains a sense of vitality throughout the trilogy, in part due to the introduction of new guest soloists such as Renée Fleming and Sir James Galway in The Return of the King. With highlights like ‘The Lighting of the Beacons’, ‘Twilight and Shadow’ and ‘The Return of the King’, it is accomplished and confident, and the quantity of the contributors reflects the scale of the production: ‘I was working with very large forces: we always had a palette of 230 musicians. It was a ninety-six-piece symphony orchestra, a sixty- to seventy-voice mixed choir, London Voices, a boys’ choir of fifty, the London Oratory School Schola, and then many folk soloists and instr
umentalists from different parts of the compass. So it was a vast project but while I was doing the recording, Peter was always there, offering guidance and support, and showing you the crescendo that could go further, the dynamic that could be increased or lowered, the use of single instruments or soloists in very specific ways to add contrast, the use of silence – all of those things were done in a lot of detail, and in collaboration between Peter and myself.’

  Jackson had wanted the films to transport the audience to another world, an ambition he undeniably achieved, and he credits Shore’s music as playing a big part in helping him reach that goal. Mindful that the composer worked full-time on the trilogy, apart from providing two scores for regular collaborators David Fincher (Panic Room) and David Cronenberg (Spider), Jackson acknowledges that he and Walsh ‘couldn’t have actually wished for anything better. Howard has given us his total commitment and his heart and soul . . . There has never been anything that’s been too much trouble. He has worked himself into the ground, until the point of exhaustion, to put his best into this music and I totally admire and have great gratitude for him doing that.’ Shore has since returned to this trilogy to rebuild the scores into a six-movement work for orchestra and choir, The Lord of the Rings Symphony, which has been performed live to sell-out crowds across the globe.