Composing a New Cycle of ‘The Rings’

The musical career of Howard Shore keeps taking strange turns. Back in the late ‘60s, he played saxophone with a Canadian rock band. He went on to become the original musical director for TV’s “Saturday Night Live” and followed that by becoming a film composer, doing nearly all of David Cronenberg’s films and such thrillers as “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Seven.”

In terms of scope and impact, however, his latest gig eclipses them all. As the composer of “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” which opens on Wednesday--as well as the next two films in New Line’s $300-million trilogy--he has become de facto Master of Music in Middle-earth, writing music for hobbits, elves, dwarfs and the various other denizens of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy classics.

“I must admit that I felt like Frodo,” says the 55-year-old Toronto native, referring to the plucky hobbit at the core of the story. “I had the Ring in my pocket, the responsibility of being the chosen one. Many times I’d wake up and go, ‘Why me? Why must I do this?’ And then I’d just work my way through it.”

The three-hour film of Tolkien’s first “Rings” novel contains 2 1/2 hours of music, by far the longest and most complex project in Shore’s 20-plus years in movies. It’s also one of the most ambitious film scores in recent years, encompassing at least a dozen themes and sub-themes; choirs singing Tolkien-inspired texts in six Middle-earth languages; both the London Philharmonic and the New Zealand Symphony orchestras, plus large choral ensembles in London and Wellington; exotic instruments ranging from the pennywhistle and African flutes to Indian bowed lute and Irish bodhran drums; and the distinctive voice of New Age artist Enya. It’s already winning awards; the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. chose it as the best score of the year Saturday.

Shore spent most of the last year and a half on the film, and he will spend most of the next two years on the sequels, “The Two Towers” and “The Return of the King,” slated for release in 2002 and 2003, respectively.

Epic-score assignments tend to go to Oscar winners like John Williams (“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”), James Horner (“Titanic”) and Hans Zimmer (“Gladiator”), but “Rings” director Peter Jackson says Shore--who has never even been nominated-- was his and co-writer Fran Walsh’s first choice.

Two big issues faced Jackson, however: Would a film composer who’s normally accustomed to arriving during post-production, spending six weeks writing a score and moving on to the next project, be willing to take on a long-term commitment involving three major films over three years, and agree to work closely with the filmmakers in translating Tolkien’s mythical worlds into music?

Shore flew down to the New Zealand locations to meet with Jackson and Walsh in June 2000. Having read the Tolkien books back in the mid-1960s, he was already familiar with the story.

“The task seemed so huge,” the New York-based composer confessed during a recent visit to Los Angeles. “But Peter and Fran seemed like nice people, open and hospitable, and wanting to collaborate. They had studied this for years, and they had the key to the complexity of it. If I could work with them, and they could guide me, it seemed like a great thing to do. What could you do musically that would have more challenge to it than ‘The Lord of the Rings’?”

Shore says that he didn’t have a grand conceptual plan at first, other than rereading the novels and analyses of Tolkien’s elaborate creations.

“It was a step-by-step process--a page-by-page process, actually. Having done the research, I started writing thematic material just based on the books: Frodo’s theme, a theme for the Shire, a theme for Dwarrowdelf [the ancient ruined city], which is in Moria.”

A real-life development jump-started the recording process. When it was decided to preview a part of the film at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Jackson asked Shore to write original music rather than show the film with temporary tracks. So Shore spent six weeks in New Zealand, composing for the Moria sequence (about two-thirds into the film) in which the nine members of the Fellowship find themselves beset by the nasty orcs and a monstrous Balrog within the abandoned dwarf mines.

Shore recorded the first half-hour of the score--about 20 minutes for Moria, another 10 for the film’s finale--in April with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and a 60-voice, all-male Maori-Samoan choir.

By then, Shore had concluded “The Lord of the Rings” should be approached with an operatic sensibility. “There’s a lot of tragedy inherent in the struggle. It’s on a scale of real human drama ... how the Fellowship forms and dissolves. It is operatic in its very nature.”

In addition, director Jackson pointed out, within the Tolkien books are “many songs, many poems,” and that the score might be a way to utilize them. Co-writer and Tolkien scholar Philippa Boyens adapted some original Tolkien material and drew on her knowledge of Middle-earth lore to create new texts that Shore could then set to music.

The result is something for Tolkien buffs to study for years to come. Most of the choral material in “The Lord of the Rings” is in languages that Tolkien made up: two forms of Elvish (the “ancient” Quenya and the “newer” Sindarin, heard in Lothlorien), Dwarvish (the chanting heard in the Moria sequence), Black Speech (an evil tongue associated with the Ring) and Adunaic (the “ancient speech of men,” associated with the ringwraiths).

Shore composed and orchestrated the remainder of the score over the next five months, recording over six weeks in September and October in London. He conducted the 100-member London Philharmonic Orchestra and 100 choristers from London Voices and the London Oratory School Schola, a boys’ choir.

In all, he says, the score for “Lord of the Rings” required 180 hours of recording.

The details are unlikely to be noticed by the average moviegoer, although the broad strokes of the score--the themes and the sound of Middle-earth--will be. The Fellowship theme, for example, begins like a folk tune but is gradually transformed throughout the score: “It becomes more stately and more bold,” Shore explains, “and at the end it’s played as a hymn.”

“I wanted [the music] to have the feeling of this ancient culture, like it was discovered in the bottom of a vault somewhere and,” he adds with a laugh, “for some miraculous reason it fit this movie perfectly.” Hence the vaguely Celtic sounds of the Shire, where the hobbits are attended by pennywhistle, hammered dulcimer, accordion and fiddle; impressions of Gregorian chant for the elf communities of Rivendell and Lothlorien; and primal orchestral rhythms and grim choral chanting for the hard-riding, malevolent ringwraiths.

Shore penned themes for various characters including Frodo (Elijah Wood), Gandalf (Ian McKellen), Saruman (Christopher Lee), the mechanical-industrial world of Isengard, the evil known as Sauron, and for the all-powerful Ring itself. “The complexity of it suited me at a certain point,” says Shore. “At first it seemed daunting, then it seemed doable, and then it was [a feeling of] ‘This is wonderful. I can stay in Middle-earth for a long time.’”

Middle-earth is a long way from Toronto, however, where Shore started his musical career. He studied at Boston’s Berklee College of Music before going on the road, doing “a thousand one-nighters” with Lighthouse (a band that opened for Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead).

When his friends from the Toronto theater community, including Lorne Michaels, launched “Saturday Night Live” in 1975, Shore was tapped to be its musical director for the first five seasons. “I did a lot of live conducting on the air,” he says. “It was great training for film work because television is a very collaborative thing.”

But film was where Shore wanted to be. “I needed an outlet for all of the musical things that were going on in my brain,” he says. Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg hired him in 1979 for “The Brood,” a relationship that has also encompassed music for “The Fly” (1986) and “Naked Lunch” (1991).

They are about to begin their 10th film together, “Spider” with Ralph Fiennes, which Cronenberg calls “a very modernist, austere character study.”

“We have discussions that work on several levels,” says Cronenberg. “They can be very theoretical, cerebral and abstract. I’m sure that someone listening to us would have no idea what we were talking about and yet the music that comes out is not cerebral or abstract. It’s very visceral and intuitive, which music has to be.”

Says director Jonathan Demme, for whom Shore scored the Oscar-winning “The Silence of the Lambs” in 1991 and 1993’s “Philadelphia”: “Howard’s a musical genius, but he’s also the hippest cat in the universe. His own personal musical tastes are limitless. There’s not one musical idiom that I’ve ever come across that Howard is not deeply into, as a fan or an interpreter.”

Shore’s resume also includes music for the hit comedies “Big” (1988) and “Mrs. Doubtfire” (1993); a wacky score for Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” (1994) that won the L.A. Film Critics Award for music; and a mock-religious score for “Dogma” (1999).

With one “Lord of the Rings” film behind him, and the essential musical foundations laid, won’t the second and third films be easier? “I’d like to think they would, but I don’t think they will,” Shore says. “You’re still writing two to three hours of music [per film], orchestrating and recording at the same pace. I can’t imagine that it’s going to take any less time.”