Howard Shore, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ (2001–03)
Earlier this week I chaired a panel on ‘Twenty-first Century Tolkien’, part of the British Museum’s ongoing Fantasy exhibition: excellent discussion from excellent people: Prof Dimitra Fimi, Prof Nick Groom and the peerless artist John Howe. We talked about how Tolkien has expanded, migrated and burgeoned through the last decades: the novels still sell in the millions, are still read, as are myriad Fantasy novels written in direct or antagonistic imitation of Tolkien; but there are also the screen texts — Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, Rings of Power, video games (the dinky Lego Hobbit, the grimdark Shadow of Mordor and many others), stage plays, graphic novels, tourist-industry properties and commodities. There’s also the vibrancy of fandom and cultural production: hundreds of thousands of fan-written Middle Earth stories and novels uploaded to AO3, conventions, cosplay, critical engagement and discussion. It’s a remarkable thing, and something that I’ll need to wrangle into my History of Fantasy, when I finally get the chapter on 21st Fantasy finished. Any day now. Fantasy is now multimodal, expansive, recreative and widely engaged.
Howard Shore’s music, composed as the soundtrack for Jackson’s movie trilogy, is entirely a part of this. Just as John Howe and Alan Lee, whose art and illustrations (very different to the style of Tolkien’s own illustrations for his work) directly informed the design and look of Jackson’s movies and so have come to signify Middle Earth, and Fantasy, more broadly; so this music, Romantic, expansive, melodic — a mix of Celtic-themed lieder and ‘Eastern’ folk melodic variation interleaving sweeping orchestral grandeur — has come to figure Tolkien. This is what Fantasy ‘sounds like’. Chris Cummins notes how relatively old-fashioned the work is, compared to the work of (say) Michael Nyman, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Hans Zimmer or Ludwig Göransson, but he thinks that a good thing.
Howard Shore’s music in the trilogy represents the last of the truly great blockbuster film scores. A bold statement to be sure … yet Shore’s music for the trilogy has, like Bernard Herrman’s work for Psycho or pretty much anything John Williams did in the 1970s or ’80s, both a symbiotic relationship with its source material and the ability to be evocative on its own. When listening to key tracks like “Concerning Hobbits” (a piece so whimsical and tranquil it has taken on a second life as a relaxation jam in spas everywhere), “The Breaking of the Fellowship,” and the rousing “The Bridge of Khazad-dûm” — whose influence can be felt in Alan Silvestri’s main theme from The Avengers, it’s easy to be instantly transported to Middle Earth.
I’ve been listening to the whole suite again recently. It is a mix of recollection — Cummins is right, the music works in part as reminiscer, reëvoking the movies — and of specific aural encounter, because to listen just to the music is to be more fully aware of it, to attend to its particularity as music. It’s long, of course, much longer than a regular symphony, a fact dictated by the length of the movies themselves. The orchestral elements strike me as full of Elgarian flavours and borrowings, which in turn gives it an English vibe — Das Land ohne Musik, yes, I know, but you see what I mean. Or is this just me? Tolkien’s ‘fantasy of England’, shaping worldwide fantasy with Anglo inflections? I may be overdetermining the music in my reading, my hearing, of it: there are also Brahmsian touches, borrowings from Berlioz, smatterings of Wagner (here and in lots of movie soundtracks). Perky folk-tunes for the hobbits, plangent choral tone-poems for the elves (the elvish music is written on the maqam hijaz scale, what used to be called ‘the Phrygian’), minor key bashing and crashing for the orcs and so on. Much of this is magnificent: ‘Glamdring’ (from Two Towers), ‘The Ride of the Rohirrim’ (from Return). ‘The Passing of the Elves’ (from Fellowship) sounds like Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, which is the highest praise so far as I’m concerned. The ‘main theme’ moves from the hobbiton small scale charm of its up-down seven note opening:
— to the spacious splendour of its orchestral chords:
— moving from a variant of Dvořák’s theme from the Largo of his Symphony №9 in E minor, ‘From the New World’, to the ‘Fry’s Turkish Delight’ theme from the allegro of the same work. The music here aurally embodies the movement of the movie, and the book: travelling out of the pleasance of The Shire into the marvellous wide-open spaces of Middle Earth. Enchanting music for a story of re-enchantment.
It’s tricky judging the whole composition as a piece of music, separated from its filmic context. American music critic David Hurwitz, listening to the soundtrack as a quasi-symphonic piece, praises the melodic expressiveness and moments of grandeur, but he notes that what works as accompaniment to film-visuals may not when considered on its own. This isn’t surprising: taken together, these movies are 558 minutes long (683 minutes in the extended cut) — music composed to accompany such runtimes must dilate and slacken, will prove repetitive, will tend towards formlessness.
It’s also important to note that “contrast” (of which there’s plenty) does not equal “form” (of which there’s none). Stitching bits together continuously does not create a logical musical sequence. There are, for example, splendid episodes, such as the lighting of the watch tower fires in The Return of the King. But by the time we get to that point, Shore’s device of stretching out time by modulating upward to increase tension has already occurred so many times that the power of this particular moment, where the technique seems justified, is weakened. You may also recall that “death” in the film is almost always represented by a sudden switch to slow motion photography accompanied by soft, vaguely Anglican crooning by a boy soprano. I disliked it very much in the film, and it sounds especially unmotivated as a purely musical device here.
That ‘Anglican’ interests me. Is there something English about this music, composed by a Canadian to accompany films directed by a New Zealander that appealed to audiences from all around the world? It’s a question that relates to the ‘Englishness’ of Fantasy as a mode more broadly, I think.
