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[excerpted from an article on Canada.com]

Howard Shore discussed the marriage of movies and music during the Tribeca Film Festival, which ended Sunday. Shore won original-score Oscars for the first and third parts of The Lord of the Rings trilogy: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and The Return of the King (2003).

But he didn't devise three separate scores for three separate films; like director Peter Jackson, who adapted J.R.R. Tolkien's novels, he envisioned them as one comprehensive work, featuring the London Philharmonic and several choirs.

"What they were interested in was clarity because the book is dense," Shore said during a discussion Saturday at the film festival, referring to Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. "It was how to tell this story with 22 main characters and multiple cultures."

Shore, a 57-year-old Canadian whose previous films include The Silence of the Lambs and Scorsese's Gangs of New York, had read Tolkien's books in the '60s but spent four or five months rereading and thinking about them for inspiration. Then he'd meet with Jackson in his native New Zealand, where the trilogy was shot, a couple times a week to look at pieces of film and discuss the accompanying music.

Even though Jackson has no formal music training -- and Shore studied at Boston's Berklee College of Music -- the director was intimately involved in guiding the score.

"He would do it the way he would with an actor," Shore said. "The way he made Ian McKellen into Gandalf or Elijah Wood into Frodo -- he did the same thing with me."

Astute fans will notice that themes from the first film resurface to provide cohesion during the third film.

"When the Hobbits return to the Shire, you know where you are, there's a reason -- the music tells you," Shore said. "When the ring is destroyed, it has to be in the right context musically."

A boxed set of all the music from the trilogy is forthcoming, Shore said, and will feature pieces that didn't make it into the films as well as first recordings. The composer also is going on the road as a conductor, performing The Lord of the Rings score with select orchestras across the country.

"I'm learning the piece all over again as a concert piece," he said. "It's like a whole different thing."

Published May 10, 2004

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