Rediscovering the Ring: A Conversation with Howard Shore

On the eve of the Italian premiere of The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring Live to Projection Concert (March 18-20, performed by the Orchestra Sinfonica and Coro Sinfonico di Milano 'Giuseppe Verdi', conducted by Shih-Hung Young), ColonneSonore.net had the chance to talk with Howard Shore, three-time Academy Award winner of the acclaimed film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson. We talked with Howard about his relationship with the universe created by writer J.R.R. Tolkien and the way of presenting his spectacular music for these films through this unique and very special type of concert format. 

Howard Shore

ColonneSonore.net: Howard, thank you for accepting our interview. We're very thrilled to finally see and hear The Lord of the Rings - Live to Projection concert here in Italy. Let's talk a little bit about this. How do you feel about your music for the Lord of the Rings films being performed all over the world and becoming a standard of the repertoire?

HS: I'm very happy about these performances, especially in Milan, a city that I love. This project began with the release of the Complete Recordings, which was [series of boxsets of] all of the music from the trilogy released on ten CDs. It was interesting because it was the first time that I had the opportunity to hear the music from The Lord of the Rings in a kind of full complete version—when you're working on a film, you're working on different sections of the film and you don't always hear the music so completely from one piece to the next. I thought it would be wonderful to hear all this music in a concert. I was thinking of ways to do it and one of the ideas that came up was playing it with the film projection. I contacted Ludwig Wicki, a conductor who is based in Lucerne [the musical director of the 21st Century Orchestra—ed.]. He did a concert of my music in Lucerne a few years before and it was quite good, it was a concert of suites from different films and he reproduced the works so beautifully that I thought he would be a great person to try to recreate the sound of these recordings in a live setting, which is not an easy thing to do. I started working with him and we did all of the synchronization together. We did The Fellowship of the Ring and he was able to do that, and then The Two Towers, then on to The Return of the King. And he's playing it all over the world. He did over 50 performances of Fellowship.

CS: I'm curious about the complexities of bringing such a large piece of work in concert hall setting. There is a huge orchestra, a chorus, children's chorus and several soloists. What were the main challenges of adapting all of this into the setting of a concert hall?

HS: I always approached it as I would approach a symphonic concert with choir. It was always based on that idea. You want the evening to feel as if you've gone to the concert hall and you're hearing a beautiful symphony orchestra playing with chorus, so I always balanced the orchestra acoustically in the room for the most comfortable and most beautiful listening experience. There's over 200 musicians on the stage. Of course there’s dialogue, but the film is always subtitled so that if the orchestra is allowed to play the audience is not missing anything. We don't try to recreate the mix of the film. You want to just create a beautiful concert and you can hear dialogue from the film which is based on a lot of Tolkien's texts. The choir is singing in all Tolkien languages. It's kind of an enhanced cinematic experience, really. You've never really heard the movie quite like this and you're seeing the music in a really unique way because you're looking at the orchestra and chorus on stage and you're also looking at the film, so you have both. Visually is really a treat because you're kind in between the film and the beautiful setting of the orchestra. It's like an enhanced experience. When I saw it for the first time it was so exciting, to hear the music being played live to the film. I must say that when you hear and see the music played to the images, to the story it was created for, it's very powerful. Something happens, you know. That's great magic. So we kept doing them, we kept going on and we did the other two films. I know that there's a lot of other live to projection concerts being done now and I think maybe people felt the same way about other films they can experience in new ways. It's exciting times.

A moment of The Fellowship of the Ring Live To Projection concert

CS: You really opened the doors to the current live to projection experiences with your Lord of the Rings film concerts. Many films are now seeing this kind of treatment and living a new life in the concert halls.

HS: There were earlier films that have been done live with orchestra, like Abel Gance's Napoleon [with a score] by Carmine Coppola, but it was a one-show only at Radio City Music Hall in New York. So there have been other ones before. Several years ago I did The Naked Lunch with the Ornette Coleman trio and the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Barbican in London. We did the whole film with live accompaniment. So I had a little experience doing it. I knew it was exciting. With Naked Lunch, it worked beautifully, hearing Ornette live with the symphony orchestra. The synchronization was quite different because with Naked Lunch you can really conduct to the picture. With Lord of the Rings, the synchronization is more detailed. We use a system where it's all done visually, so there's no click track or anything like that. It's all just visualization from the podium to the film. So it's quite seamless. The more you do it, the better it gets.

CS: Did you experience differences in how orchestras around the world perform the music?

HS: There are of course differences in the sound of the orchestra and in the choir, especially how they approach the Tolkien text. So you do get different colors and different types of performances, but I find that kind of interesting, I like to hear different interpretations from different orchestras. I conducted 40 or 50 performances of the Lord of the Rings Symphony in 2004 with orchestras all over the world, from the Far East to Australia, North America, Canada and Europe. I love working with different orchestras, I find that really interesting. It's an interesting part for me, as a composer, to hear different interpretations.

CS: Do you think live to projection is, if not the best, maybe the most ideal way to present film music in a concert hall setting?

HS: I think it's a unique experience. But hearing the music on its own could be quite enjoyable and wonderful as well.

CS: Fellowship of the Ring was the beginning of your journey into the Middle Earth. You had to establish a lot of things in musical terms and do a lot of groundwork because you knew it was the first chapter of a larger piece. What are your recollections of the creative process and the experience on the first film?

HS: When we did a live to projection concert in New York a few years ago, at Radio City Music Hall, we brought the Tolkien Archive from Marquette University to a library in the West Side. When I visited it I looked at Tolkien's notes and I could see that he was keeping this really detailed notes about phases of the moon, different months and dates, graphs and charts and so on. He was trying to keep these multiple stories organized, in a way.  He was also creating the story linearly, as he went. And I found we were kind of following the same task, in a way. I did know that he did it in that fashion, but I realized we were doing a very similar thing. We were following the same path. I started in the mines of Moria and I created a piece for that sequence, and that became a piece for the whole scene that was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. I really started writing the score at that moment and then went forward into Lothlorien and then back into Rivendell. I wrote the Shire themes really early so I did have those pieces already. I didn’t know at the time that, according to Doug Adams's book The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films, there would be over a hundred leitmotifs and themes in the end. I didn't have that kind of order when I started, I just kept writing. The trilogy took almost four years to write and it was only years after, when Doug compiled all the notes and I gave him access to my archive to the library that everything was put in order showing the logic of it. I think the logic was inherent in the writing, but I didn't know it. I was just trying to follow Tolkien's story.

CS: Do you have a favorite section in the first film?

HS: I do. I love all the Sam/Frodo relationship music. I love all their scenes and writing for them. That was really a strong thread to the whole piece. In pure spectacle terms, I think the mines of Moria sequence is a really incredible part of filmmaking. It really gave us the excitement of what was to come. It's a beautiful set piece, almost 26 minutes of film.

CS: The film has many great moments. My own personal favorite is probably the breaking of the Fellowship sequence, just before the end credits.

HS: I did the first recording for the film in 2001 in New Zealand for the Mines of Moria sequence and, at the same session, I did also a recording of the breaking of the Fellowship sequence. I used the Mines of Moria exactly from that recording in the film. But I re-recorded the breaking of the Fellowship piece in England [during the main recording sessions] because the sequence wasn't quite finished at the time. Peter was still editing the ending of the movie. It was kind of an early version just to get a feel for the ending of the first film. That recording did show up in the Rarities Archive CD that was included in Doug Adams's book.

Another moment of The Fellowship of the Ring Live To Projection concert

CS: To cap off our conversation, I'd like to look back at your whole journey into Middle Earth. How do you feel about it today? Did your perception or feelings toward the whole piece changed over the years?

HS: I feel very fortunate to be able to have written that piece when I did. It came to me at a certain level of experience that I had with film and particularly with music—orchestration, conducting, recording and working with the London Philharmonic were all things that I had done for many years leading up to Lord of the Rings. So it was really the culmination of everything I knew about music—composition, compositional techniques, 19th century techniques, 20th century techniques, ancient music, going back to the beginnings of sound, choral music and using the voice in an antique way. It was really everything I knew about orchestration, conducting, producing, recording, all of that, so it was just a lucky thing that I was able to do that at that time. And I love the fact that they’re three films and it's so extensive. I think the complete piece is probably 11 or 12 hours. I feel lucky that I had the resources that I had at the time to do those recordings. I'm very proud of those beautiful recordings we did in England.

CS: The great thing is that your music is living on thanks also to these type of concerts and I'm sure it will for many years to come. Thank you for your time, Howard!

HS: Thank you!

A very special thanks to Alan Frey, Massimo Colombo and La Verdi press office for the help in setting up the interview

Stampa