The Lord of the Rings

Original Score Composed by Howard Shore

Composer Howard Shore brings J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary imagination to vivid life with his Academy®- and Grammy® Award-winning score to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Shore’s music expresses Peter Jackson’s film as an immense symphonic work—a uniquely developed vision drawn from centuries of stylistic tendencies.

The music of The Lord of the Rings is counted among film music’s most complex and comprehensive works. This unique performance sets the score to the film, but allows the music to bear the narrative weight, creating a wholly new and dramatic live concert experience.

Shore’s score not only captures Fellowship’s sweeping emotion, thrilling vistas and grand journeys, but also echoes the very construction of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Styles, instruments and performers collected from around the world provide each of Tolkien’s cultures with a unique musical imprint. The rural and simple hobbits are rooted in a dulcet weave of Celtic tones. The mystical Elves merit ethereal Eastern colors. The Dwarves, Tolkien’s abrasive stonecutters, receive columns of parallel harmonies and a rough, guttural male chorus.

“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them”

For decades, the words above have ignited the imaginations of more than 100 million readers around the globe.   They were first read in 1954, when J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume in his towering three-part epic, The Lord of the Rings, was published.

Tolkien’s work was to have a profound effect on generations of readers, defining for many the archetypal struggle between good and evil, and was voted in worldwide polls the “Book of the Century.” It set the benchmark for the modern epic in its creation of an entirely new and thrillingly vital universe.  It introduced an unforgettable hero – the Hobbit Frodo Baggins – caught up in a war of mythic proportions in Middle-earth, a world full of magic and lore.  Most of all, it celebrated the power of loyal friendship and individual courage, a power that may hold at bay even the most devastating forces of darkness.

Now, the legend that Tolkien imagined has finally been brought to life on the motion picture screen, an undertaking that has required nothing less than one of the most colossal movie productions ever embarked upon.  The mythos, landscapes, and creatures Tolkien created are so vast and detailed in scope that it has taken more than four decades for cinema technology to reach the necessary level of sophistication to bring his universe to powerful and palpable life.  Such a project would require nothing less than a visionary to take it on, and a first-ever experiment in filmmaking to make the simultaneous production of all three films possible. Tolkien’s epic found a passionate and dedicated shepherd in director/writer/producer Peter Jackson.

Jackson and his devoted production team of over 2400 filmed all over the spectacular landscapes of New Zealand. The result has been the deployment of a logistical operation on par with an intricate and wide-reaching military campaign.  An army of artists – including digital experts, medieval weapons designers, stone sculptors, linguists, costumers, make-up artists, blacksmiths and model builders – as well as an internationally-renowned Howard Shore, Composer.

Howard Shore, Composer

Howard Shore is one of today’s premier composers whose music is performed in concert halls around the world by the most prestigious orchestras and conductors. Shore’s work with Peter Jackson on The Lord of the Rings earned him three Academy Awards, four Grammys, and two Golden Globes as well as numerous critic and festival awards. He has scored over 100 films including sixteen films by David Cronenberg and six by Martin Scorsese. His concert works include a choral symphony, an opera, a Latin mass, three concertos, and two song cycles.

He is an Officier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la France, the recipient of Canada’s Governor General’s Performing Arts Award and is an officer of the Order of Canada. The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures honored Howard Shore with an award for Career Achievement for Music Composition, the City of Vienna bestowed him with the Max Steiner Award and in 2017 he received the Wojciech Kilar Award established by the mayors of Krakow and Katowice. In 2004 ASCAP awarded him with the Henry Mancini Award. Shore has received numerous other awards for his career achievements.

Shore has been invited to speak at many prestigious institutions, including La Fémis in Paris with Michel Hazanavicius. Other notable talks have been at Oxford Union, Royal Conservatory London, Yale, NYU, Julliard, UCLA, University of Toronto, Berklee School of Music, Berlinale, Cinémathèque in Paris, and at Trinity College Dublin where he received the Gold Medal of Honorary Patronage.

In 2003, Shore conducted the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in the world premiere of The Lord of the Rings Symphony in Wellington. Since then, the Symphony and The Lord of the Rings – Live to Projection concerts have had over 500 performances by the world’s most prestigious orchestras.

In 2004, Fran Walsh was awarded Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Song, and Best Picture for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. For her work co-writing The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Walsh was nominated for an Oscar, a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award and Writers Guild of America Screen Award, and (along with Peter Jackson, Barrie Osborne and Tim Sanders) won the AFI Film Award. Walsh first garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay for the feature Heavenly Creatures, which she co-wrote with her collaborator Peter Jackson. Walsh, who has a background in music, began her writing career soon after leaving Victoria University where she majored in English Literature.