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In Tune with Tolkien
Alumnus Howard Shore scores a classic.
By Ed Symkus
Berklee.edu Correspondent
(December 21, 2001)
Howard Shore has, so far, been a man of many careers, all of them revolving around music. For the past couple of decades he's made his living as a composer of film soundtracks—his newest being the massive score for director Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring"—with close to 60 feature films on his resume.
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Photo by Daniel Smith/New Line Cinema |
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But he started out, soon after attending Berklee in 1969, as a founding member of the Toronto-based rock band Lighthouse. The group scored a couple of hits—"One Fine Morning" was the biggest—and it gave Shore the opportunity to show off his saxophone, writing, and even singing skills.
Not long after his interest with the band wound down, Shore hooked up with his old Canadian summer camp pal Lorne Michaels, who was about to launch a new TV show called "Saturday Night Live," for which Shore became the music director for the first five years of its run. Longtime aficionados will remember the irregular appearances of the white-uniformed Howard Shore and his All Nurse Band.
It was toward the end of that five-year gig that Shore joined forces with another creative Canadian, David Cronenberg, who was about to solidify his directing career with the horror film, "The Brood," for which Shore was hired to write the score. He's since worked with Cronenberg eight more times, composing for "Crash," "M. Butterfly," "Dead Ringers," "The Fly," "Naked Lunch," and "eXistenZ." He has also written scores for Martin Scorsese ("After Hours"); Jonathan Demme ("The Silence of the Lambs" and "Philadelphia"); David Fincher ("Seven" and "The Game"); and Penny Marshall ("Big").
A glance at just that short list reveals the range of Shore's composing skills, stretching in mood from light to horrific, from brooding to poppy. But he is still mildly surprised that he ended up doing this for a living.
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| Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins. |
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| Photo by Pierre Vinet/New Line Cinema |
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"There was nothing in my mind back at Berklee that sent me in this direction," Shore says. "Actually, when I did my first films, I developed all my own techniques, because I was kind of isolated. So I read books and figured things out on my own. I was like somebody putting a motorcycle together that didn't know much about motorcycles. You know, I got some parts here, and had an idea of how it worked. But I figured out a way to do it, and over the years, I've kind of used the same techniques. I did a lot of my early movies with just a calculator, to figure out timings. I had to learn it all myself."
These days, though, he's well versed in modern technology and is anything but a loner; he's a well-respected collaborator.
"I think the director-composer relationship is an interesting one," he says. "The directors I've worked with create something, and you're working with them to create a musical image of that, and a feeling of what they put onscreen. "Fellowship of the Ring" was a really close-working relationship. I did four months of research on my own before writing. I saw pieces of the film, and the book was so inspiring while rereading it, I felt I had enough to start the composition process. But director Peter Jackson knew the film and what he wanted, and he knew it musically really well. Even in the recording, he inherently knew the good take. Even if it wasn't technically the good one, he knew when the players just played the thing that captured the feeling of that scene. So I was working with him closely to pull out all the best parts of the score."
Yet Shore isn't afraid to admit that this film was one of his biggest challenges. Besides composing, he also arranged and conducted the music, using a 100-piece symphony orchestra, a 60-voice mixed choir, a 30-voice boys choir, and 10 soloists.
"You have to remember you're creating a nine-hour film," he says, in reference to 'Fellowship's' three-hour running time and the next two segments of the J.R.R. Tolkien epic that will be released around Christmas in 2002 and 2003. "Tolkien spent 14 years writing the books, and it's considered one of the most complex fantasy worlds ever created. And it's historical; it has a feeling of antiquity to it.
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Howard Shore at Berklee
Howard Shore came to Berklee in the 1960s and studied with teachers such as Charlie Mariano, Herb Pomeroy, and John LaPorta. Shore talked about his Berklee days in an interview with Berklee Today:
When I came to Berklee, I needed a good foundation. I had studied harmony and counterpoint in high school, but there was so much that I didn't understand. I soaked up the material at Berklee like a sponge. It was the first time in my life where it all made sense. There was a great logic to music that I didn't know about before. The knowledge that I took away from Berklee in those years has been the foundation for everything that I do with music now.
—Berklee Today, Fall 1997 |
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"We always knew we wanted the score to feel old, as if it was found somewhere, in a vault, and they had uncovered it, and it somehow magically fit all the scenes in Peter Jackson's film," he adds with a laugh. "And when you're dealing with literary works, you have the book as a guide. So you want the feeling that Tolkien, if he was alive and heard your music, would at least appreciate your music, your thinking. The idea of using the vocal music, and of using his languages, was a natural. I did so much research on 'Ring' mythology, like what might have influenced Tolkien in his writing, and then I looked at everything after the publication of the books, and how Lord of the Rings had influenced other literary works and films and music.
"It's a very humbling experience," he adds. "Here's this novel that the world knows, that people have read translated into 40 languages, and you're now going to create the imagery of that piece."
But the score works, with the visuals and on its own, and Shore is already composing for the next Cronenberg film, "Spider," and the next Fincher film, "Panic Room."
"I had a rock-n-roll career, I had a television career as well," he says. "This film career is interesting. It's part three, and there's probably a part four somewhere in there. But they're all part of a musical journey."
Ed Symkus is senior arts writer for Community Newspaper Company.
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