Shore has been honoured for his wide-ranging body of work with the Maestro Award at the Billboard/The Hollywood Reporter Film & TV Music Conference at Universal Studios in Universal City. Meanwhile, film scores were recognized across three genres: feature went to The Fault in Our Stars; sci-fi or fantasy went to The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and animated film went to How to Train Your Dragon 2.
Further articles from the Hollywood Reporter:
'Lord of the Rings' Composer Howard Shore on Scoring 80 Movies: "I Often Felt Like Frodo"
and Billboard: http://www.billboard.com/articles/63042 ... ings-music
There’s obviously a lot of continuity, musically and otherwise, between The Lord of the Rings films and The Hobbit. But what about the differences in your approaches to the two trilogies?
The books are different. The Hobbit was written before The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote it in the ‘30s and he read it to his children as a bedtime story, so it definitely has a lighter tone to it. The Lord of the Rings was of course written later, during the '40s. The war was raging at that point, so it has a more serious tone. The journey in each is different. The Lord of the Rings is about a much bigger, more serious world that is on the verge of destruction by a great evil force -- the world could collapse. The Hobbit is a story that’s not quite as serious. The stakes aren’t quite as high.
How is that expressed musically? Were there orchestrations or groupings that you had used in The Lord of the Rings where you thought, 'This isn’t going to be appropriate for The Hobbit'?
The instrumentation for both stories basically remained the same. The symphony orchestra was the primary instrument, with a large mixed adult choir, a children’s choir and soloists. And many solo instruments were used from the four points of the compass to show the range and the differences in Tolkien’s descriptions of Middle Earth.
Any instruments you hadn’t used before?
We used a lot of eastern and African instruments in The Lord of the Rings. But in The Hobbit we used a gamelan, which is a wonderful, very exotic eastern instrument. It was used in the scenes with the dragon Smaug. So the gamelan really took on the character of Smaug. I had previously used things like Tibetan hanging gongs and Chinese cymbals, but the gamelan was a new color. Doug Adams wrote a book [The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films: A Comprehensive Account of Howard Shore’s Scores]. And in that book, which was just based on the first trilogy, he identified over 80 themes and leitmotifs that were used. So with The Hobbit films now, we’re well over a hundred.
Were you surprised to learn you had written more than 80 themes and leitmotifs?
No, because we went step by step. A few years ago we did a concert in New York, and Tolkien’s papers were being shown in a public library and I got to see them for the first time. And it was interesting how his journey and ours were similar in a sense. He was constantly trying to take one step in front of the other. He didn’t have the whole story completely mapped out. And I think everybody who worked on the films went on a similar kind of journey, where you just kind of took one step forward at a time. It was too large and massive a project to really conceptualize so perfectly before you started. You kind of just threw yourself into it: you absorbed the book and the ideas and then collaborated with a lot of other people who were great artists from all over the world who brought all of their own ideas about Tolkien. The inspiration was all around and all you had to do was be open and receptive to it, and contribute something as well. And in my case I contributed music.
