Role of Music in The Lord of the Rings - Essay Example

Some of them were “The One Ring”, “The Elves”, “The Gondor”, “The Fellowship of the Ring”, and so on. Each theme represents a particular situation, group, or personality and, accordingly, reflects and comments on them. The lyrics of the themes are composed in a thorough manner to satisfy the viewers (Lehman, 2011, p.284). The three main themes were Shire, Fellowship, and Rohan. These were the most prominent and easily recognizable in all the three movies. Each of them is played countless times with different orchestrations according to the moods of the films.

The Shire, which is the most popular theme of the movies, represents the Shire and is rendered whenever the hobbits want to go home. It has a folksy feel and slightly out of tune. It is “warm-hearted, comforting and inviting”. The Fellowship theme has been repeated 38 times across the three movies. In the first movie, it is used as signature theme. It is “heroic, jagged, and assertive” (Rawlins, 2006). The Rohan theme is used as signature theme for the second movie. It expresses the “simplicity, military prowess, and sense of honor” of Rohan culture (Rawlins, 2006).

The lyrics for all the music pieces and especially those used by the choir were translated into Elvish languages that were invented by Tolkien (Beregond, 2009, p.68). The lyrics were written to reflect the exact theme, and special training was given to the singers to pronounce them (Waldron, 2006). Leitmotif Shore used the technique of leitmotif to compose the music of this trilogy. Leitmotifs are themes that “represent different aspects of the narratives” (Mathijs, 2006, p.307), and they were widely used in the classical Hollywood movies. In using. The films are The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003).

Howard Shore is a composer and conductor of music for all the three movies. He won the Academic Awards in 2001 and 2003 for Best Original Score. Music has been incorporated on large scale that spans nearly 12 hours. The music of all the three movies was recorded by London Philharmonic, and won Grammy Awards. Howard Shore is trained in classical music, and he continues to learn to maintain the flow of his creativity. He believes that there is no end of knowledge in music, and, as he learns more, he gets more resources to utilize.

He composes music for only those films whose subject strikes an emotional chord inside him. For composing the music of The Lord of the Rings, he has used his lifetime experience and childlike imagination. His improvisation came from the unconscious; he shaped and developed this improvisation according to the theme and characters of the movies. Howard had the responsibility of creating music in one year for a work that took 12 years for Tolkien to put in his book. He had to create music that lasted 21 hours, which included “nine hours in the theatre and 12 hours on the DVD”.

Shore felt that he became aware of many things in himself while composing the music. Music plays an important role in all the three films as it helps to narrate the story and express the characters and situations with the use of the leitmotif technique. The music has become extremely popular and the soundtrack is available for purchase. The music played in the movies is the finest achievement by Howard Shore. The symphonic presentation of the music makes it more popular in concert halls.