Introduction | Fellowship of the Ring | Two Towers | Return of the King | Notes and Links

A lot of people love the music that Howard Shore composed for The Lord of the Rings. After spending a great deal of time in various Lord of the Rings-related communities online, I came to realize that a lot of people don't know quite how film scores work, so I figured I'd try and do my best to explain. Though I have been both an instrumentalist (French horn player, specifically) and a singer for most of my life, I have tried to organize this explanation in such a way that anyone, regardless of musical background, can understand it. I'm not an expert, by any means; I'm just someone who has been picking apart movie music for well on twenty years now, and who figured maybe she could lend a hand to others who haven't. :)

As such, I begin on this page with an explanation of Shore's scoring method, below. The three separate pages -- named one for each film -- discuss that film's soundtrack in depth, going track-by-track. To compile this analysis, I have used the standard CD soundtrack, available in stores worldwide and online. A discussion of music not found on these albums is under the Notes and Links section (which, incidentally, may be useful to read before delving into the individual pages). There is one site that I cannot plug highly enough, and so it gets mentioned throughout: this soundtrack analysis provides a lengthy, well-organized, comprehensive discussion of all the text, in all the languages, sung at any point in the film or on the soundtrack. It's a safe assumption that any text I cite, even without a link provided, came from that site.

A Simple Explanation of Leitmotif

Anyone who has listened carefully to The Lord of the Rings, whether or not he or she has listened to the soundtrack albums, knows that Howard Shore has created several different themes in the music. These themes appear at different times, played by different instruments and playing under different kinds of action. This kind of scoring is called leitmotif.

Leitmotif is "a clearly defined theme or musical idea, representing or symbolizing a person, object, idea etc, which returns in its original or an altered form at appropriate points in a dramatic (mainly operatic) work." Brought to prominence in the 19th century by the German composer Richard Wagner, the use of leitmotif has found a new use in the 20th century: film scoring.

Whether in Lord of the Rings or in Star Wars or in one of Wagner's operas, the idea remains the same. Each individual theme you hear is called a "motive," although "theme" is an easily interchangeable term. Each one of these motives represents, aurally, a specific person, place, thing, or idea (yes, these themes are musical nouns).

These themes aren't necessarily whole pieces of music, or tracks on the CD. In fact, to find one that long in context is a rarity. Usually a motive is a short phrase, or even just a few notes. The idea behind their composition is to keep it simple and easily identifiable. It's a kind of sound code that we learn to interpret on an almost subconscious level, the same way we interpret the visual codes present in film. Hearing music for Gondor, then, will make you think of Gondor on a level, even though you may not be listening too carefully.