New Line’s official website for the Lord of the Rings soundtracks now offers an “Annotated Score” for the trilogy’s music. Each part comes in the form of a downloadable pdf. For The Fellowship of the Ring, click here; for The Two Towers, here; and for The Return of the King, here.

The contents of these are not the same as what’s in the little books that are included in the boxed sets of the complete recordings. Instead, they are offered as “companion pieces” to those books. The books explain the musical themes associated with the various characters and races, specifying which tracks they appear in. The motifs are given as excerpts of musical scores.

The online “Annotated Scores” instead go track by track, with explanations of how the music fits the action. There are also notes on instrumentation and on the unused stretches of music that Howard Shore composed but that were not used in the film. These stretches are included in the complete recordings. The Annotated Scores do not include any musical scores, but the lyrics for the songs, including the choruses heard over several scenes, are given.

So for those who choose to buy the recordings as downloads rather than CDs, you won’t get the contents of the book, but you can at least get some information on the various tracks—though the files are many pages each and would be a challenge to print out in their entirety for convenient reading.