One of my favorite elements in the LOTR film is Howard Shore’s dense, complex, beautiful music. I’m just glad we live in the age of CDs, because I’ve listened to these recordings often enough to wear out a few generations of vinyl copies.

Originally, of course, we had only the single-CD soundtracks. These were incomplete and even rearranged so that some cuts came out of order. Shore has been re-editing the music for the “Complete Recordings.” I doubt that I need to tell anyone reading this blog that so far we have The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. Mine are sitting enshrined on a shelf, held up and protected by the little Argonath bookends that came with the Fellowship extended-version DVD gift set.

Recently Howard Shore’s website added an announcement that the Return of the King Complete Recording is coming out this fall. No specific date given, and no pre-orders yet on Amazon. Indeed, it’s hard to get any information on the subject.

One Frodo Franchise reader, Timdalf, has written to ask why I deal so little with Shore’s music and the CDs that have been so prominent among the licensed products associated with the film. Perhaps some other fans have wondered the same thing. My reply to him was this: “I didn’t discuss them because I just couldn’t deal with all the licensed ancillary products without having the book become a multi-volume epic. Overall I decided to focus on the aspects of film franchises made possible by the digital revolution. The DVDs and videogames are the most lucrative products, and ones which are recent innovations, so I focused on them. Soundtrack recordings (like tabletop games, action figures, and other items) are fairly traditional ancillaries (despite the switch from vinyl to CDs), so I regretfully left them out.”

It was probably just as well that I didn’t need to include the CDs in my book. As I mention in the acknowledgements, New Line Cinema ultimately decided not to let me interview their executives. I’m not complaining, because they did allow me access to the filmmakers, so I got a lot of terrific material. Still, given that New Line’s own music division put out the CDs, I wouldn’t have had any inside information—as I did, for example, from Electronic Arts, maker of the videogames. The EA people were extremely helpful.

Fortunately another author, and one far more expert in music than I am, had great access to Shore and is writing a book, The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films. Doug Adams, a contributing writer for the excellent journal Film Score Monthly, has had extensive access to Shore, has witnessed some of the recording, and has published very helpful information on the dozens of leitmotifs in the score. Again, information is slim, but the occasional references to the books on internet sources suggested that the book might appear this year. Now Timdalf tells me that 2008 is more likely.

Adams’ Film Score Monthly reviews of the original CDs are available online. Go here for the Fellowship, Towers, and Return reviews. I can’t find the articles that Adams wrote for the journal, which I assume are only available in the print issues: “Towering Achievements” in the December, 2002 issue (Volume 7, number 10, pp. 20-24 and 48), and “Seven Days in September” in the December, 2003 one (Volume 8, number 10, pp. 16-26).

Timdalf also directed me to a Moviemusic.com thread, “LOTR Package Update,” on the recordings. This thread has been broken down into three series, given that the individual series don’t function well once they get too long. Go here for the original, follow-up, and current series, which have been going on for years now. Adams contributes fairly regularly, and the participants are knowledgeable and enthusiastic.

Down to the wire scoring

Googling around the internet trying to come up with more information on the recordings, I came across an interview on Film Score Monthly’s website. In it Michael McCarthy, the director of the boys’ choir that sings on the soundtrack, talks about how much of Shore’s work, both writing and recording, had to be done under great pressure as the deadlines for finishing each of the film’s three parts loomed:

MM: “We would get five to six days notice and then we would be in the studio. Sometimes they would be able to fax music the night before because they were working during the night. I would meet with my kids every morning at 8:00. If there wasn’t any music on the fax machine, we would just wait for it at the studio. The kids would be booked for a three-hour session at a time. We’d get the cues, note-bash them and put them down as a track.

“Peter [Jackson] took a very hands-on approach to the editing, so that prevented Howard from having a complete look at what he was writing music for. Well, not preventing really, but everything had to happen very much at the end of the editing process. Howard picked up the score in August. We were usually booked on the second or third week of September, with probably one more [session] to finish off the first week of October. Then everything was edited down and mastered by the end of October. Those guys had to work fast.”

This reminded me of an exciting moment for me during the research for my book. After extended negotiations during 2003, on September 28 I finally arrived in Wellington for my first of what turned out to be three visits. After a couple of days of organizing my interview appointments, I was told that I could meet producer Barrie Osborne on Wednesday, October 1. Barrie had been the person I initially made contact with, and his interest in my project was what made the book possible.

Anyone who has watched the supplement chapter, “The End of All Things” on the extended-edition Return DVD knows that the post-production was really coming down to the crunch by that point. The work on animation, special effects, and the soundtrack (music, dialogue, and sound effects) was way behind, and Peter was still editing. The result was that nothing could be “locked down,” including Shore’s compositions. (The illustrations here are all from Michael Pellerin’s DVD supplements.)

Barrie was a busy man at the time, but I got a chance to talk with him because he was driving out to The Film Unit on October 1. TFU was the post-production house owned by Peter and by Fran Walsh. It was where the laboratory work, editing, and sound mixing went on. TFU was at that time in Lower Hutt, about a half-hour drive from the Three Foot Six offices by the airport in the Miramar suburb of Wellington.

By that point a new Film Unit building was under construction in Miramar, and already the sound was being edited in the superb new studios there. (The building is now complete, and the company has been renamed Park Road Post.) I met Barrie in the new building, and we chatted during the drive out and back.

Barrie’s purpose was to give an encouraging talk to the Film Unit staff, since they, like the rest of the people working on the film, were facing a mountain of work. A number of people mentioned to me that Barrie was much liked by everyone involved in Rings because he did take the trouble to speak with them at intervals and to make it clear that their labors were appreciated.

The visit was short, but it involved a surprise for us all. Barrie had brought the trailer for Return with him. Coincidentally, I had left the U.S. on September 26, the very day when that trailer premiered in theaters. It was a thrill to see it with that group of Film Unit employees, since they had been working on that footage, but it was the first time that many of them had seen finished footage edited together and projected on the big screen.

I’m sure most of you remember that trailer, which I think was the most exciting of the ones done for the three parts. It was the sort of trailer where the lights come up and you’re tempted to say, “I want to see that film … NOW!” Needless to say, the audience was excited, cheering and even in some cases in tears by the end.

As we drove back into town, Barrie told me about some of the problems the production was facing in terms of being behind schedule. He pointed out that there was a risk that the film would not make its foreign release dates because there might not be time to dub and subtitle the prints. (From the very start he was extraordinarily kind and trusting, and I cannot emphasize enough that the incredible cooperation that made the book possible resulted from his backing of the project.)

When we arrived back at the new Film Unit building, I followed Barrie back to his office. It had been empty when we left, but now it was full of guys. Barrie introduced me, some of the men on the sofa scooted over to make room for me, and I found myself sitting in on the daily production meeting of the heads of the various departments—special effects, digital grading, sound editing, and so on. These are termed the “Just in Time” meetings in the supplement and are shown about 8 ½ minutes in.

I was sitting beside Nigel Scott, who was acting as Shore’s point person in Wellington while the scoring was going on in London. Nigel reported that Shore hadn’t made much, if any, progress since the previous meeting, since Peter wasn’t showing him the most recent changes in the editing. I’m not telling tales out of school here, since Barrie has discussed the problems involved in working on editing, special effects, and sound editing simultaneously. In “The End of All Things,” he says, “I started to realize that what was happening was that Peter would think about changes, but he would only convey them to certain people, because I think as a director he felt, ‘If I tell the visual-effects guys that I might drop that shot, they might stop working on that shot, so maybe I’d better not tell them, but I’ll tell the composer.” Or, in this case, he’d tell someone other than the composer.

Of course in the end the whole thing got finished, and it didn’t miss any of its foreign release dates, let alone its December 1 world premiere in Wellington. Now, nearly four years later, we apparently will soon have the last of the complete recordings of Shore’s epic score. And with luck, not long after we will have Adams’ book to help us to better appreciate it.

PS I think a lot of Shore’s fans are still not familiar with his music for the videogame “Soul of the Ultimate Nation.” It’s a wonderful piece, somewhat in the Rings vein, but with an effective use of the theremin, an eerie-sounding electronic musical instrument that Shore had previously used (in combination with bongos!) in his terrific and underrated score for Tim Burton’s Ed Wood.