HOWARD SHORE

Well, the streams works now! The other one I got barely a few minutes from because it blocked somehow.

You make weird conclusions! Sometimes you are bringing all things together and create a rather pessimistic orgy of thoughts.

I played this score twice from the new stream and to me this stream sounds much better then what we initially had and you know what... it's made a difference. I like the score a little bit more than I originally did. I think a viewing of the film is going to help me with my final judgment. The more muscular cues are a real highlight!

-Erik-

Some of the action tracks are pretty impressive -- 'Out of the Frying Pan' comes to mind. And I like Neil Finn's song -- it's quite a highlight for me actually.

Shore is facing the same situation Williams did when scoring the prequels.

Imagine to watch all six films in a row, starting with "The Hobbit" right through "Return of the King". Shore tries to create a musical stream of thematic deveolpement that will make sense in retospective, even though the films were released in non chronolgical order.

So he can't go all out now, he has to hold back for things to come. And: Should it all get watered down a bit along the way, who is to blame? The composer or the guys who decided to bloat this to a new trilogy?

Anyway, if the narration holds, I am confident, Shore will deliver.

New video interview with Shore on Hobbit:

(from scoop.it/t/soundtrack)

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/12/05/t … ard-shore/

I just bought the special edition of THE HOBBIT (in the store, no less! It's been a while since I last didn't have to order it online!). It ultimately took quite a while of doubting with both the regular and special editions in my hands (my left is just about strong enough to do so now, so it was a good practice), which is weird because when they were announced I expected to mindlessly buy the special edition. Basically because I've always done so for the original trilogy and even loved each and every moment of the complete recordings. I also preferred the jewel case of the regular release, with the "special" edition now in cardboard whereas the original trilogy limited editions came with a nice (fake) leathery look.

Oh well, since I haven't heard it yet (wanted to wait for the official release), let's hope it's worth it!

EDIT: Ok, the package is actually nicer than it seems when still in plastic, with the maps of Middle Earth covering the inside and a nice thick booklet containing lyrics, wonderful high quality pictures of the recording sessions and extensive liner notes by Doug Adams, who has a lot more to say about the music and themes than these notes usually contain (replacing the personal messages from Shore and Jackson, by the way, which are now absent).

http://d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfront.net/ph … 4_460s.jpg

A more honest picture would also show Tolkien's copious extra-volume notes as part of the "Hobbit" section because that is the primary* reason The Hobbit is being split up into 3 films.

*Ok, money is probably somewhere up there too. But they probably had to pay the Tolkien family a huge settlement just to get the rights to do this...

Not just, of course, but it's definitely one of the major guiding forces.

Eeeeexactly my point

I'd like to run an empirical study to determine the correlaton between Star Wars Prequel bashers and Peter Jackson LotR haters.

If you want art go to Cannes, go to Sundance, but stop bashing mere popcorn flicks that are as close to art as entertainment can get.

Just because there's a few talking points here that will soon be submerged in the Now Playing thread...

NP: The Hobbit (Erik edit) (Howard Shore)

Or mostly the Erik edit. I think I threw one more track in -- a Gollum one, just because it felt strange to imagine this story without the Gollum episode. Maybe you've stuffed the second half a little too heavy with wall-to-wall thunderous action (even that can get boring!), but mixing up the order of the cues would probably ameliorate that a bit.

But anyway... what of all of this? It helps immensely to slim the material in this way. I have no idea if great music has been cut out, but the resulting music feels stronger than the album did on first listen, so I'm calling it a massive improvement at this point. And is that a surprise? Better composers than Shore usually play better in edited form. (Richard Wagner anyone? Tell me -- how often do you go past the 'Ring Cycle Highlights' disc to meditate on the whole thing?)

It helps also to hear this on proper speakers. The various streaming things listened through headphones definitely did not serve Shore's murky connective tissue well. Now the innumerable repeated three, four and five note motifs start to become clearer. The sort of stuff Doug Adams and others (and once I) devote paragraphs uncountable to interpreting. It's here. I wish I could say I liked that stuff, but I can respect the thought behind it a bit more. There's some thoughtful twists on the body of themes that was built up over the Ring trilogy. I just wish it made my heart sing, and it really doesn't. I don't know whether that's Shore's judgement as a dramatist or his limitations as a composer, but how I wish I just felt anything other than bored for large stretches of this. The heart just wants to sing.

Ah, yes, the singing heart. The emotion I have at times been accused of lacking in my appreciation of the music we all listen to. Look that's all well and good, but I'd be amazed if anyone was shedding tears to this as pure music. That's either a film doing the heavy lifting, the weight of past associations giving it all a nostalgic familiar edge, or the audience putting their hearts into the gaps in a work (the latter something many artists aspire to).

The opening of 'Radagast the Brown'... and 'Roast Mutton' to some extent also -- which both feel quite new in the music of Lord of the Rings -- make me wish that rather that the music had been able to start from scratch this time around. That rather than pay hommage to every theme and texture of Lord of the Rings at every conceivable foreshadowing, a new approach had been taken. Equally rich, but new at every turn. This score mostly feels a little too much like the 10 hours of music that preceded it. There's not much elbow room for new feelings when you feel like you must have heard the last 8 bars before.

But maybe there's two kinds of people. Some who are endlessly frustrated when new art doesn't formally integrate with what has come before. These people wanted Prometheus's score to sound more like Alien, wanted Desplat and Shore to do more with the Carter Burwell theme in Twilight, bristled at the lack of musical integrity in the Harry Potter films, disliked that Danny Elfman did not tilt the hat to Marco Beltrami in Hellboy, mildly begrudge Lalo Schifrin for not following-up Michel Legrand's best day, and now even a few diehard fans of the Middle Earth music have taken up the banner of 'offended composer devotees'* due to the sort of slapdash musical tracking and looping that most films have to do at some point.
* This is what I refer to there.

And then there are the other sorts of people. They might have liked the former things, respect their existence. But they're equally happy to see equally talented people offer their own spin on classic material.

But then I was most excited about this film when Peter Weir was a potential directing candidate. Who knows how that would have worked, and he probably would have done too much of his own thing for that to have worked with Jackson supervising, but one thing we can say for sure -- it would be hard to second guess what THAT film's music would have sounded like, even if Howard Shore had been writing it.

It's been 40 years but the healing process is a slow one.

Are you sure you've heard both enough times to make a certain statement?