Reddit reviews The Music of The Lord of the Rings Films: A Comprehensive Account of Howard Shore's Scores (Book and Rarities CD)

It's pricey, and probably aimed at people with a certain level of understanding of music theory, but if you're interested in how Shore uses leitmotifs, there is no more in-depth analysis out there than this book.

I went to a book signing when it was released and met Mr Shore.

(MUSIC)
A while ago, I uploaded a link of what I thought to be the complete released music for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. (Released OSTs, Released Complete Score, Offical Concert album).
It has come to my attention that there is one more LOTR album out there. There is an official LOTR soundtrack book, which comes with a CD, an album called the LOTR Rarities Archive. It has early demos and themes on it.

I would like to complete my collection, and the collection of others. While I have been able to hunt down elusive rare soundtrack albums, this one continues to evade me.
Here is the link to the book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Music-Lord-Rings-Films-Comprehensive/dp/0739071572/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1506027062&sr=8-4&keywords=lord+of+the+rings++soundtrack+book
If anybody out there has it, I would appreciate it if it was shared. Thanks!

For ensemble musicians, your best bet will be to find a roster list of the London Symphony Orchestra for the year in which they were recorded.

For specialist soloists, there is an appendix in Doug Adam's The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films which lists all of the major soloists for all of the specialist instruments. I have the book right next to me!

I'm assuming you're talking about the whistle, in which case the soloist is Mike Taylor.

Yes - this guy was there for that performance signing his book -- interesting read plus you listen to the tracks as you read about them.

http://www.amazon.com/Music-Lord-Rings-Films-Comprehensive/dp/0739071572/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341848292&sr=8-1&keywords=doug+adams++lord+of+the+rings

It was on thinkgeek but it looks like they aren't selling it anymore for some reason (I used an old link because they don't display it on the site anymore). BUT I just found it on amazon, and for $20 off! Happy Holidays!

I wish there was a book. An in-depth thematic analysis of the SW music like Doug Adam's book on LotR would be amazing.


This blog post looks like a good place to start.

There is also this book available for purchase. I am willing to buy this am also saving money to do so. What do you think of this?

https://www.amazon.com/Music-Lord-Rings-Films-Comprehensive/dp/0739071572

Yeah! They came with this book: The Music of The Lord of the Rings Films: A Comprehensive Account of Howard Shore's Scores (Book and Rarities CD) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0739071572/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_eXWPDb2SDB29K

This isn’t an affiliate link, but I HIGHLY recommend this book. IIRC the author interviewed Howard Shore during production (so it wasn’t done well after the fact) and the book gets pretty technical so it’s not a fluff piece. It’s not a biography of any kind, it’s about the music (and development of it) for LotR. The book came out... 3-4 years ago?

Anyway the book is fantastic and it includes a CD with MIDI mock-ups, including a few themes that ended up not making the final cut. There’s also like 20 minutes of interview audio with the author and Howard Shore.

As the others have said, it's a very rare practice and actually Howard Shore was not hired for LOTR until production had already begun. In fact it was a trip to New Zealand to visit the set which convinced him to accept the offer, according to Doug Adams' The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films

Ennio Morricone did do it for Once Upon a Time in the West, that's a very famous example and Sergio Leone would play those pieces while filming. Not an example of composed scores, but Quentin Tarantino has played live music on set too when he knows for sure what the song will be.

Believe it or not, John Williams himself has only done this a very rare number of times and never on Star Wars. For the film JFK, I believe he did write that score entirely based on the script and a visit to Washington DC with Oliver Stone. That's the only one that comes to mind. Obviously for some things he's had to write songs, like "Double Trouble" for Prisoner of Azkaban which of course became a main theme of the score. Close Encounters, he and Spielberg certainly had to decide on what those five notes would be before filming. Hook was originally going to be a musical in its very early stages and he wrote songs for that (like "We Don't Wanna Grow Up" which was used for the kids' play at the beginning, and I think it's rumored though unconfirmed that some of the main themes were based on the songs.) But the actual full score writing all came later.

For the most part, it's really up to the composers to write such great music that it has that flow and create the illusion that the film conceivably could have been crafted around the music. Very hard to do, and depends a lot on the directors and editors as well. There's a pretty famous story about the finale of ET where it became so complicated that Spielberg just told Williams to conduct the music and he would fix it all in the editing later to fit the music. That's uncommon, mostly it's the music that gets cut up more and more with digital editing and you can hear it all the time in modern movies if you listen carefully, including all three prequels and Force Awakens.

One of my most cherished posessions is this book https://www.amazon.com/Music-Lord-Rings-Films-Comprehensive/dp/0739071572