Howard Shore

Howard Shore became a big name in 2001 with his music for The Lord of the Rings films, but he has written many scores of similar quality since 1979. Shore began his musical career playing saxophone for the band Lighthouse. Soon after, he became the musical director for Saturday Night Live from its debut, writing the show's theme and arranging and performing for sketches until 1980. Shore's first film score, The Brood, was for director David Cronenberg, and Shore would go on to score all of Cronenberg's subsequent films with the exception of Michael Kamen's The Dead Zone. These films include Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly, Crash, eXIstenZ, Spider, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, A Dangerous Method, Cosmopolis, and Maps to the Stars. Befitting Cronenberg's vision, Shore wrote most of the scores in a dark, brooding, almost minimalistic style, filled with unsettling orchestrations and strange harmonies. Even Naked Lunch, which features the performance of Ornette Coleman, is a complex and unusual composition for those more familiar with more popular and upbeat jazz. He wrote similarly dark scores for David Fincher's films Se7en, The Game, and Panic Room as well as Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, The Cell, Doubt, and Edge of Darkness (for which John Corigliano had written a superior rejected score). He scored After Hours with Martin Scorsese, and later formed a relationship with the director on Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, and the wonderfully magical Hugo. But as this last film attests to, Shore is not all about doom and gloom, and he has written scores for films like Big, Mrs. Doubtfire, Analyze This, The Last Mimzy, and (rather bizarrely) The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. He also scored Ed Wood, the one Tim Burton film with original music not by Danny Elfman (Sweeney Todd's music was based on Stephen Sondheim's already-existing musical). Shore wrote an alternately cheesy and emotionally affecting score to reflect Wood's horrible films and the plight of Bela Lugosi. His score for Peter Jackson's King Kong was rejected, though James Newton Howard's replacement was great. Of course, it is Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy for which Shore is best known. He was given a luxuriously long time to compose a score with a mind-numbing amount of themes that connect to each other in ingenious ways. And the themes themselves are, for the most part, glorious, though the score itself has its own share of uninteresting passages with thin orchestrations. But all in all, it is a marvelous composition, and musicologist Doug Adams wrote a fantastic and hefty tome about it that is a must-buy.

Dogma

Ed Wood
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Hugo

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring**

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers*

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King**

Naked Lunch

Philadelphia