The Musical Continuity between Howard Shore and J.R.R. Tolkien

Abstract

The Musical Continuity between Howard Shore and J.R.R. Tolkien Vincent E. Rone (bio) Music is "the most powerful force in Tolkien's universe," claims Elizabeth A. Whittingham in a 2019 essay (135). Such bold ideas as this and Bradford Lee Eden's description of Tolkien as a "composer of words," who conceived language in musical terms ("Scholar" 171), might have struck earlier scholars as exaggerations, but in the past decade the topic of music and Tolkien has begun to attract academic interest. Anthologies appearing since 2010 include Eden's Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien, Music in Middle-earth (Steimel and Schneidewind), and Music in Tolkien's Work and Beyond (Eilmann and Schneidewind). Specialized monographs include Christopher MacLachlan's Tolkien and Wagner: The Ring and Der Ring and Renée Vink's Wagner and Tolkien: Mythmakers. These authors have worked hard in the past ten years to reveal the hitherto underestimated place of privilege music occupies in Tolkien's legendarium. It is tempting to conclude that the intense scholarly interest in music and Tolkien has at its origin the popular and critical success of Howard Shore's score for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. For instance, Shore's film scores became the topic of an article by Alex Ross in the New Yorker, while Doug Adams wrote for general audiences a comprehensive guide to the themes and their interrelationships in the film trilogy. Academic music theorists, such as Frank Lehman, have investigated Shore's ability to convey harmonic wonder and dread, and commented on how Shore depicts the peoples of Middle-earth through harmonic techniques, providing a sonic correlation to Tolkien's descriptions of them (Rone). The film scores have spurred fans and scholars alike to re-examine Tolkien's world-building procedures through sound, what Shore calls "mirroring" Tolkien's work (Adams and Shore 3:25–3:40). Yet most of the work comparing Shore and Tolkien's world-building through sound takes historical and literary approaches. No scholars have studied Shore's musical examples with Tolkien's own musical performances and selections of melody, possibly because a musicological/theoretical study of Shore and Tolkien presents a highly specialized niche. Furthermore, and most practically, bona-fide examples of analyzable music from Tolkien are scarce. The precious few examples [End Page 113] come in two forms. First, in his recorded narration of parts of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien set poetic texts to either pre-existing or improvised melodies. Second, Tolkien consulted and approved for publication a song cycle of his poems for voice and piano, Donald Swann's The Road Goes Ever On, in which the melody Swann used for an Elvish song was a Gregorian chant provided by Tolkien (Swann v–vi; Devaux and Spirito 47–48). This essay therefore demonstrates that Shore and Tolkien used similar methods and contexts to depict the music of the peoples of Middle-earth in their respective media. Specifically, I focus on Hobbits and Elves and compare their diegetic music1 in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy with the music Tolkien performed, improvised, or supervised for the two races. My analyses reveal two important parallels between Shore and Tolkien. First, the extant examples show that they emphasized similar generic contexts: folk and casual for Hobbits and ritualistic and sacred for Elves. Second, and more importantly, Shore and Tolkien adopt the same use of pitch organization for these generic contexts. Hobbit music receives an almost exclusive use of diatonic tonality, while Elvish music is written in the ecclesiastical or church modes. Such a juxtaposition of musical style and pitch emphasizes the association of Hobbits with the common and familiar, and Elves as ancient and unfamiliar. I first treat tonality and the Hobbits with a theoretical and historical overview of tonality and its associations of familiarity. I then demonstrate how such associations manifest in the diegetic music of the Hobbits in selections from Shore's score. Finally, I show how such associations apply to Tolkien's writings about Hobbits, his conceptions of Hobbit music, and to Swann's song cycle. Next comes the music of Elves, beginning with a theoretical and historical overview of...