Michelle Glazer's List: Documentary Script

• I approached each  film as a separate entity. The first one completely out of the blue, but the second one of course connected to the first  one; we referred back to characters and extended them and referred back to themes and extended and developed  those.
• I suppose it was a natural but unconscious metamorphoses of musical themes that created something that may  seem to have more architectural and conscious interrelatedness than I actually intended to put there.
• If I had written  the music without the film probably nobody ever would have heard of the music; it was the combination of things  and the elusive, weird, unpredictable aspect of timing that none of us can quite get our hands around.
• Darth Vader's theme seemed to me to need to have, like all of the themes if possible, strong melodic  identification, so that when you heard it or part of the theme you would associate it with the character. The melodic  elements needed to have a strong imprint.
• In the case of Darth Vader, brass suggests itself because of his military bearing and his authority and his ominous  look. That would translate into a strong melody that's military, that grabs you right away, that is, probably  simplistically, in a minor mode because he's threatening. You combine these thoughts into this kind of a military,  ceremonial march, and we've got something that perhaps will answer the requirement here.
• JW: Flourishes and upward reaching; idealistic and heroic, in a very different way than Darth Vader of  course, and a very different tonality—a very uplifted kind of heraldic quality. Larger than he is. His idealism is  more the subject than the character itself, I would say.
• JW: I would make similar comments there about Solo's music. Although they overlap a lot; I mean it's one  thing really in my mind, a lot of it. And of course the Luke Skywalker music has several themes within it also.  You'd be testing my memory to ask me how I used them all and where [laughs].
• I tried to construct something that again would have this idealistic, uplifting but military flare to it.
• And try to get it so it's set  in the most brilliant register of the trumpets, horns and trombones so that we'd have a blazingly brilliant fanfare at  the opening of the piece. And contrast that with the second theme that was lyrical and romantic and adventurous  also. And give it all a kind of ceremonial... it's not a march but very nearly that. So you almost kind of want to  [laughs] patch your feet to it or stand up and salute when you hear it—I mean there's a little bit of that ceremonial  aspect.
• JW: Well I have stand-outs in my mind because of the music that we play in concerts more recently: the  asteroid field I remember from, I think it was the second film. It had a musical piece that was like a ballet of flying  spaceships and asteroids colliding. That was a very effective and successful scene in my mind both musically and  visually.

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• The way HOWARD constructed this score was to translate TOLKIEN's   cultures of Middle-Earth into a population of musical ideas.
• Present the themes as cultural elements, and from there,   put them back into the story and show how this thematic material   essentially tells the story of the LORD OF THE RINGS

• He extended the Wagnerian operatic approach and, in the process, added several new themes and motifs including a new love theme for Han and Leia, a motif for the droids, a bassoon  motif for Boba Fett, a cosmopolitan march for Lando Calrissian, Yoda's benevolent theme, and, of course, the immortal Imperial march.
• All of the major themes and motifs from the first film return and are mercifully toned down (no more Luke's theme or Force theme playing continually - see review for  Star Wars )  Although he employs dissonant orchestration at some points, it never overtakes the entire score, and adds new meaning to the uncertain future of the plot. 
• The unused Ice Planet Hoth contains introductions to most of the major themes and motifs, opening with a hint of Vader's theme under dissonant orchestrations, which perfectly sets the desperate, downcast tone of the film.  After more atonal wanderings, we get some appropriately "snowy" music subtly blended with hints of Luke's theme, and segueing into the first, truncated statement of the new love theme.

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• Why do composers use leitmotifs? Because they lend unity and coherence and richness to scores. A skilled composer can use his motifs to play off one another, musically, as characters do; and the recurrence of themes and motifs as a score progresses enhances the audience's familiarity with a film and its characters.
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  More than that, a skilled composer who puts thought into the creation of his motifs will create them in such a way that the motifs themselves are interrelated in a proper way. Thus, for example, virtually all of the major themes in the Star Wars films that are associated with "the good guys" begin with wide intervals: the main theme (Luke's theme) opens with a fifth; Leia's theme and the Love theme from TESB open with a major sixth; the "Brother and Sister" theme from Return of the Jedi begins with a perfect fourth; t
• Less obvious are some other interrelations of the Star Wars themes. The Imperial March (Vader's theme) and Yoda's Theme don't seem all that similar, but both follow the same rough melodic shape in their opening phrase (hum them both and you'll hear it), and the AOTC love theme is a minor-key variation of the Star Wars Main theme. The two major themes that don't fit into any particular mold are Ben's Theme (or the "Force Theme"), and the Emperor's Theme. These are pretty iconic, and are nearly always heard in pretty close to their original form.
• Most people assume that leitmotifs exist to basically "mirror" whatever or whomever happens to be onscreen; thus, when Luke Skywalker does something heroic, we should hear Luke's Theme; when Darth Vader is being evil, we should hear his theme, and so on. It doesn't really work this way, though: leitmotifs aren't just musical tags to be sounded at any point when that motif's referent is acting. This is what I call the "Easy View of Leitmotifs", the idea that they are the musical equivalent of nametags at a convention, or perhaps those little tags on thumbtacks beside each specimen in the dead butterfly exhibit at the Museum of Natural History.
• A skilled film composer will use leitmotifs to create a tapestry of emotional music, as opposed to a grab-bag of disparate themes that happen to "mickey mouse" the action onscreen. Thus, a common complaint filmscore fans make of leitmotif-based scores – that the motif is played when its associated character is nowhere on screen – is often misplaced.
• Problems can arise with the leitmotif technique. Comparing the use of motifs in the Star Wars scores with the Lord of the Rings scores, I find that the latter are more unified in their conception than the former.
• Thus Shore was able to do a lot more "pre-planning" of his motifs, whereas Williams often finds himself "retrofitting" new motifs to fall into place alongside the old ones.
• Well, what matters most of all in a filmscore is how it enhances, or illuminates, the emotional fabric of a film. But if you're after a deeper understanding of a score, it helps to consider how the motifs and themes are related and why they are constructed the way they are.

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• Film music composers often use leitmotifs to help build a sense of continuity. A leitmotif is a recurring musical idea (a melody, chord sequence, rhythm or a combination of these) which is associated with a particular idea, character or place.

• Leitmotifs are manipulated to match the action and mood of a scene.

  They could be altered by:

  • changing the rhythm or pitch
  • changing the instrumentation or accompaniment
  • adding new material
  • developing fragments of the idea

• Briefly, the idea is that the composer represents the important elements of the story — characters, objects, ideas — as musical themes or motives (leitmotif = "leading motive") in the score, and then uses these themes to expand and comment on the developing action.
• Movie composers have been doing something like this, of course, ever since the invention of the talkies. But most such themes are treated in a rather straight representational way — see the character, hear his theme — and many a film composer must have wished he had the opportunity to flesh the system out a bit — to develop the themes, and use them not just to signify but to add layers, to elucidate and comment.

• Anyone who has listened carefully to The Lord of the Rings, whether or not he or she has listened to the soundtrack albums, knows that Howard Shore has created several different themes in the music. These themes appear at different times, played by different instruments and playing under different kinds of action. This kind of scoring is called leitmotif.
• Leitmotif is "a clearly defined theme or musical idea, representing or symbolizing a person, object, idea etc, which returns in its original or an altered form at appropriate points in a dramatic (mainly operatic) work."
• Whether in Lord of the Rings or in Star Wars or in one of Wagner's operas, the idea remains the same. Each individual theme you hear is called a "motive," although "theme" is an easily interchangeable term. Each one of these motives represents, aurally, a specific person, place, thing, or idea (yes, these themes are musical nouns).

• The idea behind their composition is to keep it simple and easily identifiable. It's a kind of sound code that we learn to interpret on an almost subconscious level, the same way we interpret the visual codes present in film. Hearing music for Gondor, then, will make you think of Gondor on a level, even though you may not be listening too carefully.
   
  

   

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• While Shore strived to capture a feeling of antiquity, he also had to maintain close ties to the story and the characters driving the story. To this end he composed numerous themes or refrains that were intrinsically linked to specific characters, objects, and moment within the films.
• "In actual fact there's probably 40 or 50 of them," he says, referring to the number of distinct themes he wrote for various portions of the filmscore. "There's characters, there's culture and there's objects attached [to the music]. It's based on Wagner's storytelling and he was the first to do this kind of thing. He was the first to say

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    Shore's approach to scoring The Lord of the Rings somewhat mirrors the approach John Williams took with the Star Wars trilogy, using a large orchestra to perform a score composed in the leitmotif tradition.
• The sophisticated use of leitmotifs involves the skillful use of the motifs to enhance and extend the emotional fabric of the score, and therefore the film.
• What a leitmotif approach allows, if the composer does his job well, is for the music itself to suggest emotional and psychological connections between seemingly disparate elements of story. Howard Shore's work on the three Lord of the Rings scores accomplishes this, and more, along the way.
• Leitmotif can also be used by composers to foreshadow events and provide connections between early events and later ones:
• There's a constant sense of discovery as one studies what Howard Shore has wrought, as one discovers more and more connecting tissue between all of those separate and distinct motifs. The theme for the Shire, for instance, is a totally separate and self-contained theme, but Shore is able to quote it in short form numerous times throughout the trilogy, and at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring he is able to blend that theme with that of the Fellowship itself (that heroic tune that's probably the most well-known theme from the trilogy) to show that the two storylines, that of Frodo and Sam and that of the remainder of the Fellowship, are still connected even though the Fellowship itself has broken.
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    Shore's music isn't terribly ground-breaking. In fact, at first hearing, it all strikes the listener as precisely the kind of thing one would expect for a massive fantasy trilogy: lots of dark themes juxtaposed with lots of lyrical ones; heroic fanfares in the brass; large-scale passages for full orchestra and chorus.

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• the LOTR scores are full of sophisticated instances of musical foreshadowing, such as the Gondor theme being heard during Boromir's speech at the Council of Elrond, one-and-a-half films before we ever even get to Gondor.
• Because one of the things that Shore's scores do so well is musically illustrate relationships that exist between the various elements of the story (example: the motifs associated with Saruman and with Gandalf the White both start with the exact same notes).