Doug Adams

https://www.slsostories.org/post/john-williams-conducting-the-slso-november-1

The Music of the Hobbit Films was finished over four years ago. I have publisher's block.

The potential concerto was first (I think!) mentioned in a book that came out in June of 2017: Be Your Own Manager: A Career Handbook for Classical Musicians. "Today, Martin Grubinger is probably considered one of the biggest stars in classical music, and not just in percussion. Many great composers have written concertos for him, including Friedrich Cerha, Peter Eötvös, and Tan Dan. Rumors have it that John Williams wants to write a concerto for him."

Jim’s a dear friend and trusted collaborator. I tell him .... things.

Apologies, I misunderstood. No inserts were recorded in London for Moria.

The LPO recorded inserts.

They’re not errors. The orchestra membership changed when required. (LPO and NZSO alike.) The conductor’s scores from the sessions reflected this, but the instrumentation was standardized for live presentations. (This is the case with pretty much all live-to-projection performances.)

Years ago.

Re: Goldenthal ... Williams did attend a performance of Grendel in Los Angeles. Not film music, I know, but we can at least confirm he’s heard “The Beast Within.”

A wonderfully cogent point (no surprise) by Frank here … context is everything when defining what, precisely, constitutes a theme. Even extra-musical context can play a role. Incidentally, the word “theme” is thrown around a lot in The Music of the Lord of the Rings because, honestly, it’s the most efficient way of relating to readers. Constantly juggling “theme,” “motif,” “motive,” etc. was exhausting in early drafts … especially as each instance then required some sort of disclaimer relating to the innate subjectivity of it all. And that was before getting into musical context, composer intent, and so on. It was word soup! At some point, it’s cleaner to think of it all as “the material.” It reads horribly, but it’s much truer to most composers’ mindsets.

They’ve been dragging on almost exactly the same: they were finished within a few weeks of one another in the spring of 2015.

There goes your 'special thanks' credit ...

Yup! But you're always at the mercy of someone else with these things, so you learn to be content with things inching along ... as long as the forward progress doesn't cease entirely.

Forget it, Jim. It's Chinatown.

He means part of him feels like saying, "I've done it all--written all I'm going to about Middle-earth. That's it. No more," while another part remains intrigued by the possibility of doing something else.

What production tasks the liner notes guy with keeping the set in print?

Pretty much this.

I don't think stealing from an artist you claim to admire would be very admirable. Alternates tend to live quite nicely as Rarities. Allows the principal album to maintain a proper narrative flow, yet ensures that the material still reaches interested listeners.

Not including the rewrites (Radagast, Thorin's Wraith chant, etc.) or alternates, which are not currently considered to be "score canon" ... if such a thing exists.

I would expect that people would have a mature and informed understanding that such decisions do not rest in any single pair of hands. Many people -- myself included -- would love to see Hobbit Complete Recordings. No one is depriving listeners for nefarious pleasure. It's simply a question of whether or not those with pockets deep enough to fund such a project are willing/able to do so without a guaranteed return on the investment. Right now, that hasn't happened. It doesn't necessarily mean it won't ever ... but right now Hobbit CRs do not have a green light. Other projects, however, do.

The standard edition LOTR CDs vastly outsold the CRs, which were a niche collectors' item. Were they artistically superior? Yes, in my opinion. But that's not what drives the market. If you're referring to the home video releases of the films themselves, that's a different company. The albums are produced separately.

Admittedly it's rare these days, but not all Americans throw "hissy fits."

No. 1) LOTR and Hobbit did not get the same commercial treatment. The LOTR scores were initially released as standard suite-form OSTs, which left ample room for expansion. The Hobbit scores were released in nearly complete two-disc sets. This means Hobbit CRs would largely overlap the prior releases, which makes them a harder sell to the general public ... which makes producers jumpy. 2) Even ignoring the change in both film studios and record labels, release strategies vary greatly from property to property. They're not plugging material into a pre-eixtisting workflow.

It's almost as if someone thought that writing about the complete scores would help reinforce their commercial viability, thus paving the road to potential future releases. What madness!