LR OSTs - Novels Chrono Order

[Pellaeon 593]

Noticing that many of the track titles on the OSTs match the chapter titles from the books, I had the idea of reordering the tracks to match up with the books’ story order. Let’s see how this goes! Any thoughts or suggestions appreciated.

 

BOOK ONE
A Long-expected Party	1-02 Concerning Hobbits
The Shadow of the Past	3-01 A Storm is Coming 1-03 The Shadow of the Past
Three is Company A Short Cut to Mushrooms	1-05 The Black Rider
A Conspiracy Unmasked The Old Forest In the House of Tom Bombadil Fog on the Barrow-downs
At the Sign of the Prancing Pony	1-06 At the Sign of the Prancing Pony
Strider
A Knife in the Dark	1-07 A Knife in the Dark
Flight to the Ford	1-08 Flight to the Ford
BOOK TWO
Many Meetings	1-09 Many Meetings
The Council of Elrond	1-01 The Prophecy 1-04 The Treason of Isengard 1-10 The Council of Elrond
The Ring Goes South	1-11 The Ring Goes South
A Journey in the Dark	1-12 A Journey in the Dark
The Bridge of Khazad-dûm	1-13 The Bridge of Khazad-dûm
Lothlórien	1-14 Lothlórien
The Mirror of Galadriel
Farewell to Lórien	2-20 Farewell to Lórien
The Great River	1-15 The Great River
The Breaking of the Fellowship	1-17 The Breaking of the Fellowship
	1-18 May It Be
BOOK THREE
The Departure of Boromir	1-16 Amon Hen
The Riders of Rohan	2-03 The Riders of Rohan
The Uruk-hai	2-05 The Uruk-hai
Treebeard	2-10 Treebeard
The White Rider	2-01 Foundations of Stone 2-09 The White Rider
The King of the Golden Hall	2-06 The King of the Golden Hall
Helm’s Deep	2-12 Helm’s Deep 2-15 The Hornburg 2-16 Forth Eorlingas
The Road to Isengard
Flotsam and Jetsam	2-17 Isengard Unleashed
The Voice of Saruman
The Palantír	3-02 Hope and Memory
BOOK FOUR
The Taming of Sméagol	2-02 The Taming of Sméagol
The Passage of the Marshes	2-04 The Passage of the Marshes
The Black Gate is Closed	2-07 The Black Gate is Closed
Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit The Window on the West
The Forbidden Pool	2-13 The Forbidden Pool
Journey to the Cross-Roads	2-18 Samwise the Brave
The Stairs of Cirith Ungol	3-09 Cirith Ungol
Shelob’s Lair	3-11 Shelob’s Lair
The Choices of Master Samwise
	2-19 Gollum’s Song
BOOK FIVE
Minas Tirith	3-04 The White Tree 3-05 The Steward of Gondor
The Passing of the Grey Company	3-10 Andúril
The Muster of Rohan	3-07 The Ride of the Rohirrim
The Siege of Gondor	3-03 Minas Tirith 3-06 Minas Morgul 3-12 Ash and Smoke
The Ride of the Rohirrim
The Battle of the Pelennor Fields	3-13 Fields of the Pelennor
The Pyre of Denethor The Houses of Healing The Last Debate
The Black Gate Opens	3-14 Hope Fails 3-15 The Black Gate Opens
BOOK SIX
The Tower of Cirith Ungol The Land of Shadow
Mount Doom	3-16 The End of All Things
The Field of Cormallen
The Steward and the King	3-17 The Return of the King
Many Partings Homeward Bound The Scouring of the Shire
The Grey Havens	3-18 The Grey Havens
	3-19 Into the West 3-20 Use Well the Days
APPENDICES
The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen	2-08 Evenstar 2-11 The Leave Taking 2-14 Breath of Life 3-08 Twilight and Shadow

[Nick1Ø66 4,689]

You know what I think would be a cool and worthwhile project for you? Get the unabridged audiobook (the Rob Inglis version) and track in the corresponding LOTR soundtrack music for each chapter. Will take some tricky editing and looping, but I think it's possible.

 

Yeah, do that and upload it. I'd definitely listen! 

[Gollum Cat 24]

15 minutes ago, Nick1066 said:

You know what I think would be a cool and worthwhile project for you? Get the unabridged audiobook (the Rob Inglis version) and track in the corresponding LOTR soundtrack music for each chapter. Will take some tricky editing, but I think it's possible.

 

Yeah, do that and upload it. I'd definitely listen! 

 

This is probably the most worthy fan-project that can possibly come out of the LOTR world. This must happen.

[Pellaeon 593]

6 hours ago, Nick1066 said:

You know what I think would be a cool and worthwhile project for you? Get the unabridged audiobook (the Rob Inglis version) and track in the corresponding LOTR soundtrack music for each chapter. Will take some tricky editing and looping, but I think it's possible.

 

Yeah, do that and upload it. I'd definitely listen! 

 

If I were to go to all that trouble, I would prefer to rearrange the whole score and rerecord it with a chamber ensemble. Even then I don’t think I would be satisfied with the result. The aesthetics are all wrong for Tolkien. There’s nothing in it that sounds convincingly Ancient, or Medieval, or English, or Elvish, to me. Why no period instruments? Why Irish Hobbits? Why almost exclusively female solo vocalists, usually poppy, and mixed to sound distant or drowned out, when Tolkien almost always described male singers, clear and strong? And good God, the Nazgûl Theme, it’s too much! They must be spooky—why the opera chorus? Even Rosenman did better, here. So… Think I’ll pass!

[Dixon Hill 4,233]

Are you talking about Shore's music?

[Pellaeon 593]

Yes.

[Dixon Hill 4,233]

Only on JWFan!  I'll be at JWFan Antimatter.

[Faleel 5,340]

1 minute ago, TGP said:

Only on JWFan!

If only that were true....

[Chen G. 3,944]

On 9/1/2018 at 4:47 AM, Pellaeon said:

The aesthetics are all wrong for Tolkien. There’s nothing in it that sounds convincingly Ancient, or Medieval, or English, or Elvish, to me. Why no period instruments? Why Irish Hobbits? Why almost exclusively female solo vocalists, usually poppy, and mixed to sound distant or drowned out, when Tolkien almost always described male singers, clear and strong? And good God, the Nazgûl Theme, it’s too much! They must be spooky—why the opera chorus?

 

No period instruments? It’s one of the biggest, most eclectic collection of instruments ever in a musical work.

 

As for sounding ancient, I find that the use of Maqam Hijaz more for Lorien and especially the deep male vocals for the Dwarves to be very evocative of the ancient.

 

As for the medieval - TOLKIEN’S WORLD ISN’T MEDIVEAL. It actually doesn’t correspond to any particular time period of our world, because the travel through Middle Earth is as much a travel through time as it is through space: we start at the cusp of modernity at The Shire, through late Middle Ages with Bree, the Dark Ages with Rohan and classical antiquity with Gondor, with prehistoric glimpses with the likes of the Druedain.

 

As for the supposedly Irish elements, let’s see which instruments Tolkien describes: in the more anachronistic The Hobbit (again, consistent with the Shire’s aesthetics) he describes fiddle, viol, harps (clearly a small, Celtic-style harps and lyres), flute (more along the lines of recorders and whistles than a concert flute), clarinet and drums - all well within the celtic palette. Shore’s Shire music prominently features all but the viol, and Plan 9’s diegetic Shire music uses a lot of bowed banjo, which is a good substitute for the viol, on top of that.

 

Looking into The Lord of the Rings, there’s also mention of horns (probably more along the line of alphorns and blowing horns used for the diegetic horn calls in the film, rather than valves horns), trumpets and pipes. Shore did use “drones” in Fellowship, as well as both Uilleann and Highland Bagpipes - unless of course Tolkien was referring rather to Pibgorns (to which the name “Pipe” originally refers) which Shore’s scores regrettably don’t feature. Shore and Tolkien both knew that all these instruments are historically as much English as they are Irish. There’s also mention of “musical crackers” and bells - the use of celesta, tubular bells, mark tree and whatever it is Plan 9 used for Flaming Red Hair and Blunt the Knives (Castanets? Spoons? Ratchet?) are good substitutes for those, as well.

 

The Silmarillion mentions lutes (which Shore uses) and conch-trumpets, as well as organs (which I believe also earn a passing mention in The Lord of the Rings), which Shore again used. Earlier drafts of the great tales, as well as The Hobbit, feature gongs, so the eastern elements aren’t too out-of-character, as well.

 

That, and of course the use of voices (which Tolkien envisioned as ranging from folksy English to Gregorian chants) and body percussion, are just about everything regarding musical instruments in Tolkien’s work. I suppose we could also look into what music Tolkien liked and listened to: I understand he did have a passion for opera, and for the piano - he tried taking on the violin in his youth, to no avail.

 

So I’d say Shore’s scores are very much in line with Tolkien’s vision. I’ve always said that it sounds like a grand opera composed in the Forth Age about the War of the Ring.

[Dixon Hill 4,233]

Was there really an organ used during the Dol Guldur scene or was it just woodwinds in octaves?  I always thought it was the latter and he never used the organ in either trilogy.

[Faleel 5,340]

1 hour ago, TGP said:

Was there really an organ used during the Dol Guldur scene or was it just woodwinds in octaves?  I always thought it was the latter and he never used the organ in either trilogy.

Well, there was an organ in the room.

And the version on the album sounds different than the one in the film:

https://youtu.be/Ktbmt4U0GzI?t=154

https://youtu.be/cLaa64075Zw?t=152

[Pellaeon 593]

10 hours ago, Chen G. said:

As for the medieval - TOLKIEN’S WORLD ISN’T MEDIVEAL. It actually doesn’t correspond to any particular time period of our world, because the travel through Middle Earth is as much a travel through time as it is through space: we start at the cusp of modernity at The Shire, through late Middle Ages with Bree, the Dark Ages with Rohan and classical antiquity with Gondor, with prehistoric glimpses with the likes of the Druedain.

 

I mention medieval in a list of other things, and you mention medieval in a list of other things, so I’m sure we have no disagreement, on this point.

 

All in all, a very interesting post. But I’m not sure it addresses my point (though perhaps you were just going off on a tangent). First and foremost, that if I were scoring an audiobook, I would prefer a chamber ensemble to rerecord it. I hope it wasn’t thought that I was bashing the film scores wholesale (otherwise this very thread would not exist); rather I was airing specific points where I am dissatisfied with them—again, not their effectiveness as film score necessarily, but thinking about scoring the audiobook. Maybe I was unclear. I don’t think the size of the orchestra and of the choir match the tone of the novels. They yank me into the 19th century (Wagner, R. Strauss). It has certainly always been obvious to me that Shore was very deliberate in his inclusion of certain instruments, but his usage of them still by and large contributes to a bombastic film texture for a Hollywoody film adaptation, and not what I would abstractly think of as the ideal soundtrack for reading the books. Also the new age music yanks me into the 1990s. Celtic makes me think Elves, not Hobbits—they’re Oxford English. And there are one or two other specific other things that I mentioned I would change. There’s no need for anyone to get defensive.

[Chen G. 3,944]

Defensive? not at all. Just an interesting topic, is all.

 

But I do always find it odd that people look at Tolkien's creation as largely medieval. If anything, he was thinking about antiquity more than anything.

 

As for the forces involved - I think Shore's treatment is apt, being that Tolkien certainly had a taste for ostentation: this is the man that made Orthanc 500 feet tall. If anything, I sometimes feel like Shore could have gone full "symphony of a thousand" mode with the Mount Doom stuff.

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

I agree with Chen!

[Dixon Hill 4,233]

Yes I can't at all agree that Shore's score calls to mind the sound of anything resembling the 19th century high romantics.  His manner of writing here is quite far removed from that, far less opulent than say what Williams did for Potter.  It's a much more archaic and in a way non classical sound which for me seems to suit the world of the film perfectly.  Not at all a flighty and sumptuous fantasy score, not quite a hard hewn Biblical epic.  It's somewhere else entirely, very singular.  Certainly not remotely what I would call Hollywoody or New Age.  It is most remarkable how the many ethnic instruments used, even the very familiar ones, don't seem to really carry their real world associations in Shore's hands.  I at least do not hear Celtic when hearing the Shire music - I hear Shire music.  And so on.

[Chen G. 3,944]

In general Shore has a unique way of handling the ensemble, creating a sound that's distinctly his, distinctly Middle Earth and distinctly not anything else. Look at the hardanger fiddle for Rohan: it doesn't at all sound like what it does in a Norwegian folk piece.

 

Looking at the late ninties and early 2000s its clear to me that Shore very wisely wanted to stay away from two things, at least initially untill his scores gained traction. Those things being: 1) The "Golden Age Hollywood" sound, and 2) The stereotypical ethnic instrumental choices that were popular at the time to suggest geography (duduk to suggest the east, erhu to suggest the far-east, bagpipes to suggest the north) or style (pan pipes to give a suggestion of nativity, overtone singing for a sense of mystique, etc...). Even when he went for those colors, he intentionally chose different instruments: nay and rhaita in lieu of the duduk, hardanger instead of pipes, etc...

[Nick1Ø66 4,689]

6 hours ago, Chen G. said:

But I do always find it odd that people look at Tolkien's creation as largely medieval. If anything, he was thinking about antiquity more than anything.

 

While I find the rest of your comments on this topic quite salient, in this case I'm not so sure I agree 100% with your Tolkien scholarship there Chen. And at the very least, I think you're being a bit unfair describing as "odd" the perception of Tolkien's work as being medieval. 

 

My point is, you can't blame the casual viewer or reader for thinking that.  Any story full of people in armour fighting big battles with sword and shield, quests, Kings and castles, to say nothing of dragons, is going to be viewed in general by casual viewers and readers as "medieval fantasy" (even if some of those tropes are also associated with other eras).

 

Of course, it's not medieval fantasy, at least the way that Game of Thrones is. We know that. But among Tolkien's many influences in creating this world (the term "Middle Earth" has its roots in a medieval poem), I think its fair to say some of the legends and stories that arose out of the middle ages is among them (especially given that Tolkien has said as much).  Not nearly as influential for example as the Norse Sagas, but I can't fault people who don't live and breathe this stuff who see the works as somewhat medieval.

[Chen G. 3,944]

That's fair. I'm a historian in profession, so I'm more likely to notice that sort of thing.

 

Tolkien was kind of an odd personality in the academic landscape in that he was a linguist, but kind of crossed with a historian. Admittedly they're related fields, but still. His knowledge in and love of ancient history permeates his literary work. In reading it, its readily appearant that a professor wrote it.

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

Thankfully it was written by a professor with an incredibly vivid imagination.

[Pellaeon 593]

Just to dig deeper into this aspect of period, I would add the perspective that Tolkien’s legendarium is set in an imaginary time. It is a mythology which is set in a prehistorical time, but not prehistorical relative to all human history; rather, like all mythology, it is prehistorical relative to the history of a specific people—the people whose mythology it is meant to be. So the mythology merges into history at the point that that people’s history begins. In this case, it is the English, which to Tolkien is the Anglo-Saxons. English history, for Tolkien, begins with the invasion of Britain by Hengest and Horsa in the 5th century (as recorded in 8th-12th c. Chronicles). So the setting is definitely pre-Medieval, but not in the sense that it reaches back to classical antiquity — he’s not, by and large, writing about Romans or Greeks or Babylonians or Egyptians — but rather in the sense that he’s inventing mythological backstory for elements from Medieval history and Medieval imagination; first and foremost for the Elves for whom he had invented two languages. This conceit is, of course, most evident in The Book of Lost Tales, in which the central character Ælfwine turns out to be the father of Hengest and Horsa, and, you see, the Anglo-Saxons are Elf-friends who invade Britain (=Tol Eressëa) to take it back from the dark men (Celtic Britons) who had stolen it from the Elves.

 

Now, Middle-earth, as I have written before, is of course in the end an amalgamation of several different “cycles” in addition to the main English/Elvish Mythology. You have The Hobbit which is sometimes all over the place, but, most prominently, its Wilderland is the realm of Norse Sagas (Gandalf and all the dwarves are straight from the Edda, and Beorn is of course the mythological father of Bödvar Bjarki). And there’s the Atlantis myth which of course is grounded in Mediterranean classical antiquity. But he keeps finding more ways of inserting his proto-Anglo-Saxons into the stories: the Marachians in the First Age (Húrin, Tuor), and the Rohirrim in the LotR (in fact, Eomer’s son is named Elfwine).

[Chen G. 3,944]

Quote

So the setting is definitely pre-Medieval, but not in the sense that it reaches back to classical antiquity — he’s not, by and large, writing about Romans or Greeks or Babylonians or Egyptians 

 

Yeah, but he was being informed by Graeco-Roman history and mythology as he was crafting his own. Numenore, Arnor and Gondor are very much based on the Roman Empire and, fittingly, there's a strong Greek influence on the Elves.

 

Quote

he’s inventing mythological backstory for elements from Medieval history and Medieval imagination

 

Most of the stories Tolkien drew on predated the Middle Ages.

 

At any rate I'm just not sure what's the point here. Regardless of the setting of the narrative, the last thing anyone needs or wants is a Middle Earth score with a strictly "medieval" instrumentation. Y'know, crumhorns, hurdy-gurdy, bagpipes and shawms. Just thinking about it makes me shiver.