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Howard Shore's An Unexpected Journey (Hobbit Part 1)


Jay

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7 hours ago, Kühni said:

Didn't Max Steiner invent the click track? As for the click track allowing to follow set tempi precisely, as Georg said, take a look at the sheet music excerpt on pg. 259 in Doug's book where mm. 2 and 3 are in 161 and the following in 162 bpm. I am actually curious as to how much actual time this minute change (combined with the change in metres) covers!

 

There are four tempo changes in the first seven bars of The Two Towers!

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6 hours ago, Jim Ware said:

There are four tempo changes in the first seven bars of The Two Towers!

 

Do I look as if I have the wherewithals to confirm this? DO I? (Good thing that I generally trust you, Jim...)

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14 hours ago, Jim Ware said:

 

There are four tempo changes in the first seven bars of The Two Towers!

 

Well, if you want to do a classical accelerando or ritardando over several bars, and still be precise, you kind of have to do this micromanaging, no?

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  • 1 month later...

You know that you've really gotten your priorities straightened out when you buy the AUJ SE again, but the North American version this time, just so that your Hobbit SE collection looks consistent on the shelf.

 

:kaboom:

 

 

Juli 550.jpg

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The European editions of the Hobbit SE OSTs were awful, smart of you guys to switch to the US versions once that was discovered.

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  • 2 months later...
3 hours ago, Kühni said:

Currently listening to Faleel's as-complete-as-possible assembly of AUJ and enjoying it VERY MUCH! :thumbup:

:thumbup:

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2 hours ago, BloodBoal said:

 

Just send a PM to Fal.

What, there are no shady instructions like "At midnight on next Wednesday go to the corner of 5th and Elm and leave a bag of peanuts on the sidewalk. Return the next day you'll be approached by an old bag lady who will leave you instruction in a brown paper bag for the pick-up point for the complete-as-possible AUJ assembly by Fal. Come alone and bring 5 dollars for the bag lady in small change. The codeword is "fried cod"."

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  • 3 weeks later...

I think I have come across this version before (although not the other three pieces tacked at the end). This type of arrangement of the full poem/song from the book as end credits song would have been awesome!

Nice that the artist also remembered that Farewell Song of Merry and Pippin from LotR is actually set to the same rhyming meter as Over the Misty Mountains Cold.

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  • 11 months later...

I don't think Shore minded using the theme for films two and three: Notice that he also dropped his own theme for the company. I think the Desolation of Smaug was just both too dense and too grim for that theme: its too bold. Still, I would have liked to have seen a cameo of it.

 

On a side note, I like the cross-over that occurs between diegetic music and score in this series: "The Misty Mountains" turns into a theme in the underscore and into an end-credits score, the martial Rivendell motif at the end of "The Hidden Valley" is almost immediately thereafter playe diegetically; Thorin's theme in the horn, Lament for Gandalf being heard by the characters, etc... It gives the music a sense of being a part of this world. You could almost imagine the score as an opera written about the Red Book during the Forth Age.

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Really?

 

It's in 3:14 of "The Hidden Valley". Its the same melody as the diegetic "Valley of Imladris", I'm sure.

 

It's almost like a new, secondary theme for Rivendell.

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Shore dropped his theme for the company after AUJ, but since AUJ seems to have been such a chaotic musical post-production, not sure if this was by design or not.

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1 hour ago, BloodBoal said:

 

Let's face it: it's a bullshit explanation, always has been, always will be.

 

If that's the reason behind dropping the theme, why didn't they do that with the Fellowship theme in LOTR as well? And anyway, the Dwarves are supposed to know those "uncharted dangerous lands beyond the Misty Mountains": that's where they come from! If it's not familiar to them, I don't know what is.

 

That is the film makers' explanation, not a very cunning ruse indeed.

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I do believe that that's what was going through the filmmakers minds when they lost those themes. I think they just found them a little to bold for the tone of the later two films. It makes sense on paper and I don't mind it all that much while watching, but I do think one or two cameos would be nice.

 

Since Shore binds Thorin's theme to the Company theme, Thorin's theme sort of carries on the associations of the Company theme. In the Extended Edition, we are also introduced to the House of Durin (in its definitive form) much earlier, so it takes the place of that theme nicely. For the general audience, the Laketown theme takes the place of the company theme in terms of something they can hum.

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3 minutes ago, SafeUnderHill said:

This explanation came from fans though?

No that explanation came from the film makers. I can't for the life of me remember where it first appeared.

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8 minutes ago, SafeUnderHill said:

It’s also worth noting that musically Bilbo and dwarves are connected through the Thorin/Erebor/Shire/Bilbo themes sharing the same fundamental melodic notes.

The music like the films gave a lot of way to the dwarves at the expense of Bilbo in the sequels, no matter how much there was sharing of common musical elements in the themes.

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I always saw Bilbo's Adventure as his main thematic identity, and that theme does carry on into the next two films.

 

I like the Dwarves and their music so I don't mind that the story (and the music) became Dwarf-dominated.

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The amazing suite of themes the first score provided gave me such high hopes for how they would all develop and crescendo in the subsequent movies....

 

The resulting scores we got were still good, but not what the first score promised.

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I also gave it another listen and I love the more classical feel of the music for Bilbo. In the Lord of the Rings, the music evolves from folk music to more orchestral and sophisticated music. In The Hobbit, there is also a bit of development from a more classical sound into the more romantic sound of the rest of the music of Middle Earth.

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  • 2 weeks later...

 

On 10/20/2017 at 8:21 PM, Chen G. said:

I also gave it another listen and I love the more classical feel of the music for Bilbo. In the Lord of the Rings, the music evolves from folk music to more orchestral and sophisticated music. In The Hobbit, there is also a bit of development from a more classical sound into the more romantic sound of the rest of the music of Middle Earth.

 

I discussed with Doug some years ago on his blog. I hope he doesn't mind sharing that pertinent parts:

 

Non-music question: What was the increase (in %) of NDAs you had to sign this time around vs. the LotR days? ;-) (I'll continue to yank this chain from time to time, even though it's not your fault...)

 

Music question: To my ears, AUJ, while inhabitating the same musical world as LotR, sounds subtly different. Being musically rather illiterate, I find it hard to put into words, so I'll try to sum it up thusly: It's Middle-Earth by way of Hugo. How would you say HS's style has evolved since the early 2000s? Are there certain techniques, ways he structures his themes, new harmonic/rhythmic developments etc. that he didn't have 10-12 years ago?

 

(...)

 
Avatar

Doug Adams Mod  CK  4 years ago

 

I think know what you're saying re: Hugo.

 

It probably boils down to Bilbo's fussy theme, which includes a very simple chord progression that moves from D minor to A major (or i-V, if you're into that sort of thing). This progression suggests the harmonic minor scale, which raises the seventh degree a half-step. (Technically, it could also be the melodic minor scale, I suppose, but we don't hear the sixth, so we don't know.) This type of harmonization was very big during the Classical and Baroque periods. The LOTR scores, however, almost always based their harmonies on pre-Baroque modes or Late Romantic chromaticism. Hugo, however, had all sorts of Classical period harmonies--they fit well with the compiled film scores that feature (diagetically) in the picture. So in that sense, yes some of The Hobbit sounds a bit Hugo-y.

 

I'm not sure we'd call it an evolution of Shore's style necessarily. It sounds to me like a response to Bilbo's ways ... he's extremely conservative at the beginning of the story--and a bit old fashioned in his ways, so it makes sense for his theme to stand outside of the score's grammar just a little bit. It's a neat little trick, actually!

 

Oh, and i don't really know how many NDAs I signed on either project. Lots, I guess! :)

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