The Precious

I’ve been listening to The Lord of the Rings: The Complete Recordings a lot lately. It was a wonderful thing when they were all finally released, because the original one-disc score albums were not enough. But there’s one passage of music that has been overlooked.

”…And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost...”

The last seven minutes or so of the extended edition end credits of The Fellowship of the Ring feature a passage not included in the complete recordings. It’s an incredibly beautiful and brilliant finale to the film, essentially a variation on The Breaking of the Fellowship. It might be some of the best music in the first film, well worth mentioning. I need to find a way to rip that onto iTunes.

The extended editions of the movies each have a stupidly long section of the end credits to name every single member of the fan club, their moms, and their dogs. Or something like that. I don’t remember if it’s a list of fan club members exactly, but it’s an insanely long block of names, essentially a Who’s Who Of Who Gives A Crap, a marketing gimmick of some kind. All it does is extend the end credits to pretty much the length of the original score album.

So I can’t blame anybody for not sitting through it. But the last seven minutes has original music not from the rest of the film, and it’s bloody brilliant, beautiful, and bittersweet. Check it out sometime, because it’s not on CD.

”We wantss it…”

Howard Shore’s magnum opus is some of my favorite music ever written. It’s pretty much what got me into music in the first place. His use of leitmotif, melody, orchestration, development, and through-composed variation is masterfully crafted and never, ever gets tiring to my ears.

I’m not biased because I’m a Tolkien fan. I’m not a Tolkien fan. In fact, I never read the books until years after the movies came out. I love the music because I love the music. It’s exactly “my thing.” To me it is musical perfection.