Howard Shore

Composer

Howard Leslie Shore (October 18, 1946), is a prize-winning composer. He composed the soundtracks for The Lord of the Rings film series and The Hobbit film series.

He also appeared in a cameo in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. He is one of the drinking Rohan soldiers during the drinking game which Legolas beat Gimli in.

In 2020, it was reported that Howard Shore was in talks with Amazon to compose the score for the television series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power‎. Eventually, he wrote and composed the main title theme for the series, while the rest of the score was composed by Bear McCreary.

Musical style

Although he is mostly associated with the films of David Cronenberg, for which he contributed very atmospheric scores, Howard's Tolkien oevure is characterized by supple melodicism, triadic harmony (though generally not stable in key) and stacked orchestration. Although there is still a strong atmospheric, textural aspect - Howard often writes sections from string divisi, tone pyramids and aleatoric passages - the defining characteristic of the score is the leitmotif: harmonic-melodic and rhyhtmic ideas, loosely associated with narrative elements, which are repeated and varied through the score. There are some 160 such themes running through Howard's scores. This style of scoring is inspired by Wagner's Ring, which Howard makes an homage to at the end of The Return of the King.

Discography
Awards
Referencias

1. Esta ficha se ha importado inicialmente de TolkienGateway.net el día 26/05/2026.

Colaboran en la Tolkienpedia

Sociedad Tolkien Española