...Shore's first cue of the day was the film's new opening sequence, which now featured narration by Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins, reading from the introduction to his book "There and Back Again: A Hobbit's Tale". As amusing new footage of hobbit life flashed across the screen - accompanied by Bilbo's musings of how hobbits are well known as eaters of food, drinkers of ale, and smokers of pipes as opposed to great warriors - Shore's jaunty Hobbiton theme rang around the studio. Crehan's fiddle sang, and the strings rose in unison to perform a beautiful new version of the "Concerning Hobbits" cue, highlighting Shore's obvious but little-heard talent for musical elegance and lightness of touch....A further sequence, elaborating on the conversation between Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and Frodo (Elijah Wood) as they travel in a cart to Bag End, in which Frodo tells Gandalf of the strange behaviour he had noticed in his uncle Bilbo, was the next to be attempted. To capture the uneasy dichotomy of Bilbo's love affair with The Ring, Shore combined the lovely Shire theme with a new sequence of quite harsh dissonance as Bilbo, fearing that his beloved Ring has gone missing, ransacks his own home. Having heard nothing but Shore's gorgeous Gaelic tones for almost two hours, to suddenly be exposed to the most savage (and loud!) string-led chaos was a quite jolting experience, and drove home the talent that Shore - and indeed every other composer - has to elicit polar emotions through their writing...
...The previous day, Shore told me, had been Lothlorien Day in Abbey Road, in which Shore had recorded new music for additional sequences taking place in Galadriel's magical Elven settlement. As in the original score, Shore used the usual symphonic orchestra, augmented by a group of Asian and Oriental percussion devices, as illustrated by the vast array of gongs and Gamelan bowls still hanging at the back of the studio. Most interestingly, Shore described to me one particular instrument he used which was made out of a whole, hollowed-out tree-trunk with strings stretched along the underside of its base. Apparently, the ethereal-sounding instrument was most commonly used in musical healing therapy - the patient lays inside the instrument, and the vibrations produced by the plucking of the strings are supposedly considered beneficial to the soul.
...We left the studio while the orchestra were on a break, and as the engineers were setting up for a further new sequence in which Ian McKellen as Gandalf sings a song at Bilbo's 111th birthday party (which, sadly, I did not hear). Howard told me that he and his crew would be recording at the Colosseum in Watford during the following week, where the acoustics for recording the choral elements of the score were better. New music for Moria, the conclusive battle at Amon Hen, and additional choral overdubs would be recorded there, before they returned to Abbey Road the following weekend to finalise the mixing...
Thanks for posting this. I have a friend who just won a Sony DVD / CD player in a drawing and is letting me use it. (Now that's a good friend!) I changed my pre-order of FotR to DVD instead of VHS. August seems a long time away ... sigh.