Composer Shore, ‘lord’ of blockbusters’ scores
‘I write music every day’
‘He should be called ‘The Sea’ not ‘The Brook’ said another Music Giant, Ludwig van Beethoven about The Father of All Fathers, Johann Sebastian Bach. And he was right ... The reason being in German language ‘Bach’ means ‘a brook’.
I do not know any composer named ‘Mr Ocean’ but I know Mr Shore who composed the ocean of the music. We don’t know too many Canadian composers and there are various reasons of it.
Tentatively, a young country with short history of music may be some Canadian ‘modesty’ with exposure to them. However music life in Canada is very rich and interesting. The operas, the philharmonic orchestras, the concerts hall, festivals and TV & radio programs are at least but not the last good music education from elementary level up to the respectable music departments at Universities. Why are we so little exposed?
Let me unveil today the name of one Canadian composer, famous but... not so well-known! He wrote an ‘ocean’ of well-known music to almost everybody. He has been awarded the top awards but still remains a bit anonymous. Where is a secret of this untypical situation?
His music fans who know him call him the ‘master, a genius, a visionary’. Others know only his music. How many people know such movies as The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit trilogy, Gangs of New York, Aviator... He created the sound tracks for more than one hundred movies. Take for example, The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, Miss Doubtfire, The Game, Infiltration, etc.
He is Howard Leslie Shore. He was born more than seventy years ago in Toronto, Canada to Bernie Ash and Mac Shore. Since his early childhood music was his passion but not as a prodigy: he started studying music at a normal age of eight.
From the beginning he studied various instruments from flute to organ (his favorite being the saxophone). As a teenager he joined the bands and he had no doubt that he wanted to pursue music in his adult life and dreamt of becoming famous playing music but the question was how to succeed?
Influenced
His good young friend Lorne Michaels assured him of this and influenced him to apply to the Berklee College of Music in Boston after graduating from the Forest Hill Collegiate Institute. He met Lorne for the first time at a summer camp in Canada. Not to be bored they began recording a movie and organizing shows for people attending the camp. Nobody would doubt that Howard was responsible for music...
At the beginning of the 1970s he played on brass instruments in the Canadian ensemble of jazz fusion Lighthouse. Soon they performed for the popular Canadian TV program The Hart & Lorne Terrific Hour directed by Lorne Michaels and from 1975 till 1980 Shore was a leader and musical director of Lorne’s American influential latenight NBC comedy show Saturday Night Live.
At Saturday Night...he met Chevy, Chase, Danny Aykroyd and John Belushie. The last two have to remember him well because he helped them to establish The Blues Brother group and even invented its name. Generally Shore appeared to be an altruist: he composed just as a friend the music motif opening NBC wellknown talk show by Conan O’Brien Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
After five years of hard work at the NBC program Saturday Night Live which ran every week at 11:30 pm Shore realized that there was time for new challenges. His first movie music he composed earlier in 1978 was to the thriller I Miss You, Hugs and Kisses and he started to like that job. One year later he met the film director, David Cronenberg. The low budget movie The Brood (1979) was the first step of their cooperation. So successful, that they worked together on fifteen movies, proof of common trust, similar sense of humor or huge tolerance because they are known for quite strong characters. A similar friendship connected Shore to film director David Finch although their common output was not so huge.
Fame
Finally the doors to the much desired fame were opened for him by director Peter Jackson and his movie The Lord of the Rings based on the cult novel of Tolkien. As it happens so often it came by chance. Initially Jackson intended to ask James Horner for music but he was busy composing music to Ron Howard’s movie A Beautiful Mind and he turned down the request. Today when Shore is triple Oscar winner Jackson probably did not despair about it...
Success
‘Why one sound track of the movie gets the way to mass imagination and another one not? The answer is simple. The most important is a story. Music should never interrupt watching,’ says Shore modestly.
He is known for dusky motives so well composed with horrors and thrillers. He likes dark, ominous melodies with heavy sound of strings and choirs. He was able to rage in The Lord of the Rings thanks to a combination of Wagnerian impetus, Celtic folklore, links with Renaissance music and construction like Prokofiev. His mélange appeared to be magic. There are critics who say that it is the best film soundtrack ever composed in the 21st century.
Asked if he considers the film music to be a type of classical music, he said ‘it is an art form of its own that can be approached on its own terms. It’s not the same as writing purely concert music.’ But there have been many great composers who have ‘written incredible pieces and also worked in films,’ Shore said.
The Canadian composer might have included himself among those composers. With so much work on his plate, Shore maintains a rigorous schedule which includes daily composition. ‘I write music every day and I have been doing that since I was a youngster,’ Shore says of his routine of composing with a pencil on paper. ‘It doesn’t feel like a day to me unless that pencil is moving on those pages and ideas are being formed.
Shore continuously tours the world. He started the grand tour in 1996 when he was invited to the Festival of Cinema Music in Seville, Spain. He conducted his compositions played by Symphonic Orchestra. In Ottawa, Canada his music to the movie Crash he performed also in symphonic version in 1998.
A similar concert he presented in Melbourne, Australia at the 1st Int’l Conference of Film Music ‘Cinesonic’. In 2000, the University of Ghent, Belgium organized a weeklong retrospective of his music and so on. At the moment in 2017 Howard Shore was a honorary guest at the Film Music Festival in Krakow, Poland. Also currently he is involved in composing music to the movie directed by his friend, Martin Scorsese Sinatra.
‘Live to projection’, the presentations of his music around the world are interlaced by performance of his classical works. Shore has recently written a number of concertos. For the most popular piano virtuoso, Chinese Lang Lang, he wrote the Piano Concerto ‘Ruin and Memory’ but for other virtuoso of Chinese origin, cellist Sophie Shao — Cello concerto ‘Mystery Gardens’.
His ‘Fanfare’ is a work written for the biggest ever organ in the world - Wanamaker Organ in Philadelphia (presented with Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra) but the cycle of songs A Palace Upon the Ruins for well-known mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson-Cano.
His opera ‘The Fly’ premiered in 2008 in Paris (at the Theatre de Chatelet) and in American premiered at the Los Angeles Opera. The production was directed by his friend, David Cronenberg and conducted by Placido Domingo.
Except for three Oscar Awards, Golden Globe and Grammy Awards, Honorary Doctorates and highest Orders he received in Krakow the Prize of Wojciech Kilar (1932-2013, famous composer of classical and film music) with description: ‘Comprehensive of kinds, fidelity of traditional art of composing, individual and recognized music language, creative operation of sound coloristic - represent ethos and tradition of composing art... and greatly enrich the world repertoire of film music.’ The Canadian Shore of world music ocean... Nothing to add.
Editor’s Note: Cezary Owerkowicz is the chairman of the Kuwait Chamber of Philharmonia and talented pianist. He regularly organises concerts by well-known musicians for the benefit of music lovers and to widen the knowledge of music in Kuwait. His email address is: cowerkowicz @ yahoo.com and cowerkowicz@ hotmail.com