Howard Shore is a Canadian composer who is famous for his film scores. He has composed the orchestration for over 80 motion pictures, especially the musical arrangements for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies. He won three Academy Awards for his work on the first trilogy. Shore has also composed a few musical pieces including one opera, The Fly. He also won three Golden Globe Awards and four Grammy Awards. He started learning and studying music at the age of eight. He advanced to educating himself how to play instruments, and performing in bands by the age of 13. At
Rachel M. Harper’s The Myth of Music intentionally weaves together 1960s era jazz music and a poor African American family via metaphor and allusion to show a deep familiar bond between father and daughter.
Today's music scene is slowly growing, and differentiating in styles. One of the newest styles of music that has broken out is a generally unrecognized genre of music called "Geek Rock." By taking the meaningful lyrics of Emo, the heavy guitar riffs of Grunge, and the do-it-yourself attitude of Indie rock, this genre forms a new-wave approach to music. Many new artists have been categorized under this label, including Ben Kweller, Ozma, and Rooney. Rivers Cuomo, front man and lyricist of Weezer, is predominantly responsible for this underground rock movement. By transferring his life experiences into a musical statement, Rivers Cuomo has the ability to appeal to his fans on a new level.
Carl Strommen was born in 1940 and currently lives with his family in Long Island, New York. He graduated from Long Island University receiving a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and later went to The City College of New York where he studied music and received a Master of Arts in Music. He studied orchestration with Manny Albam and Rayburn Wright and composition with Stefan Wolpe. He currently has over twenty published arrangements for bands and wind ensembles. His popular arrangements and compositions are played all over the world.
In the text book America’s Musical Landscape by Jean Ferris, the book takes us through the history of the evolution of American music. The book delves into the different time periods of America’s music beginning with early North American music all the way to today’s modern music. Additionally, the book also explains how music, theater and film intertwine to provide some spectacular art. Jean Ferris finishes the book by exploring America’s concert music. Let us now take a closer look into the different time periods brought out in the book.
On March 13th the Rochester Oratorio Society and Houghton College Choir performed at the Hochstein Performance Hall in the city of Rochester. It was a predominately vocal concert with an accompanying pianist. The main performance of the evening was the Rochester Oratorio Society’s rendition of Johannes Brahms’ “Ein deutsches Requiem,” in which vocal soloists Elena O’Connor and Benjamin Bloomfield took the front stage, and Linda Boianova joined Kevin Nitsch as a second pair of hands behind the piano.
In this essay I am going to explore the unique collaboration between director and composer and how much a long-term collaborative process between the two can influence the establishment of the former as an author. An author, in this case, stands for an authority actively shaping the film’s story and message but at the same can be understood as an author of music, I will try to consider both factors. In this process I want to begin with filmmaker’s general relationship to music, then while answering the main question I will give examples of the European collaboration of Theo Angelopoulos and Eleni Karaindrou, focusing on their approach of using music in new ways, as well as examples from the more known collaborations between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann and David Cronenberg’s collaboration with Howard Shore. Furthermore, I am going to include conclusions from my personal experience I have had with my friend and director Nuno Miguel Wong. Concurrently this Essay is not an analysis of the music in the films of the above-mentioned collaborations, but rather focuses on their distinct working relationship and how it might have affected their musical approach and productivity.
John Dowland (1563-1626) was a composer of Renaissance England and considered one of the most prolific and well-known composers of English lute song. A composer and accomplished lutenist, he is probably the most well traveled English composer of his time. Through his travels he was exposed to the musical elements of his Italian, French and German contemporaries. He developed his own musical language, in which he created a unique style for the lute song. As a composer, he focused on the development of melodic material and was able to elegantly blend words and music with a wide range of emotion and technique. For the purpose of this document we will focus on the influence of his Italian travels. John Dowland’s use of chromaticism in his lute songs as can be directly associated with such as “All ye whom love or fortune.” In these pieces, we can see the influence on this genre through his travels to Italy and encounters with such composers as Marenzio.
Dmitri Shostakovich, born on September 25, 1905, started taking piano lessons from his mother at the age of nine after he showed interest in a string quartet that practiced next door. He entered the Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg, later Leningrad) Conservatory in 1919, where he studied the piano with Leonid Nikolayev until 1923 and composition until 1925 with Aleksandr Glazunov and Maksimilian Steinberg. He participated in the Chopin International Competition for Pianists in Warsaw in 1927 and received an honorable mention, after which he decided to limit his public performances to his own works to separate himself from the virtuoso pianists.
Andrew Lloyd Webber was born on March 22, 1948. He composed many musicals throughout his lifetime including; “Evita”, “Phantom of the Opera”, and “Cats”.
...lassical composers, I applaud this man for his creativity, style, but most of all for the great contribution he has made to the music and film world.
successful lyricist. Also, it was Ira’s interest in music that made their parents purchase the
A pioneer of Minimalism, Steve Reich is known as “the most original musical thinker of our time” according to The New Yorker. His contemporary musical style was contradictory to the serialism and aleatory styles of music of his time. That is the very component that is used as evidence that Reich is indeed “America’s greatest living composer.” Music is in his blood. Reich’s mother, the very June Sillman (later June Carroll), was a famous lyricist, singer, and actress. She is best known for her co-writing of a piece called “Monotonous” alongside Arthur Siegel. Both mother and son, June Carroll and Steve Reich, contain a similar conversational quality in the music they write/wrote. At a young age, Steve Reich took piano lessons and grew up listening
Leipzig in April 1834 to live in at the Wiecks', and to study with Clara's
Peter Jackson directed three films that is a part of The Hobbit trilogy. The films are called An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug and There and Back Again. It is an adaption of the 1937 novel by J.R.R Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Jackson has also directed the prequel of The Hobbit films called the The Lord of the Rings (film series).
Shore, Howard, and Doug Adams. The Music of The Lord of the Rings Part 1. Los Angeles: New Line Tunes, 2002. Print.