Howard Shore: Academy Award-winning composer

Howard Shore is a musical composer and has won three Academy Awards for his score to The Lord of the Rings as well as four Grammys and three Golden Globes. He has scored over 90 films and collaborated with many well known directors including Peter Jackson, Martin Scorsese, David Cronenberg, and Tim Burton.

Some interesting insights from this episode:

• He was in a jazz fusion band called Lighthouse and opened for Jimi Hendrix while touring with the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.
• He was the first musical director for Saturday Night Live.
• When he was starting out, he went to the library and studied other scores to learn how to write music for the movies.
• He has wide range as a composer scoring thrillers like Silence of the Lambs, comedies like Big and Mrs. Doubtfire, dramas such as Philadelphia and The Aviator, and fantasy films, most notably The Lord of the Rings.
• “You’re trying to take the audience to the world. You want to transport the person and they may not be aware of how they got there and what’s happening to them.”
• He used to review Mozart’s symphonies in the morning before he would compose to tune his brain up and try to emulate that level of quality.
• The key to creating music is to not overanalyze but to keep writing and writing and figure out later how to revise and winnow it down to what you really want.
• “Excellence is respecting the art of the world that you’re working in.”