I am a total nerd for music. I am a particular fan of movie scores (and sometimes their associated soundtracks, which is fun until you’re cleaning out your parents’ attic years later and realize how many questionable movie soundtracks you picked up when you were in high school, but that’s another entry). They make up the vast majority of my writing music, and even the artists I like who aren’t score composers tend to end up on movie soundtracks anyway, which is a handy overlap of tastes, even when the end credits of Red Riding Hood come up and you’re like, “Wait, is that – M83, was rent due?” Then again, I’ll forgive it, because the music for Red Riding Hood was better than that movie deserved.

Speaking of music that was better than their movies deserved, let’s talk about Daft Punk’s score for Tron: Legacy! …Actually, that’s sort of the whole conversation. Tron: Daft Punk Music Video: The Motion Picture.

I’m particularly fond of this track, which is about as good a structure for a fight scene as you could hope for – the initial meeting of opponents, punishing opening volleys, a brief respite, the discovery of something that Changes the Field of Play, the call to rematch, and the final quick-cuts that lead up to the badass cliffhanger of your choice.

(This post brought to you by my morning commute about once a week when this song comes up, during which I get to feel I am on the Most Badass Bus in the World, Destination: Great Adventures!, even though I am mostly just trying not to fall asleep and would therefore be so far down the list of candidates for awesome gladiatorial combat that I would just be the person who hands actual gladiators their little paper cups of water.)

…then I look at my iTunes library and say, “…are you kidding me with this?”

The weekend before last, I went to see The Two Towers in concert. It was much like last year seeing The Fellowship of the Ring, except this time my seat was in an area of Radio City where the orchestra/chorus was actually in balance with the film, which helps a LOT with the applause-to-annoyance ratio. (There were still people who clapped for nice moments in the movie halfway through someone’s fancy instrumental solo, but I guess you can’t have everything.)

However, I walked out of this one saying “THAT WAS AWESOME,” compared to my more qualified response last year. I chalk this up to the Two Towers score appealing to me more, due largely to the greater use of the hardingfele in the Rohan bits, and because the increased epicness of the story itself is more interesting than the slow build of the Fellowship Theme. (That said, I forgot how much Two Towers benefited from the Extended Edition; we’ll get to this later.*)

I still think my favorite part of the whole LOTR phenomenon is the Lord of the Rings Symphony, but while that’s out of commission, just the live music is more than enough.

(Please note that the conductor looks like he’s going to poke Legolas right in the nose. This one’s for Mirkwood, jerk!)

I am a huge nerd for music. I’m one of those people who really, REALLY loves it and likes to have it around – if I am at someone’s house and music is not playing, I subconsciously assume there’s a technical glitch before I come to my senses and realize some people don’t like music all the time. On the other hand, I am not about to hold up my taste here as anything but questionable; I have a wide variety of music I enjoy, but I suspect not all of it is good. So, I love it, and also suspect I love a lot of it that secretly sucks. (I’m okay with this.)

However, I was working on some travel mixes in my iPod last night to keep me company on the train to and from Capclave this weekend, which involved scrolling through my entire library looking for stuff that had rotated out long enough to sound new and fun again. With dawning horror, I realized it had been a loooooong time since I purged my music collection. I had a lot of college flashbacks staring me right in the face, some of which I still love (“Battersea” by Hooverphonic), and some of which made me cringe (I have two separate mp3s of “Higher and Higher” by Alice Deejay, as if at some point I was terrified I would lose it and made a backup just in case. Really, me? Have you heard that thing?).

Most of it, thankfully, is weird enough not to qualify for much pop-music debate (if you ever want some rockin’ Armenian choral music, I’m your gal), or is music I can stand behind (I have so many movie scores you can’t…well, you can probably imagine, we’re all friends here).

I deleted the crap out of “Higher and Higher,” though. Some things just have to be done.

* No, you know what, we are talking about this now. Why the footage of Eowyn kicking Orc ass was filmed and then not included even in the Extended Edition is a total mystery to me and will remain so, because it’s not as though it interfered with pacing. That battle was fourteen hours, all of which played out in real time; surely you could spare forty-five seconds for Eowyn. I am not asking for a lot here. Also, it is actually weirder when she pops up again at the end of the battle and you’re like, “Where the hell were you napping, Shieldmaiden?” I am just saying.

Also, I will feel sorry for Faramir forever. Even in the Extended Edition the character changes are a stretch; in the theatrical edition he’s basically twirling his mustache as he drops Frodo and Sam onto the train tracks. (Apparently David Wenham, when he caught up with his reading during filming, was actually very confused as to how he had been written. RIGHT THERE WITH YOU, SIR.)

I’m guestblogging over at Ecstastic Days over the next week or so, and after a handwavey attempt to link writing and music (they are…both things that I like), I start things off with Nine Movie Composers to Know.

This is timely largely because of Inception’s amazing soundtrack, by the seriously productive Hans Zimmer (composer of 8 bajillion movies), and has brought new attention to the role that a score plays in a movie. Naturally, all scores play a large part, but this one in particular gets points for the cleverness of some of its cues. (Can you tell how hard I’m avoiding spoilers here? Please, everyone, just see the movie so we can all stop hinting.)

However, I’ve been a score nerd pretty much ever since I was a movie nerd, and the nine composers there are far from the only ones whose stuff I hoard. Yoko Kanno, Ennio Morricone, Clint Mansell, Trevor Jones, Bear McCreary, Philip Glass, Peter Nashel, Brian Tyler, Jeanine Tesori, Stephen McKeon – basically, I had to cut it off after nine, or it would have been a six-thousand-word blog post about how awesome music is.

Instead, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite pieces of movie music ever. (Both times it was used, Graeme, I see you over there recycling! You stop working for terrible TV and score a good movie this instant!)

So, someday I will have to start a series of posts about movie composers I love – or rather, film scores, because there are scores I love more than The Lord of the Rings, but after listening to Howard Shore talk about writing this, he’s probably my favorite composer, personality-wise. I just want to buy him a beer, you know? He seems really chill.

I wrote it up for Tor.com, and included a little shout-out to linguist David Salo, who was seriously the shit. (Dude, if you have Google Alerts turned on, I would totally read that proof, for serious.)

The thing about the music is, I am not the biggest fan of the book(s). The movies I enjoyed more, but still, there are issues. (Oh, so many issues.) The score is pretty much note-perfect, and it made me care when I didn’t want to care. (Do I care about Frodo and Sam? No I don’t! Did I get chills when Frodo and Sam are waiting for the eagles and we get the Renee Fleming solo? Why yes, yes I did!)

This is the piece that Howard mentioned he stressed out about the most, and the bit from about 4:00 to maybe 6:30 (“The Destruction of the Ring”) is the piece he said he wrote in a single night before he had to give everyone the orchestrations.

In the context of the movie, even under the dialogue and the sound effects, this piece is still immensely powerful, but when taken apart and used in the Symphony, it lost none of its power and flow, which, you know, good job, Howard!

(Fun fact: Renee Fleming did her solo note-perfect and a capella after what looked like less than a day of rehearsal (, fact check?). If so, that is pretty well-played, madam.)

(Fun fact 2: In the theatre, I was totally going to be fine and not cry, and I was super-proud of myself, and then we hit the 5:11 mark in this movie where the tower falls and the chorus just goes up and up and up and I cried like a total weenie. In 2004, I did the same thing at that point in the Symphony. I have no excuse for myself. If you crank up a sad movie score, I am a total goner. It’s just science.)

For someone who was only ever a casual fan of the Lord of the Rings books, I am a nerd and a half for the movies. I have been to every midnight show. (I brought MY MOM to every midnight show. Step back!) Those evenings were some of the coldest ever (movie theatres really don’t want to let Lord of the Rings people in, for some reason), but I remember each one being a blast, for several reasons.

It’s a time machine into my past! The movies were different, my love of midnight shows was the same.
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