The three Oscars he has received for his work on The Lord of the Rings Trilogy were probably the highlight of Howard Shore’s more than 35 years as a professional musician and composer. Here’s a little of the trail that lead to those Oscars.
Howard Shore was born in Toronto, Canada on Oct 18, 1946. He started writing and composing his own music by the age of ten and even attended Boston’s Berklee School of Music. In 1969 he started his professional career in music off by joining the Canadian rock band Lighthouse. In Lighthouse, Shore wrote some songs and also played both flute and saxophone. After three years with Lighthouse, Shore left the band in 1972, shortly after playing Carnegie Hall.
For his next career move he teamed up with a friend from summer camp. That friend was Lorne Michaels and Howard worked with him in summer camp in 1960 to do a little weekend variety show. Shore became Musical Director and Bandleader for the first two seasons of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. While with SNL he played saxophone in the Saturday Night Live band, wrote the closing theme, and also made a few appearances in some of the skits, including one as a ‘Killer Bee’. He was also instrumental in helping Belushi and Ackroyd set up the Blues Brothers band, and even appeared as the featured musical guest, ‘Howard Shore and his All Nurse Band’.
Shortly after leaving SNL, Shore wrote his first score for a movie when Canadian Director Murray Markowitz had him do the score for the 1978 release ‘I miss you Hugs and Kisses’, a rather mediocre murder mystery that starred Elke Sommer. Shortly after that, another Canadian Director, David Cronenberg, sought him out to do the score for the 1979 film ‘The Brood’. Cronenberg apparently liked his work, as Howard Shore has now written the music for every one of his films, with the exception of ‘The Dead Zone’.
Howard Shore was then well established as a film score composer and he went on to compose the scores for more than 60 films, including such memorable films as ‘Big’, ‘The Silence of the Lambs’, ‘Mrs Doubtfire’, ‘Striptease’, ‘Dogma’, ‘Se7en’, ‘The Cell’, ‘Panic Room’ and Martin Scorsese’s ‘Gangs of New York’, as well as many, many others.
You would think that writing the scores of this many films would take all of the man’s time, but Shore has still found time to keep active with television, including writing the theme for ’Late Night with Conan O’Brian’.
After working four years on the scores for The Lord of The Rings and winning three Oscars, you’d think that it would be time for a break. But Howard Shore is still busy, conducting The Lord of The Rings Symphony and continuing to compose scores for movies. He wrote the score for the recently released ‘Aviator’ and is also working on both ‘A History of Violence’ and Peter Jackson’s ‘King Kong’ remake.
by PotbellyHairyfoot
