Ampleforth/Lay Me Low by The Albion Band (this was written in the ‘70s, but The Albion Band, and this album in particular, is made up of a bunch of old Fairport Convention members with vocals from people like Martin Carthy and Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span, and you really don’t get more Traditional English Folk than that)
Babylon Is Fallen by Sacred Harp (1640s – this is the only half-decent version I could find, as previously I’ve only heard it sung around a fire by drunk English civil war reenactors)
Over the Hills and Far Away by John Tams (late 1600s, sometimes something goes hard because of the feelings it stirs in your breast, and not because it actually goes hard)
Going back to one of your earlier posts about villains and music. It’s not just that the villains are music fans, they also support up and coming artists.
they appreciate the classics and the contemporary!
AND THEY MAKE TIME FOR MUSIC!!!
when Shades wanted to talk and Mariah was like no, wait, I like this song.
when everyone attentively watches the rehearsals.
Somehow anytime the club is destroyed, the music is never cancelled. The show goes on!
Or how they’ll keep the club open even when they’re both in danger
Rules: We’re snooping on your playlist.
Set your entire music library on shuffle and repost the first 10 songs
that pop up. Choose 10 victims.
I wonder if the “new music sounds like noise” reaction from older adults comes less because it exists and more because they realize that new music will never sound the same as what they listened to when they’re in college and it makes them resentful. I’ve noticed that I don’t get an “ugh not this again” reaction when I’m looking for new music but I’ll get it when I hear it in like car commercials or I hear it being used for memes. Been trying not to react that way now that I know where it’s coming from though because it’s uncharitable.
Most composers spend just 10-12ish weeks working on a film’s music. John Williams spent around 14 weeks on each Star Wars movie, 40ish weeks total for the whole OT……but composing the LOTR trilogy’s soundtrack took four years
The vocals you hear in the soundtrack are usually in one of Tolkien’s languages (esp. Elvish). The English translations of the lyrics are all poems, or quotes from the book, or occasionally even quotes from other parts of the films that are relevant to the scene
When there were no finished scenes for him to score, Howard Shore would develop musical themes inspired by the scripts or passages from the book. That’s how he got all Middle-Earth locations have their own unique sound: he was able to compose drafts of “what Gondor would sound like” and “what Lorien would sound like” long before any scenes in those places were filmed
Shore has said his favorite parts to score were always the little heartfelt moments between Frodo and Sam
Shore wrote over 100 unique leitmotifs/musical themes to represent specific people, places, and things in Middle Earth (over 160 if you count The Hobbit)
The ones we all talk about are the Fellowship theme, the main Shire Theme, and the themes for places like Gondor, Mordor, Rohan, and Rivendell…but a lot of the more subtle ones get overlooked and underappreciated
Like Aragorn’s theme. It’s a lot less “obvious” than the others because, like Aragorn himself, it adapts to take on the color of whatever place Aragorn is in: it’s played on dramatic broody stringed instruments in Bree, on horns in battle scenes, softly on the flute with Arwen in Rivendell….
Eowyn has not just one but three different leitmotifs to represent her
Gollum and Smeagol both have their own leitmotifs! Whose theme music is playing in the scene can often tell you whether the Gollum or Smeagol side is “winning” at the moment
The melody for Gollum’s Song in the end credits of the The Two Towers is the Smeagol and Gollum themes smushed together (it’s Symbolic)
And then there’s the really obscure ones. Like there’s a melody that plays at Boromir’s death that shows up again in ROTK in scenes that foreshadow a major death or loss
Shore wanted the theme music to grow alongside the characters– so that as the characters changed, their theme music would change with them.
You can hear that most clearly in the Shire theme. Like the hobbits, it goes through A Lot
Like compare the childish lil penny whistle theme you hear in Concerning Hobbits/the beginning of FOTR with (throws a dart at random Beautiful Tragic Hobbit Character Development scene because there WAY TOO MANY to choose from) the scene when Pippin finds Merry on the battlefield, where you hear a kind of shattered and broken but more mature version of that same theme in the background
I could write you a book on how much I love the way the Shire theme grows across the course of these films
Unlike the hero’s themes, which constantly change and grow, the villain’s themes (The One Ring theme, the Isengard theme, etc) remain basically the same from the very beginning of FOTR to the end of ROTK. Shore said this was an intentional choice: to emphasize that evil is static, while good is capable of change
Shore has said that between all the music that made into the movies and the music that didn’t, he composed enough for “a month of continuous listening”……..where can I sign up
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