Bear McCreary Talks Scoring ‘Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ as Soundtrack Releases Worldwide
variety.comJon Burlingame editorComposer Bear McCreary has scored some of the seminal sci-fi and fantasy series of our time, from “Battlestar Galactica” to “The Walking Dead” and “Outlander,” but it’s safe to say that nothing quite compares to his experience scoring “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” which debuts Sept.
2 on Prime Video.The soundtrack album is being released by Amazon Studios Friday on all streaming services, including McCreary’s Season 1 score and the new main title theme by Howard Shore, who won three Academy Awards for his music for the original “Lord of the Rings” feature-film trilogy and scored the later “Hobbit” trilogy as well.“I’m a huge fan of the J.R.R.
Tolkien books, of the legendarium, the mythology and the Peter Jackson films,” McCreary tells Variety. “They were, in a way, at the nexus of my childhood and adulthood, the last films that took me away as a child.
I watched those films over and over and over.” McCreary’s journey with the characters of Middle-earth began 13 months ago, and the secrecy of the project was such that he couldn’t tell anyone, outside of his music team, that he was doing it.“I’m trying to honor the legacy of what Howard Shore created, and to do so by using those epic colors, and crafting 15 new themes that can be added to the pantheon of memorable melodies that started with Shore’s films,” he says.He spent two months just writing themes, based primarily on reading the scripts. “Each of the themes had an A section, a B section, an intro, a development,” he explains. “It was like writing a symphony.
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