Well, We Just Had to go There Didn't We?

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

Wikipedia actually has a list of these leitmotifs, click this link and scroll down to check it out if you’re bored

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

merry crisis

me when i don’t know anything about the xicanx movement or latina feminism or the latin american diaspora or the spanish language. youre blaming trans people and “libfems” for phrases that came out of the latine fight against the lingual patriarchy of a gendered colonizer language? like it’s a bad thing? like it’s about “hurt feelings” and not about acknowledging the fact that spaniards imposed their language AND gender binary onto the natives they colonized? as if changing the grammar of the spanish language doesn’t have enormous precedent in latine culture and YEAH especially in US latinx culture? as if latines in diaspora “don’t count”? as if some english speakers aren’t fully fucking latino? stop pretending that “real latinos” didn’t have anything to do with this shit because we did and we still do. just because it’s a new concept to you doesn’t mean it’s worthless or senseless lmfao. of course op is a t*rf. fucking useless explaining the relationship between colonialism and gender to these people.

it’s okay if you don’t want to use it for yourself. it’s okay if you have differing opinions. but your opinions will be uninformed and perpetuating harm if you don’t recognize the history in latine activism—for example, the x in xicano or chicanx used in the mexican american movement and community, said to be influenced by indigenous language and non-binary gender systems. it’s worth noting that spanglish often used in chicanx communities has been criticized simultaneously for not being “american” or “latin enough” as if this too isn’t a problem directly stemming from colonization.

let me be clear i am not dying on the hill of latinx. i am dying on the hill that latin americans should be able to use whatever form of identification they want in order to recognize and dissect the effect of spanish colonization. i strongly prefer latine and i also strongly believe that terms like hispanic, latino, and variations thereof are all colonial terms. i’ll reiterate that we are living in a colonial society and that these terms are nearly exclusively meaningful in the arenas where xenophobia (fear of outsiders) applies to the native people below the colonist-established mexican-american border, where these natives are not recognized as native americans, where the borders of colonist countries are considered genuine authorities. it all only exists because of colonialism.