Composer of the Day!

Today’s composer of the day is Howard Leslie Shore

(b. 1946)

Canadian by birth, he graduated from the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Afterward, he performed with the group Lighthouse, who were, according to Wikipedia, scheduled to play at Woodstock, but decided not to, “fearing that it would be a bad scene.” Later, he became a lifelong collaborator with Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels. Howard even suggested the title, The Blues Brothers, to Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi.

However, he is primarily known for his films scores, such as Mrs. Doubtfire. Most notably, he won two Academy Awards for his Wagnerian scoring of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. It won him a boatload of awards. More recently, Shore has compiled the music into a concert version—except there are projected scenes from the movie that accompany the performance—called The Lord of the Rings Symphony: Six Movements for Orchestra and Chorus: Music from the Motion Picture Trilogy.

He has also scored the music for many other films, like: Videodrome, After Hours, Big, The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, Ed Wood, Se7en, That Thingh You Do!, Cop Land, Dogma, Analyze This, Gangs of New York, Panic Room, Spider, The Aviator, The Last Mimzy, and the 1986 film, The Fly, which began, for him, a fruitful collaboration with director David Cronenberg.

So fruitful, in fact, that it resulted in Shore’s most recent work, an opera based on the film. The Fly, in opera form, premiered at Paris’ Théâtre du Châtelet in July. It has just made its American premiere in Los Angeles under the able hands of Plácido Domingo.

Mr. Anthony Tommasini, of the New York Times, was there to review the new work (required reading).

You should listen to new music!

(pictured with Lili Tomlin on SNL in 1975)
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