Howard Shore was born in Toronto, Canada on October the 18th, to a Jewish family. He graduated from a Forest Hill Institute and studied music at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. In a period between 1969 and 1972, he worked as a musician, writing music and lyrics, playing flute, sax, trumpet and even doing some vocals with the group Lighthouse.
He directed music for the TV program ‘The Hart & Lorne Terrific Hour’, and wrote music for Doug Henning’s musical ‘Spellbound’. He also directed music for the NBC’s very influential late night comedy show – ‘Saturday Night Live’ that was on the air from 1975 to 1980.
The turning point for Shore’s career was start of his collaboration with David Cronenberg when he hired Shore for the first time in 1979 to write the score for ‘The Brood’, a small-budget movie. The collaboration continued ever since and is still active.
Apart from ‘The Brood’, his early films were low budget movies like ‘Scanners’ and ‘Videodrome’. The success of those movies made it possible that the later ones like ‘The Fly’, ‘Naked Lunch’ or ‘Dead Ringers’ to be much better funded. Shore was associated with horror genre, even if he worked with other directors as well. That only led to more projects for that genre, including ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘Seven’.
See Howard Shore at work in this video
This early period of collaboration with Cronenberg were very important for Shore’s musical development, as working on low-budget horror movies was offering a lot of artistic freedom, which he used in experimental manner, trying out different techniques and figuring out what works in different situations. He is known for mixing traditional orchestral chores with world music, period styles, electronic instruments and sampled sounds.
Apart from those movies, he also composed with ease for the mainstream movies, where the music requirements were much more rigid. He composed music for the light family movies such as ‘Big’, ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ and ‘Cats and Dogs’. He has done an extremely memorable soundtrack for ‘Philadelphia’, including songs by Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springstein, Neil Young, and an aria from the opera Andrea Chénier, performed by Maria Callas.
The most important period in his career began in 2000, when Howard Shore was chosen to work on one of the most grandiose movie projects of our time – ‘Lord of the Rings’. He spent a whole year just working on the first of the three films, which comes as no surprise when we know that each film is more than three hours long. With music being present for the majority of screen-time, the task to write score for this feature is a considerable achievement which brought him three Oscars, several Grammies and great respect in Hollywood.
See Howard Shore talk about the creation of L.O.T.R. soundtrack and here some of the music in this video
Although many assumed that Howard Shore would continue his work for the Peter Jackson’s next movie ‘King Kong’, due to creative differences, other composer - James Newton Howard has composed the music for this feature. Instead, Shore has begun working more frequently with Martin Scorsese, following his work on ‘Gangs of New York’. In 2004, he won the Golden Globe for best score for ‘The Aviator’ and continued his work by writing scores for, ‘The Departed’, ‘The Last Mimzy’, and ‘Doubt’. Shore has also created music for MMO computer game ‘Soul of the Ultimate Nation’.
Howard Shore, still, has not forgotten his early roots in Horror genre and continued his collaboration with Cronenberg on ‘History of Violence’, ‘Eastern promises’ and an opera version of ‘The Fly’.
More Songwriting Tips?
For more tips and juicy articles about songwriting, subscribe to my monthly songwriting-guide.com newsletter. This unique inbox offering is packed with information and 100% free. just sign up!
