The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power - Season One
The original soundtrack to the Amazon Prime Video television series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power featured a musical score composed by Bear McCreary and a main title theme composed by Howard Shore, who previously scored for the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit film series. Their involvement was initially reported on September 2021 before being officially confirmed in July 2022. McCreary wrote the score nearly thirteen months before his inclusion was confirmed. He wrote nearly 15 new themes for the score, inspired by Shore's earlier work. The score includes various musical styles and fictional languages, created by author J. R. R. Tolkien. Recording involved a 90-piece orchestra and 40-member vocal choir working in London, Vienna, and Los Angeles.
Season 1: Amazon Original Series Soundtrack was released on all major streaming services on August 19, 2022, two weeks prior to the official premiere. It was led by two singles from McCreary's score – "Galadriel" and "Sauron" – released exclusively on Amazon Music on July 21. The album featured 37 tracks. The physical soundtrack will be marketed by Mondo and is set for release on CD (October 14) and vinyl (January 13, 2023). Additional soundtrack albums featuring the full score for each episode will be released after the episode premieres.
BACKGROUND
Howard Shore, the composer for the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, was reported to be in discussions with Amazon about working on the series in September 2020. He was said to be interested in developing musical themes but not necessarily composing the entire score. A year later, Shore was confirmed to be in talks for the series, when composer Bear McCreary was reported to be involved as well. Their hiring was officially announced in July 2022, with McCreary composing the score and Shore writing the main title theme. McCreary said the main theme was created independently of the score, but he felt the two "fit together so beautifully". The Head of Music at Amazon Studios, Bob Bowen, opined that both musicians have "deep understanding of the Tolkien legendarium".
RECORDING AND PRODUCTION
McCreary began working on the series in July 2021, and said it was a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" to work on such an ambitious score with the creative freedom that he wanted. He spent nearly two months writing new musical themes based on the scripts, which he compared to that of writing a symphony, and then used those to compose nine hours of music for the first season over eight months. Each themes had two sections, an introduction and the development of that theme. He wanted to honor Shore's musical legacy and hoped to create a "continuity of concept" between the series and films, with the 15 new themes he wrote for the season being added to the "pantheon of memorable melodies" that Shore had written. He did note that his music would reflect the series' depiction of "these societies at their peak" compared to Shore's music for the Third Age which had "a wistfulness and a melancholy". McCreary used different approaches for the different groups in the series: the music for the Elves features "etheral voices" and choir, the Dwarven music has "deep male vocals", the Harfoots have music based in natural sounds, and the harmonic language for Númenor has Middle Eastern influences.
The score for each episode took four days to record, using up to 90-piece orchestras at Abbey Road Studios and AIR Studios in London as well as a 40-person choir at Synchron Stage in Vienna. For the choral music, McCreary pulled text from Tolkien's writings and worked with the series' language experts to write new lyrics in Tolkien's fictional languages, including the Elvish languages Sindarin and Quenya, the Dwarvish language Khuzdûl, Black Speech, and the Númenórean language Adûnaic. He added each themes had been crafted with close consultation with the language experts, further stating that "the context of what is being said, and the language in which it is being said, matches what you are watching". Soloists were recorded in Los Angeles and across Europe playing folk instruments such as the hardanger fiddle, nyckelharpa, bagpipes, and bodhrán drums. McCreary was still writing music for the first season in Los Angeles while recording for most of the episodes took place, but he was able to conduct the orchestra for the final episode at AIR Studios in April 2022. The score also featured two performances from the actors, Sophia Nomvete and Megan Richards, who respectively played Princess Disa and Poppy Proudfellow.