There and Back Again (A Hobbit’s Tale, by Bilbo Baggins)

A full preview for The Hobbit‘s new, yet to be released soundtrack was out recently- and  it is everything I’d hoped it’d be.

Howard Shore, who composed the music for Lord of the Rings, got things just right ten years ago and is doing just the same now. His iconic score, evocative and magnificent, opens up in the right places, stretches and builds, glides back down, is dark or brilliant or stately or hopeful or whatever it needs to be when it needs to be. There’s somehow almost always a sense of age, even in the lighter bits, of some underlying culture and knowledge or dignity. Sometimes, the music really does read like a wide-angle pan over the New Zealand landscape.

The score for The Hobbit loses none of the feeling, none of the nuanced technical skill. It retains nostalgically recognizable themes from the original trilogy, reminding the audience that they are still in the same world. There has to be continuity, naturally, for the characters belong to the same histories as the ones we know from the best soccer predictions present-day Middle-Earth we know from the Lord of the Rings. Yet there is of course new music, for different characters and a different story altogether. Some of the tracks are very fresh, and surprisingly so in their ability to explore a different feel and sound. Even the new material, however, blends seamlessly.

Howard Shore masterfully incorporates elements of both old and new into a cohesive work that covers new ground without abandoning the familiar. The level of attention paid to every detail and nuance finds a natural fit with Peter Jackson’s cinematic translation and complements the fruits of Tolkien’s extensive world-building. There is approximately an hour and forty-five minutes of music for this first of three installments of the The Hobbit, and every minute of it, I think, is worth the listen.