SYMPHONY IN SEE.(composer Howard Shore's score for "The Return of the King")(Interview)

On a recent Tuesday, the composer Howard Shore left his hotel in London and climbed into a black Mercedes for the forty-five-minute drive to Watford, an unromantic suburb northwest of the city. There, in the Watford Colosseum, a municipal dance hall opposite a tanning salon, a sweetshop, and a pharmacy, Shore was working on the score for "The Return of the King," the last movie in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, a project that has occupied him for the past three years and will soon be completed. "I knew the acoustics of this Watford room," Shore explained. "It's been used on several classical records; the BBC uses it. Middle-earth is old. It's five to six thousand years preceding our culture. So it needed an antique sound."

Shore, a meditative, unhurried man who studied at the Berklee College of Music, in Boston, and spent the early nineteen-seventies touring with a progressive-rock group, was wearing sunglasses, an untucked black shirt, and loose gray trousers. "I'm a little tired," he said. "When I did the score for 'The Silence of the Lambs,' in 1991, it was written to the finished movie and we went to the studio and recorded it and that was that. It used to be an effort for a director to change a frame. You had to go back and clip it out manually, rebalance the reel. Now the digital technology is there to do these things quickly, and it allows much more fluctuation of the image. And if a frame moves it's a ripple effect. That's kind of what I'm in right now. The ripple. The big wave."

Peter Jackson, the film's director, was attending the session, but much of the "Lord of the Rings" cycle was created in a "virtual office" devised for the New Zealand-based production which enables the musical teams in London and in Tuxedo, New York, to upload their work onto a series of secure Web sites. "People sign in and sign out, and we chat and exchange things," Shore said. When he arrived at the Watford hall, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which would be playing the score, was gathering on the wooden floor, amid arc lamps and a thicket of microphones. On the musicians' stands were sheets marked "rotk 912 921b. The Black Gate Opens." Shore smiled, said good morning, went to his podium, and without further preamble ...