Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Instrumental: Bilbo Gives Up the Ring

While musicals are driven by songs with lyrics, as previously described during “The Epigraph”, “The Introduction Song”, and “The Want Song”, instrumentals are equally important for setting the tone during dialogue scenes and moments where characters are silent. Music accompanied film even before the invention of the “talkie”, whether a live organist playing along with the action or a phonograph blasting the tune. In the modern era, film composers are among the best known music writers of their day with the most famous in English-language films including John Williams, Howard Shore, Danny Elfman, and Hans Zimmer. Like many industries, older white men dominate movie music, although recent film adaptations of stage musicals have begun to change this demographic.

In this essay, I will briefly cover the history of film music with special attention paid to composers and movies that have influenced my work. Then, I will describe themes appearing in my own instrumental, which covers the dialogue scenes between Bilbo’s disappearance from his “Long-Expected Party” and the first song appearing in the dialogue section of the text, “The Road Goes Ever On”. At the very end, you will be able to listen to the instrumental without the interruption of dialogue while viewing the sheet music. A version with dialogue is slated to appear as part of an animatic in several weeks.

Before “Talkies”

The history of film music is a subset of the history of film. While a few home movies date from the late 1880s, a team led by Thomas Edison designed the first commercial filmmaking and distribution process during the mid-1890s. Siblings William Kennedy-Laurie (W.K.L.) Dickson and Antonia Isabella Eugénie Dickson were instrumental in designing the Kinetoscope, the peep-box format for viewing the short films, and even wrote a straight-forward book describing the science and history behind its creation. Antonia was a gifted musician, having played the piano at a professional level since she was twelve years old, while William played the violin, which inspired him to create The Dickson Experimental Sound Film. William played his violin into a large horn connected to a wax cylinder while his movement was recorded onto 35mm nitrate film. Unlike modern film, the sound and image had to be manually synced. The film is held by the Library of Congress and was added to its National Film Registry in 2003.

Despite this early innovation, movies would not have audio for several decades. Syncing was likely the issue. Instead, a pianist or organist would play in time to a film, often one they had seen only once before or were viewing for the first time with an audience. According to the Silent Film Sound & Music Archive, musicians often started on vaudeville and adopted songs they already knew to the new media. By the 1910s, music was written for silent films, not for specific movies but actions commonly occurring within movies. For example, since riding a horse was a common occurrence, music might mimic the sound of hoofbeats. Musicians might improvise a song during the first viewing of the movie and improve their work with each viewing until they had a complex piece completely in their head.

It is worth noting that many improvising musicians of this era were women, and they took jobs in other parts of the entertainment industry once movies came with their own sound. Among the best known was Rosa Rio, stage name of Elizabeth Raub. Rosa began playing in talkies during the 1910s, worked at NBC radio in New York City, played for soap operas, ran a music school in Connecticut, and finished her career at Tampa Theater in Florida. She died in 2010 a few weeks shy of her 108^th birthday, having played the piano throughout her long life.

Let There Be Sound

The first thirty years of film with sound, roughly from 1930 to 1959, is now called the Golden Age of Cinema, perhaps in line with the tendency to call the young adults from that era The Greatest Generation. Despite these illustrious names, this era had a lot of issues. The movies at the beginning were shot in black and white while color film was used later in the era. Special effects were primitive, and reliance on film made editing unwieldy. Outside of technical issues, actors faced extreme discrimination based on race, nationality, and sex. Filming conditions were unsafe as labor laws were few and poorly enforced.

During this Golden Age, one composer rose to the top. Austrian-American Max Steiner is now called the “Father of Film Music”, and his most famous scores include the original King Kong (1933), Gone with the Wind (1939), Casablanca (1942), and Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). While somewhat simple by modern film standards, his work assisted audiences in understanding the storyline by liberally using leitmotifs for characters and places. Frequent readers of the blog will know how German composer Richard Wagner inspired that musical style. An in-depth but incomplete analysis of Steiner’s music is available as the Max Steiner Digital Thematic Catalog housed by Brigham Young University, which tracks themes and variations within his work, along with instances where he used similar motifs across multiple films. His accolades were many, as he won eighteen Academy Awards or Oscars for Best Film Score and was inducted as a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1995.

Besides his incredible musical abilities, Steiner shared another commonality with many composers of the period: his Jewish ancestry. While Jewish actors were rarely given lead roles on the silver screen, their music could be heard in the background. Alfred Newman and Erich Wolfgang Korngold were two other major film composers who joined contemporary ragtime musicians like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin in getting their art into the theaters and living rooms of the general American public.

Genre Movies

As the supposed Golden Age subsided in the 1950s, blockbuster movies transitioned to a pair of genres. Bleeding into the 1960s, Westerns featuring actors like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Sam Elliott while giving audiences a romanticized view of the American West from a century earlier. While the Golden Age had favored Jewish composers, Westerns favored Italian composers and directors, causing the genre to sometimes be called “Spaghetti Westerns”. The term was allegedly coined by journalist Alfonso Sancha after watching a movie directed by Sergio Leone and was considered derogatory.

Among the most prolific composers of any period was Ennio Morricone who chose Westerns as one of his many musical styles. While he started his career as a ghost composer during the 1950s, meaning that he wrote uncredited music to films already assigned to more famous composers, his willingness to experiment with atypical instruments, explore different genres, and play along during sessions won him early acclaim. His career took off after joining forces with Leone to score Per un pugno di dollari or A Fistful of Dollars (1964) starring thirty-four-year-old Clint Eastwood. Two movies followed to create Dollars Trilogy, the highest critically acclaimed Western movie series. The use of folk instruments like banjos and guitar, humans whistling, coyotes howling, and the foley of creaking floorboards defined the music of the genre. According to a 2007 interview with The Guardian, Morricone wrote part of the score before Leone directed the film, the inverse of the usual process. Leone did not want to cut Morricone’s beautiful music, so he allowed scenes to linger, creating the distinct pace that contributed to their acclaim.

Despite the success of these films and many others, westerns would not last. With the success of the American space program during the late 1960s and 1970s, science fiction became the rage, along with occasional reminiscing about “the good old days” during World War II. Among the most successful franchises were scored by John Williams. Some of his best remembered early works included the Star Wars franchise (1977–Ongoing) directed by George Lucas, the Indiana Jones franchise (1981–2023) created by George Lucas but directed by Stephen Spielberg, and other Spielberg films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. The Extraterrestrial (1982), and the Jurassic Park franchise (1993–Ongoing).

While these movies were sometimes light on plot, likely because the intended audience was twelve-year-old boys, Williams’ orchestral style broke the barrier between highbrow classical music and mainstream pop culture. He even became the director of the Boston Pops, an offshoot of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) best known for broadcasting a Fourth of July holiday special with rapidly declining ratings. Williams claimed to be influenced by Korngold, the Golden Age composer known for music in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Sea Wolf (1941) among a plethora of films, but downplayed the influence of Wagner despite composing famous leitmotifs like the “Imperial March” for Darth Vader or the “Indiana Jones Theme”. Regardless of his influences, the film scores of Williams have become a touchstone for modern composers with some trying to mimic his orchestral style and others deliberately turning away from it.

Modern Composers

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, it is easier than ever to learn about established and rising composers, sample their music, and watch their films. I have a mild obsession with the streaming service MasterClass — they do not pay me to advertise, but maybe they should — and have watched the classes hosted by composers Danny Elfman and Hans Zimmer. Both men are highly prolific and award-winning along with sharing Jewish ancestry much like composers in the Golden Age. Elfman collaborates with Tim Burton on teen goth movies, with Sam Raimi on superhero movies, and with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on Good Will Hunting (1997). Zimmer likewise worked on superhero movies along with historical fiction movies and several projects with Disney, including The Lion King (1994) and the first four films in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (2003-2011). It is worth noting that Zimmer’s replacement on Pirates, Geoff Zanelli, had learned from the composer for many years and believed his mentor “redefined the sound of the entire genre”, a fair assessment despite its bias.

Modern composers rarely write sheet music, preferring instead to use easy to enter, tricky to master digital audio workstations like Pro Tools, Apple Logic Pro, and Adobe Audition. While I have worked in the latter two programs as an undergraduate and as part of my job, I prefer the old school method of familiar notes on a page, albeit in a digital program where I can easily add special effects and playback the audio with a virtual orchestra. Modern composers can watch the movie in real time as they compose, playing the visuals on one large computer screen while they input notes using a combination of midi keyboard, computer keyboard, computer mouse, and touchscreens with colorful dials. They may record a sound catalogue of eclectic instruments, allowing them to use their computer-based creation as a final score if needed. This allows for a much broader range of sounds to be featured in mainstream films than previously possible, whether composers design a fanfare of a hundred trumpets, bring together rare instruments found across the world, or incorporate noises not traditionally thought to be musical, such as garbage can lids or street traffic.

With the ever growing number of projects on tight deadlines, modern composers might decide to collaborate instead of working solo. Zimmer co-founded the collective Bleeding Fingers Music, perhaps referencing the effect that too much practicing has on fingers, where groups of musicians, composers, and producers work together to score not only films, but also television shows and video games. The process is sometimes sped up by using a temporary score behind an unfinished film to inspire the composers. However, composers tend to dislike the temp music, also called a temp track, as directors and producers can become so attached to this sound that they require the composer to nearly plagiarize previous work to create a matching piece.

My Composing Style and Musical Themes

Reviewing the history of film composing was a fun and informative way for me to better understand my own composing “roots”. Since I listen to classical music, movie scores, and mechanical organs, my style is influenced by a wide range of Western genres, including 18^th century chamber music, 19^th century opera, early 20^th century popular music, and the soundtracks of sci-fi and fantasy. While I create my scores using traditional sheet music like the songwriters of old, I use programs like MuseScore and Audacity to alter the sound of my virtual orchestra.

Overhead view of a pair of hands pressing a book and a cloth bundle into a green backpack.

The instrumental for “Bilbo Gives Up the Ring” is in some ways uncreative, as it is a collection of themes to reappear throughout the animated musical. The themes blend into each other, matching the actions of the characters on screen. The piece begins in E flat major at 150 BPM of 4/4 time by fading into a simplified version of “The Decision Theme”. This theme will be played when a character must make a life-altering choice. The instrumentation in this version of the theme is similar to “The Introduction Song” and “The Want Song” because hobbits play these instruments in my interpretation, and the scene is set in the Shire. The theme plays through twice with the second time featuring a prominent trumpet solo, since I use the trumpet as Bilbo’s instrument.

A cozy parlor lined with red brick. A daisy rug is on the floor and matching yellow easy chairs line the walls along with a pair of round, green tables with a vase of daisies on them. Bilbo wears a traveling outfit and stands in the back beside the fireplace with his bag. Gandalf sits on a the largest chair to the left of Bilbo.

The theme slows down, and the wood block enters in a ticking rhythm similar to a metronome or clock. Gandalf enters on screen, an immortal who suddenly finds himself short on time with the reappearance of what he thinks might be the One Ring. The tempo slows to 120 BPM, allowing the rhythm to perfectly match the tick-tock of a mechanical clock, while the key modulates into E flat minor, changing the mood from upbeat to sober. The contrabass enters to give extra bass to the piece, and I will use this instrument to represent Gandalf. A countermelody to “The Decision Theme” plays through twice before slowing down in the last line, and the clock-like percussion fades out, suggesting that the scene is moving outside of time. On screen, Bilbo begins a flashback to his adventures long ago.

A nearly symmetrical picture of a green forest, blue river, purple and black mountains with white snow-capped peaks, and an enormous mountain in the center. A small town stands at the foot of the second row of mountains on the right.

As the theme ends, the chords briefly modulate back to E major before settling into C major as the tempo reaches 70 BPM. All instruments play a single chord until Bilbo’s trumpet enters with the snappy “The Road Goes Ever On Theme”. This theme indicates a character’s desire to travel and explore the world and is often accompanied by lyrics. As soon as the flashback ends, the piece snaps back to “The Decision Theme”. The clock-like beat does not yet return, as Bilbo still lingers in the past. On the second time through the theme, the harp appears to strum gentle arpeggios underneath the melody. The harp is Frodo’s instrument, since Bilbo recalls how Frodo asked to travel with him. Instead, Bilbo will leave everything to Frodo, including his ring.

A pair of hobbits sit on a wide yellow chair wearing matching green outfits. Bilbo sits on the left, talking with a sarcastic expression. Frodo sits quietly on the right, appear somewhat sad.

At its mention, the introduction to “The One Ring Theme” first appearing in “The Epigraph” begins. The time signature changes from common time or 4/4 time to 6/8 time, but the transition is fluid since the tempo changes from 140 BPM to 70 BPM and the key signature changes from C major to its relative A minor. The ticking rhythm reappears as Gandalf urges Bilbo to give up the ring. The theme then shifts down into C minor, the relative of E flat major that began the piece. The contrabassoon enters, emphasizing Gandalf’s intention. The ticking crescendos at the end of the theme as the tempo creeps upward, and the time signature changes to 5/4 time.

The scene is black except for the glow of Gandalf's eyes that lights up himself and Bilbo, who has an angry, red face and glinting eyes.

Upon hitting 200 BPM, the “Morgoth’s Ring Theme” begins. The name is shared with the tenth book in The History of Middle-earth series, where Christopher Tolkien described his father’s concept of evil in his fantasy world as coming from the Vala Morgoth who embedded it into the matter of Arda so that no one who lived there was unaffected: Sauron strongly altered the One Ring, while Morgoth weakly altered Middle-earth. Since the Shire was mostly sheltered from evils, the theme is somewhat weak here, played in hobbit instruments and soon overpowered by the incessant ticking of the wood blocks. I will have an in-depth discussion of how I created this theme in a future post describing a scene where the theme is played with full instrumentation.

In the parlor, Gandalf stands with his blue hat touching the ceiling, his staff and pipe half-hiding his face. Bilbo stands on the right near the door holding his backpack and looking back at Gandalf.

After a grand pause, the countermelody to “The Decision Theme” plays in E-flat minor at 60 BPM, each tick representing one second. In the repeat, the contrabassoon plays a countermelody to the countermelody, which is less confusing than it sounds. “The Decision Theme” itself returns with heavy percussion, much like the “doom doom” of the drums that will appear in several chapters during the ill-advised shortcut through Moria. The piece closes after about eight minutes and forty seconds in a darker place than it began. Not to worry! Bilbo forgets his anxiety almost immediately and will sing “The Road Goes Ever On” within the next thirty seconds of screen time.