Howard Shore

Shore arrived at film music by way of a jazz-rock band and a television studio: he played in Lighthouse, then became the first music director of Saturday Night Live. He developed a long collaboration with David Cronenberg. His scores for Cronenberg include The Brood, Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Crash and A History of Violence. His other scores include The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, Ed Wood, Se7en, The Aviator and Hugo. He scored the six Peter Jackson films of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Music from The Lord of the Rings was arranged as a concert symphony, first performed in Wellington in 2003. Born in Toronto, he studied at Berklee. He has also written for the concert hall and the opera house, including The Fly, staged in Paris and Los Angeles in 2008. Born in 1946 and appointed to the Order of Canada, he holds three Academy Awards, one of them for the song Into the West, shared with Annie Lennox and Fran Walsh, besides three Golden Globes and four Grammys. He directed the music at Saturday Night Live from 1975 to 1980, The Fly had its first performance at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 2 July 2008, and his shorter concert pieces include a fanfare for the Wanamaker Organ and the Philadelphia Orchestra. His concert works also include Ruin and Memory, a piano concerto for Lang Lang (2010), and Mythic Gardens, a cello concerto commissioned for Sophie Shao (2012).