This track has always struck me as deviating somewhat from the style of the rest of Shore's score. Some moments in it remind me very strongly of the
Star Wars scores- for instance, the lower voices 'creeping about' at the beginning, or the rising march-like figure in the brass at 3:10. And the quintessentially 'spidery' music at about 1:27 and continuing calls to mind Herrmann's
Psycho score. On the other hand, other moments do relate strongly to the rest of the LotR score - for instance, the tremolo/glissando that Encaitare notes at 1:47. Overall, a very effective track.
Encaitare said something interesting:
Quote:
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Like much of the music in Mordor, it's not necessarily the kind of thing you'd listen to for pleasure, but it definitely fits what's going on in the movie.
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I wonder about this - to what extent do dark and depressing scenes warrant dark and depressing music that one wouldn't listen to for pleasure? I only bring it up because in my opinion there's a fallacy here, into which a fair number of directors, producers, and composers seem to be falling these days. The fallacy is that the best way to use music to accentuate unpleasantness is to make the music in some sense unpleasant. But it seems to me that music can
suggest all these dark things while remaining thoroughly good, pleasurable music in its own right. I can think, for instance, of bits of Beethoven that could characterize Mordor quite well - and I think few would argue that Beethoven is not pleasurable.
John Williams said something about this in one of the
Revenge of the Sith DVD special features - he noted (and I'm paraphrasing) that while the movie was certainly the darkest of the six, the score was probably not any darker than the other scores, because darkness need not be scored darkly.