Holy SHIT.

Sorry I couldn't come up with a more eloquent title for this post, but...well, sometimes you gotta go with the words that hit you. Therefore: Let there be dancing in the streets!

Yup, I won a copy of Doug Adams's The Music of The Lord of the Rings, which makes me so utterly happy that...well, later there may be opening of beer and dancing once I am alone and no one can see.

The entry rules were simple: in addition to providing contact info, entrants had to identify their favorite bit of music from the films and describe why. Here's what I wrote:

My favorite bit of music from the LOTR scores? That's a nearly impossible requirement for me to fill, as I adore just about every single note in the trilogy, from start to end. But for the purposes of this contest, I'll name the music that plays as Gandalf leads the Fellowship into the ruin of the subterranean Dwarvish city of Dwarrowdelf, in Moria. There's just something so majestic and regal about the music in this scene: most of the Moria music is dark and forbidding, but in this one passage, Howard Shore conveys some of the optimism that the Dwarves must have felt as they started digging into Moria. The music builds and builds, and it feels like it's about to open up into a huge melody -- but that melody never comes, which is fitting since Moria never reached the heights that the Dwarves had hoped. Instead, the music turns dark again as Gimli finds Balin's tomb. This moment in the score always makes
my spine chill a bit. (The film actually blunts the impact a bit by having Sam say "Now that's an eye-opener and no mistake". It's a scene that needed no dialogue.)

Here's the music I'm referring to. It's the first 1:15 of this clip, and I shiver in awe every time I hear this passage. It's so regal and sad and evocative of Tolkien's world that is full to overflow with old things that are lost and nearly forgotten:



That music is Middle Earth.