Biography
Howard Shore has composed the scores to more than 60 films and recently received the Oscar for Best Original Score for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, for which he was also honored with the Los Angeles Film Critics and The Chicago Film Critics Award.
Shore's outstanding film work also includes The Silence Of The Lambs and Philadelphia, directed by Jonathan Demme; Ed Wood, directed by Tim Burton; Seven and The Game, directed by David Fincher; Dogma, directed by Kevin Smith; and After Hours, directed by Martin Scorsese. Other recent film scores are The Score, The Yards, Analyze This, Mrs. Doubtfire and Big.
Shore's long standing collaboration with David Cronenberg has produced the scores to The Brood (1979), Scanners (1980), Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988), Naked Lunch (1990), M. Butterfly (1993), Crash (1996) and eXistenZ (1999).
His upcoming projects include the highly anticipated 2nd installment of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and David Cronenberg's Spider, starring Ralph Fiennes, scheduled for release later this year. Shore's last project was the David Fincher thriller Panic Room, starring Jodie Foster.
Howard Shore was formally educated at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. He recorded with the group "Lighthouse" from 1969 to 1972. As one of the original creators of Saturday Night Live, he served as Musical Director from 1975 to1980.
Shore has been honored with 2 Los Angeles Film Critics Awards, a Grammy Award nomination, and 2 BAFTA Award nominations in Great Britain. He has also received a Gotham Award in New York, the Saturn Award for Science Fiction and a Genie Award in Canada. In May 2000, Shore was honored during a week long retrospective of his work presented by the University of Ghent in Belgium.
Shore's music has also been performed live in concerts throughout world, including the Seville Film Music Festival in Seville, Spain; Cinesonic's 1st International Conference on Film Scores and Sound Design in Melbourne, Australia; and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Canada. In November 2000, Shore conducted the world premiere Concert to Projection of his original score to David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. The performance was part of the Belfast Festival at Queens, in Belfast Ireland, and featured Ornette Coleman and the Ulster Orchestra. Naked Lunch Concert to Projection was most recently performed in March 2001 at the Barbican Centre in London as part of the Barbican performance series Only Connect: A Series of Extraordinary Live Events.
In addition to his film score work, Shore's chamber music has been featured on Arabesque Record's "Reel Life - The Private Music of Film Composers Vol. 1".