The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - Vocal and Piano book

Published by: Warner Brothers Publications
Retail: $14.95 US

Apparently with a Bachelors and Masters in Music Performance, it has been discovered my talent in life is to review songbooks. It was not a skill I learned in school, yet when something is sent my way to review so far it's been of the songbook variety. Ironic, really, since my only piano ability comes from a year of lessons I had to take for my major and a lot of fun playing Heart and Soul as a child. None of these songbooks contain music for oboe.

But I'll do my best.

This time I get piano reductions to music to The Two Towers, the second of the amazing trilogy based on the books. Now I have nothing but admiration for Howard Shore's original score, or the vocal styling of Emillana Torrini, Enya, or Ben Del Maestro. But if you're gonna talk about Lord of the Rings music, especially to a musician, then you need to listen to one of the few well known band works out there; Johann de Meij's Symphony Number 1, subtitled The Lord of the Rings because that's exactly what it is. Five movements based on the original book, each detailing a given character. The Gandalf movement is especially loved by adventurous high school bands performing at judging festivals. I read the books when I was very young, I heard the band piece in high school, and until the huge honkin' movie trilogy came along I heard Meij's score in my head.

This book is not really an orchestral reduction, which is good because those tend to suck. But these are songs, most co-written by Shore and other artists, that were either featured in the movie, the credits, or on the soundtrack. The songs themselves are nothing special, although they do come in the original language (English or Elvish as the case may be) and do have translations, which are kinda fun to see. I pounded through most of the pieces of my keyboard and while a few were obviously originally written for orchestra and required more notes then could comfortably fit in ten fingers, most were playable with some skill and practice. Though I doubt none but the most fanatical Tolken devotees will really gather around the piano to belt out Forth Eorlingas.

A few random nit-picks:

• The table of contents at the beginning, for some strange reason, is listed in alphabetical order not in numerical order. It's a bit odd to see the first song in the book is not the first song in the Contents.
• Scattered throughout are the obligatory pictures from the movie. Some are just cool pictures, others are full page cut and pasted groupings...a page of Aragorn after The King of the Golden Hall, a page showing all four Hobbits in various slightly surprised reaction shots, a page of important men on horses...that kind of thing. Unfortunately the cut together pictures look more like something someone would put on their computer desktop and not something for a songbook.
• The songs do have chords, but no guitar tabliture.

My opinion? Unless you really have an uncontrollable urge to croon out Gollum's Song, go listen to the soundtrack instead. Or better yet go to your local high school band concert and hear Meij's version. The kids will thank you, and you can sit back and picture your own versions of Frodo, Pippin and Legolas as you listen to some good music.

Lauren (OboeCrazy)