‘The Rings of Power’ Score Found Inspiration in Tolkein, Nature, and Rufus Wainwright

[Editor’s note: The following post contains spoilers for “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”]

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A spotting session is a common practice in film and TV scoring that sets a composer up to write the music for a given project, where the showrunners/filmmakers watch cuts and figure out where they want music and discuss what they want that music to do. But talking about music in the abstract can, in the words of composer Bear McCreary , be a little bit like dancing about architecture. Even when you’re trained in music theory, part of what’s beautiful about it is you’re never quite going to build the idea out of words themselves.

“ The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power ” concluded its second season with Sauron (Charlie Vickers) holding sway over Eregion — if not over the apparent elven ability to fall off of tall cliffs and survive. None of the twists and turns of the season were worked out, musically at least, through spotting sessions, however. McCreary and showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne stopped feeling the need to do it after the very first episode of the show.

“I remember being on a Zoom with them, and I just said, ‘This sounds really weird, but everything that I’m saying you’re saying, ‘Yeah, that sounds great.’ And everything you’re saying, I go, ‘Yeah, I can see that it’s obvious in the footage.’ Let me just take a stab at it,” McCreary told IndieWire. “To sit down and verbalize [the hypothetical ideas] is actually a waste of everyone’s incredibly valuable time.”

McCreary says that way of working is only possible because the footage in “Rings of Power” so clearly cries out for where it wants music and the color and tone of the music it needs. There is a sincerity to the storytelling of “ The Rings of Power ,” not just in its dialogue on the nature of good and evil in Middle Earth but in its blocking, editing, and overall design, all of which shape the music — and give it a particularly operatic shape, at that.

In Episode 8, for instance, Gil-Galad (Benjamin Walker) wearily raising a sword in defiance, framed by the impossibly tall mountains and golden woods of a place we’re probably not quite ready to call Lothlórien, is a small one in itself. But the way the series treats the moment — the timing, framing, and reaction of the characters around the elven king — are designed to make it have an exponentially more massive emotional impact. “I love that the show is bold in that way, that they create that space,” McCreary said.

The score matches the operatic qualities of the “Rings of Power” visuals. “A lot of mainstream big budget storytelling does not employ the use of melody — or employs melody in such a conservative way that it actually rewires what audiences even think melody is,” McCreary said. “‘Rings of Power’ is a very modern score. I think it sounds modern. I’m using modern techniques. The melodies, though, are not modern. It’s a much more old-school approach where the melodies are big and draw your attention.”

There is, in fact, a lot of space in how the visuals are composed and in the rhythm of the episodes for music to be the thing that grabs viewers’ attention, directs their emotion, and gives context to the scope the visuals are trying to achieve. “I’ve worked on a lot of things and sometimes it sounds great, but you can tell [the filmmakers] want it now big — which means the production is big, but go easy on the melodies,” McCreary said.

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McCreary can go big on the melodies here, and it helps draw out the emotional import of the interactions between characters. “There are some fabulous moments of nuance between Celebrimbor [Charles Edwards] and Annatar [still Charlie Vickers] where [the levels of manipulation are] all so clear in the performances. Like, I don’t need to sit down with the showrunners and ask.”

Instead of nuance, what did need to get worked out in advance were the in-world songs — let it never be said that “The Rings of Power” has been unafraid to incorporate J.R.R. Tolkien’s love of a good song break — most notably the song of Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear), anger management specialist for trees of all stripes and guide to the (eventual) Gandalf (Daniel Weyman).

McCreary talked to Kinnear about how he was approaching the part but also thought deeply about the roots of folk music in relation to the whimsical, sometimes nonsense lyrics of Tom’s songs as they appear in the text of “The Fellowship of the Ring.”

“The subtext with Tom Bombadil is he’s the eldest. He talks about seeing the first acorn in the first tree. He calls the stars young,” McCreary said. “For him, he’s enjoying nature and singing about the trees and the river because [they’re fleeting]. It’s like the way we would look at a beautiful butterfly and go, ‘Oh, that’s pretty. It’s gonna die tomorrow.’ And I thought that’s kind of bittersweet. There’s a depth to that.”

So McCreary zagged instead of zigged, ignoring the bounciness of the lyrics on the page and leaning into a thoughtful, sort of sad delivery of them. This led him to think about singers, too. “I realized, ‘Oh, Rufus Wainwright is this man.’ And I started imagining Rufus singing it and just reading that text. Thinking about Rufus Wainwright, different things come out. The way he holds words and releases them is so unique. That’s how the melody came out,” McCreary said.

By kindly fate, McCreary could recruit Wainwright to sing his version of Bombadil’s song and solidify the melody he had in his head. And if the little sequence of Gandalf and Tom sitting together by the fire, singing his song of an evening, isn’t proof enough that McCreary’s instincts were right, he recently discovered another.  “I just read ‘Fellowship’ to my daughter a few months ago, and I realized that melody fits every line he has in the book,” McCreary said. “I kind of smiled realizing that maybe I’ve added something to the literature experience for some fans. Maybe one day, the next time some people read ‘Fellowship,’ when they read those pages, they might hum the melody that I wrote.”

“The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” is available to stream on Prime Video.