Howard Shore

Canadian composer Howard Shore is best known for scoring movies like The Fly, The Silence of the Lambs, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Howard Shore spent his formative years studying at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, which sets out to prepare students for a career in contemporary music. After graduating he put his training to good use as one of the founding members of Canadian rock/classic/jazz fusion band Lighthouse. Shore played saxophone with the band from 1969 to 1972. During this time the band released four studio albums including Suite Feeling and One Fine Morning.

From 1975 he was the musical director of Saturday Night Live, occasionally appearing in the sketches, but he would become more famous for the work he was doing on the side at the time. Film maker David Cronenberg called on Howard to write music for his 1979 film The Brood; this was to be the first of many film scores that Howard would write. In addition to providing music for almost all of Cronenberg's subsequent films, his list of credits includes The Silence of the Lambs, Ed Wood and Gangs of New York. He also wrote the music for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and has taken performances of this work on tour, conducting an orchestral adaptation of the work to audiences round the world. In addition to his prolific output for films he wrote an opera based on The Fly, for which he originally wrote the score.