The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring CR - 01. Khazad-dûm

With a menacing growl, Khazad-dûm is transformed into an even less inviting environment. The Balrog has awoken. Shore's
all-male choir returns, now with the Maori grunters, performing the text of "The Balrog." "It's 60 men," says Shore. "A choir of 50,
and 10 grunters!" Here the composer begins forging an unrelenting dread, barreling from stark choral textures to a surging mass
of overlapping tonalities—like a ritual gone horribly wrong. The Dark Places of the World figure debuts in the low brass, searing
through the pyramids of howling dissonance.
The rising fifths of the Moria theme are further explored, spiked with syncopated rhythms unique to this sequence. "I was careful
with that in the writing," Shore remembers. "There are a just couple of times where I used that." Throughout the score Peter
Jackson and Howard Shore sought to maintain a primal sound to the music, so anything that smacked of a contemporary sound
(including an over-reliance on syncopated rhythms) was strictly avoided. The tension in Moria is never built through flashy rhythmic
figures, but through layers of sound—a kind of rigorously structured chaos that licks at the Fellowships' heels.
Eight members of the Fellowship cross the bridge of Khazad-dûm as a crash of cymbals and one last triumphant reading of their
theme congratulates them—but it is cut short. Gandalf and the Balrog face off at the bridge's edge. With a crack of percussion (including
bass drum and taiko) the two crush the structure and fall into the abyss below. The music pulls away from the action here
to allow the audience to mourn the loss of Gandalf—a luxury for which the Fellowship has no time. "Peter takes all the sound
out," says Shore. "You just hear the music and the sound of the arrows hitting the rocks." A four-chord dirge begins under soprano
Mabel Faletolu's voice. These are the four chords of Gandalf 's Farewells, a theme that, like the Wizard himself, will not return
until later in the story.