ROTK Score - pre-Oscar discussion on evolution of themes

I'm reviewing my soundtrack website as I tidy it up for a final archived version of it. I ran across this link I had to a discussion of the 2004 Oscar noms for Best Score. This article was the second of two and it covered Finding Nemo and ROTK (part one covered Big Fish, Cold Mountain, and House of Sand and Fog).

The reviewer started the discussion of ROTK with an explanation of why the score for TTT was not eligible for Oscar consideration. Most might remember it was because Shore used themes from FOTR. And that the rule that rendered TTT ineligible was rewritten to accommodate this style of writing a score that would cover many movies as one entity.

He then went on to discuss - with audio examples - how various themes matured from their initial use in FOTR to their ultimate use in ROTK. I was pretty interesting and I thought it would fun to post it here in our last week.

When asked which score he thought should/would win, he responded:

The way I approach a score, I think, favors those that write with the kind of intelligence and craft that will continue to reveal their secrets to you over the years. These are scores, I hope, you'll want to come back to. There's only one score in this bunch that I believe will be long-remembered and will really be considered an important part of film music history. It's such an incredible achievement that there's no way I cannot say that the best score this year is Howard Shore's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.