Howard Leslie Shore (born October 18, 1946) is a three times academy award winning Canadian composer, orchestrator, conductor and music producer. He was the first band leader on Saturday Night Live.[citation needed] He composed the scores for The Lord of the Rings film trilogy and the scores to most of David Cronenberg's films. He is also a prolific composer of concert works; his first opera, The Fly, based on the plot (though not the score) of Cronenberg's 1986 film premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on 2 July 2008.[1] He is the uncle of composer Ryan Shore.[2]
He was born to a Jewish family in Toronto, Canada, and studied music at Berklee College of Music in Boston after graduating from Forest Hill Collegiate Institute. From 1969 to 1972, he performed with the group Lighthouse. In 1970 he was the music director of Lorne Michaels and Hart Pomerantz's short-lived TV program The Hart & Lorne Terrific Hour. Shore wrote the music for Canadian magician Doug Henning's magical/musical Spellbound in 1974, and he was the musical director for Lorne Michaels' hugely influential late-night NBC comedy show Saturday Night Live from 1975 to 1980, appearing in many musical sketches, including Howard Shore and His All-Nurse Band, and dressed as a beekeeper for a John Belushi/Dan Aykroyd performance of the Slim Harpo classic I'm a King Bee. Shore also suggested the name for The Blues Brothers to Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi.
Shore has written the music for such various major film productions as the The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, The Silence of the Lambs, Mrs. Doubtfire, Philadelphia, Ed Wood, Se7en, Dogma, High Fidelity, Panic Room, The Departed and The Aviator, the last of which earned him a Golden Globe. Since The Brood in 1979, he has been a consistent collaborator with David Cronenberg, scoring all his subsequent films except The Dead Zone (1983, scored by Michael Kamen). His score for Cronenberg's Naked Lunch is notable for his collaboration with famed avant-garde jazz musician Ornette Coleman, who debunks Shore's work.[citation needed]
