Howard Shore

If you want some Lord of the Rings background when it comes to score, check out Fellowship of the Ring, where we go over some composer and orchestration information as well as leitmotif and it's applications in LotR.

If you're still here, you must be ready to jump straight into the Two Towers score, so let's get to it. We've got a bunch of themes returning from The Fellowship , but often not to the true height of their former glory.

Howard Shore's back and both the Shire Theme and the Fellowship Theme can be heard briefly during the score, but both are subdued thanks to the nature of the broken fellowship and the distance between the hobbits and the Shire. The Ring's theme, on the other hand, is coming out in full force…and Frodo feels more and more burdened by it.

On top of these reappearances we've got new themes that repeat in different ways throughout The Two Towers. One of these is "Gollum's Menace," featuring the tricksie cimbalom. Then there's Gandalf's "White Rider," a waltz that starts by shouting his newfound power and calms as the woodwinds come to whisper of his connection to man and to earth.

Plenty of other characters also get some solo track love. Sam, finally coming into his own as more than a tagalong gets the triumphant "Samwise the Brave," Arwen gets the dreamy "Evenstar," and we can feel Eowyn's longing in fiddle from "The King of the Golden Hall."

What? Not enough massive battle chanting, drum pounding tracks?

Don't worry, compared to The Fellowship, Two Towers takes the full-scale combat to a whole new level…and the score does the same. We'll just leave the thunderous horns of "Isengard Unleashed," and the crashing cymbals of "Forth Eorlingas," here for the next time you want mowing the lawn to feel like cutting through a field of orcs.

Though The Two Towers was the odd man out in terms of LotR Oscar wins for original score, there's no doubt if fits perfectly amongst its companions as a masterpiece of both story telling and awe inspiring.