This is not a review of The Hobbit. If you haven’t seen it yet, I’m not going to spoil anything for you.1 Well, not in the conventional sense anyway: after reading this you’ll probably pay closer attention to the music, which might indeed end up spoiling the experience slightly for you.

It did for me.

My misgivings started with the Dwarves singing in the trailer: yes their voices are wonderfully deep and soulful, but the song is a perfectly standard modern Western harmonic composition. Shouldn’t music made by people who aren’t human sound just a little different?2

But no, it seems that Dwarven harmony is Western harmony. And this when our real (non-Western) musical traditions include this and this.3

The same failure of imagination shows up in Rivendell: the elves play a concert harp and a flute to signify their refined and enlightened culture. The flute, at least, is done up to look like it’s not borrowed from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, but still.4 And the sounds they’re making, of course, sound like what someone Western without much idea of classical music probably imagines that the most refined classical music sounds like.

(How could you do it differently? I would have loved to be put in the Dwarves’ own place, by hearing music that I didn’t understand; Turkish classical music, for instance, uses very finely distinguished tone pitches in ways that sound very odd to Western ears, without being any less clearly a rich and refined musical system.)

Given how seriously Tolkien and some of his fans take his created languages, I’m sure Peter Jackson has a linguist (perhaps several) on the production staff; apparently, though, no ethnomusicologist. A lot of deliberate and focused creativity has been applied to the languages, the costumes, the fight choreography, the weapons… I just wish that same kind of deliberate attention had also been focused on the music.

Notes:

  1. If you haven’t seen it yet and don’t know what happens, read the book! [↪]
  2. It turns out this is the theme tune of the whole film, and it’s definitely catchy. I cycled home whistling it, and just heard someone else whistling it outside our apartment. I just wish the rendition by the Dwarves had been a bit less… choral. [↪]
  3. Two examples picked not at all at random; I’m sure there are plenty more that push the envelope in other directions. [↪]
  4. Yes, I’m sure Tolkien mentions harps. Doesn’t mean they have to look like our harps, or be played like them. Think how different the West African kora is to a concert harp: that’s the space you’ve got to play in. [↪]