'RINGS' COMPOSER SHORE SOMETIMES FELT ADRIFT.

Byline: Phillip Zonkel Staff Writer

FORGET THE ON-screen fantasy-drama in ``Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.'' The real adventure was behind the scenes. Howard Shore was in the midst of his own Tolkien task, composing the film's elaborate and mammoth score.

``Every day I would wake up and feel like Frodo - I'm on this amazing journey, but why was I selected to do it?'' Shore says, chuckling.

``It was an enormously complicated task to take on. It goes beyond anything of what you think of as a film score,'' says Shore, whose resume includes 1991's ``The Silence of the Lambs,'' 1994's ``Ed Wood'' and 1999's ``Dogma.'' ``The closest thing I could relate to it was opera because of its length and the cast was so enormous.

``But you couldn't really grasp it,'' he says. ``The only way to do it was to start the journey and try to keep sight of the end goal.''

In the end, Shore made the longest and most complex work in his 24-year career, a 2 1/2-hour epic. The ambitious score, which took 180 hours to record, contains two orchestras (London Philharmonic and New Zealand Symphony), choirs singing in six languages (English and five Tolkien-inspired texts), a dozen themes and subthemes for various characters and locales, and exotic instruments ranging from pennywhistle and African flutes to Indian bowed flute and Irish bodhran drums.

The musical tapestry has garnered heaps of critical praise, including a Los Angeles Film Critics Association award and an Oscar nomination.

``There's a lot of darkness, but there's also tremendous soul and beauty in Howard's music,'' says ``Lord of the Rings'' producer Fran Walsh.

``The great thing about Howard is, he is tremendously versatile. Whatever project he's engaged with, he will approach it on its terms rather than his terms. If the film requires something modern, deconstructed, bizarre, whatever it is, he'll find it.''

Middle-Earth is a long way from the 54-year-old's native Toronto. Growing up, Shore was inspired and influenced by such avant-garde composers as Ornette Coleman, Toru Takemitsu, John Cage, Mauricio Kagel, Arnold Shoenberg and Anton von Webern. In 1969, after graduating from Boston's Berklee School of Music, Shore hit the road for three years as a singer-songwriter and woodwind player with the progressive-rock group Lighthouse.

Shore then spent five years (1975-80) as ```Saturday Night Live's'' musical director before moving on to movies and working with David Cronenberg on 1979's ``The Brood,'' 1981's ``Scanners'' and 1983's ``Videodrome.''

``I thought of movies as a way of expressing myself musically,'' says Shore, who scored Cronenberg's ``Naked Lunch,'' ``Dead Ringers'' and ``Crash.''

Shore's big break came in 1986 with the simultaneous release of three scores ``The Fly'' (``a tragic opera''), ``Big'' (``in the tradition of all the great comedies, very warm and beautiful'') and ``After Hours'' (``a completely electronic score'').

``People went, 'Oh, Howard Shore. What is this guy up to?' '' Shore says.

Music, music and more music. Shore has left his sonic fingerprints on a host of compositions, including 1993's ``Philadelphia'' and ``Mrs. Doubtfire,'' 1995's ``Se7en'' and 2000's ``The Cell.''

``I'm interested in music,'' says Shore, discussing his work choices. ``I look at a film and go, 'What are the musical possibilities?'

``Some of the subjects offer more interesting music solutions for films and what you can create.

``A movie like 'Se7en' offers a more complicated, interesting world musically than a comedy might that has pop songs,'' Shore says.

``We really liked how Howard worked with themes and what he did with (the score),'' says ``Se7en'' director David Fincher. ``It was more about melancholy than about narrative underscoring. It's like a sonic envelope. It kept with the tone rather than Barney Rubble and wah, wah, waaah.''

Fincher, who also worked with Shore on 1997's ``The Game,'' enlisted him for his new thriller, ``Panic Room,'' opening March 29, about a mother (Jodie Foster) and her young child playing a game of cat-and-mouse with three men who've broken into their house.

``The composer is a highly trusted co-conspirator and you're going to them for them to point out certain things you may have missed,'' Fincher says.

For example, ``The flashlight sequence in the movie was supposed to be really, really tense, but I never delivered on it,'' Fincher says. ``He was going to have to pick up a lot more of the slack and said, 'Yeah. Let's go.'

``He was the one who said, 'I think there's a really great moment here to pull these two people together.' I found myself going, 'Interesting, I never thought of that.' ''

``Howard isn't afraid to take big risks and really push film composition,'' Walsh says. ``He's not limited by conventional point of view of what film music should be or do. He's like a jazz musician. He's prepared to take risks and see what happens.

``He's quite visionary. That's a very rare thing to find. The easiest thing to do is imitate other people, but it doesn't push the boundaries of anything. Howard's greatest strength is that he's innovative and fresh.''