Journey in the Dark

I originally intended on listening to Howard Shore's rendition of this chapter in Tolkien's book but somehow I ended up listening to Johan de Meij's, so I listened to both. I definitely enjoyed de Maij's more but that also might have a lot to do with the fact that he was just composing and not trying to fit the action of a movie. de Maij's Journey in the Dark has steady drum beats throughout the entire first half of the piece. These begin very softly but grow to be quite loud. This creates the impression of the growing fear that danger is drawing closer. The brass and strings enter in seemingly random places toward the beginning of the piece and woodwinds join in a bit later. And impending feeling of mystery and danger. Then at about 1/4 of the way through, the dynamics grow and this feeling intensifies. 1/2 of the way through, the entire piece shifts to a different feeling. The brass gets even louder and the drum beats are about twice as often as before. I get a rushed feeling from these changes, like danger is following the Fellowship. An interesting feature of this section are a couple runs of upward/downward chromatics. Following all of this, there is an enormous decrescendo into basically nothing. The main theme from the other movements of de Maij's symphony then enters, but it's much, much slower and drawn out. From this, I get the feeling that the Fellowship has been through much toil on this leg of the journey. Overall, I think this piece just screams apprehension and danger. Although Shore's Journey in the Dark included drum beats also, they weren't as prevalent. Shore included more uplifting tonal and major-keyed melodies than de Maij.