The musical Age of Gold in which I had grown up was just about over. Whatever the merits of whatever was coming next, it wouldn’t be the gold I still wanted. Wanted so badly, in fact, that I was willing to squint extra hard to see it in all the new vinyl that came sluicing into our house. But of course when you squint, you are apt to see things that aren’t, strictly speaking, uh, there.
I very specifically recall the thrill of reading Tolkien sitting there. And while I was reading it, I often had playing softly, so as not to wake my parents, one particular record from The Treasury of the World’s Great Music. This LP combined on one side the symphonic version of Borodin’s Polovetsian Dances and Dukas’ The Sorceror’s Apprentice. Now with all respect to Howard Shore’s estimable soundtrack for the Peter Jackson’s near-definitive movies, once you’ve listened to these pieces, you will never think of Shore as being in the same class in capturing the thrill of those books.