The Lord of The Rings has been anointed the Best Movie Soundtrack of all time by a US radio station.
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Howard Shore's orchestral powerhouse took out the top spot in the annual poll of Classic FM listeners for the sixth year running, beating out a host of blockbuster and box-office heavyweights.
Beloved composer John Williams dominated the list. His creations - celebrated for their bringing celluloid worlds to life with whimsy, terror and sorrow - appeared 13 times in the top 100 list, and four in the top 10.
Williams' iconic score to Schindler's List inched out Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard's composition for Gladiator to claim second place. Williams' work on Star Wars, Harry Potter and Jurassic Park landed in fourth, seventh and ninth positions respectively.
Rounding out the top 10 were John Barry's scores for Out of Africa (number 5) and Dances with Wolves (6), and Ennio Morricone's haunting score to The Mission (8) and Klaus Badelt's Pirates of the Caribbean (10).
Top 10 best movie soundtracks of all time
1. The Lord of The Rings, Howard Shore
2. Schindler's List, John Williams
3. Gladiator, Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard
4. Star Wars, John Williams
5. Out of Africa, John Barry
6. Dances with Wolves, John Barry
7. Harry Potter, John Williams
8. The Mission, Ennio Morricone
9. Jurassic Park, John Williams
10. Pirates of the Caribbean, Klaus Badelt
Any compilation that includes both Lawrence of Arabia and The Dam Busters, Cinema Paradiso and The Lion King is a diverse selection
But a list generated by American Classic FM listeners comes with its obvious biases.
Big budget productions, fantasy epics and science-fiction romps drowned out some of film's more subtle but masterful scores.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, for instance, came in at 68, while Elmer Bernstein's To Kill a Mockingbird, which beautifully mimics a child's haphazard tinkering on a piano, just scraped in at 100.
And the highest new entry was Hans Zimmer's music for Interstellar at 43.
Memory and generation bias also seemed to influence voters. Three soundtracks in the top 10 were for films released after 2000. The oldest top 10 score was the 1977 release of Star Wars.
It's also unclear what what guidelines the list's authors were governed by. Some soundtracks in the top tiers were not wholly original scores. Fifth place Out of Africa borrowed heavily from Mozart's Clarinet Concerto and traditional African songs.
But what's missing? At risk of diving into as hotbed of personal taste, we've compiled our own list of epic soundtracks overlooked by Classic FM.
Best overlooked movie soundtracks:
- Brassed Off, Trevor Jones
- Shaft, Isaac Hayes
- Chocolat, Rachel Portman
- Pi, Clint Mansell
- Under The Skin, Mica Levi
- Snowtown, Jed Kurzel
- Macbeth, Jed Kurzel
- The Proposition, Warren Ellis and Nick Cave
- The Sting, Marvin Manlisch
- 2001 A Space Odyssey, Richard Strauss
- Barry Lyndon, Leonard Rosenman
- Shane, Jerry Fielding
- Watership Down, Angela Morley
- The Man From Snowy River, Bruce Rowland
- Frozen, Christophe Beck
- Pulp Fiction, Various Artists