THE CINEMATIC HARRY POTTER
A SYMPHONY IN SEVEN PARTS:
THE MUSIC OF THE HARRY POTTER SERIES
INTRODUCTION
Harry Potter has presented a unique dilemma for the film world which has seemingly flown under the radar and gone unnoticed for many years. One of the most important aspects of a movie experience is the original score that plays in the background as the audience watches the film. At points, the score may go unnoticed, but at key climactic elements of a story, the lack of a good score can make or break a film. The film’s score may also catapault what may be viewed as a decent film to the status of a superior one. Who would enjoy Disney’s Sleeping Beauty without its central element of Tchaikovsky’s themes remastered for a mass audience? What would Gone With the Wind be like without “Tara’s Theme” (otherwise known as the song, “My Own True Love”)? These things, though perhaps possible, would be unimaginable.
But what is the dilemma of scoring the Potter films? There are two main elements to this question. The first and most obvious element is the fact that the Potter films have become the largest film franchise (the biggest movie series) in the history of cinema. Each of the Potter films have made over $750 million in international box office receipts, and this is putting it lightly. The lowest grossing Potter film (globally) was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which made $795.5 million. The other four films have made over $870 million each, putting the grand total of the Potter film series to date at the box office over $4.48 billion worldwide. This does not even include the home video/DVD releases or merchandising.[1] As Susan Gunelius notes in her book, Harry Potter: The Story of a Global Business Phenomenon, this is “the top-grossing motion picture franchise in history, beating the totals of all 22 James Bond movies and all six Star Wars movies.”[2] One more fact to keep in mind: the franchise is not yet completed. There are still three films waiting in the wings to make their debut and join the other five. The pressure of anyone to be responsible for such a critical element of a series, the film score, is no longer at any rational boiling point – rather, it’s stewing somewhere inside of a volcano.
The second element of the scoring dilemma is the fact that it has already been established that all seven (in actuality, eight) film scores will not be completed by a single composer. The film series’ scores are, whether on purpose or not, a collaborative effort. The music all needs to work together, for as easily as scripts and direction need to be consistent, so does the music. The music needs to make sense the entire way through the series. If this can be achieved, it will be a hallmark for film composers that is unlike any other moment in the history of cinematic music. With the filming of the last Potter movie in motion, one is fully convinced that this hallmark has already been achieved. The musical albedo is complete, and the finale will be extraordinary.
THE FIRST THREE FILMS, or WILLIAMS' WIZARDING WORLD
There is perhaps no more recognizable composer for blockbuster films in the present day than John Williams. The Internet Movie Database credits Williams with work on over one hundred and thirty films and television shows since 1952[3]; the most notorious of the list (in one’s opinion) being:
Jaws (1975) – Academy Award for Best Original Score
The Star Wars Saga (1977, 1980, 1983, 1999, 2002, 2005) – multiple Academy Award and Grammy nominations[4]
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) – Academy Award nomination
Superman (1978) – Academy Award nomination / Grammy nominations
The Indiana Jones trilogy (1981, 1984, 1989) – all three Jones movies received Academy Award nominations for Best Original Score[5]
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) – Academy Award for Best Original Score
Jurassic Park (1993)
Schindler’s List (1993) – Academy Award for Best Original Score
Saving Private Ryan (1998) – Academy Award nomination
As mentioned previously, these are only a handful of the film score work for which John Williams is celebrated. One can add to this list the Olympic Fanfare and Theme, which can be heard almost every time Olympic-related information and coverage is done by NBC (as the “Fanfare” was replaced in 1996, having been played every two years since its inception in 1984 as the opening music)[6] and the musical score for the 1960s television show, Lost in Space. Most recently, Williams led professional musicians Anthony McGill, Yo-Yo Ma, Gabriela Montero and Itzhak Perlman in his “Air and Simple Gifts” classical quartet piece at the Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009.
However, we must backtrack eight years from that event to November 2001, to the release of the first Potter film: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The haunting melody of the “Prologue” track of that first film soundtrack would become the “leitmotif” of the entire Potter series, later known as “Hedwig’s Theme.” “Leitmotif” means recurring, or leading theme that embodies the spirit of a character, location or notion (an idea). Of the classical composers, Richard Wagner is the most associated with using leitmotifs, and Williams is certainly a musical disciple of Wagner’s for this very reason (though this may not be exclusively so).
Famous leitmotifs in Williams’ work as listed above include the treacherous minor second interval (m2) work by the bass parts in Jaws, the Star Wars opening theme (which can be heard during the opening crawl of information before each film), the bellicose “Imperial March” theme from the Star Wars films, the exuberant brass work in Indiana Jones and the tragic violin solo which opens and closes Schindler’s List. “Hedwig’s Theme,” the leitmotif of the Potter series, however, is not performed by a usual instrument nor bass alone. It was written for the first Potter film for the celeste (or celesta), an instrument which sounds like a music-box with many octaves, and which has only been around for a little over a hundred years. Celestes were used most famously by late-Romantic and early twentieth-century classical composers, including Tchaikovsky, Holst and Bartok. Ironically, Gustav Holst employed the celeste in the final movement of his work, “The Planets” (1918) which was titled “Neptune, the Mystic.” This is ironic because the first movement of “The Planets” is “Mars, the Bringer of War” and in almost every serious discussion of Williams’ Star Wars music that one has had with music students and professional musicians alike, lines of comparison are drawn between Holst’s “Mars” and Williams’ “Imperial March.” If one does not believe this, stop reading this section right now and find a way to listen to both pieces. Anyway, it’s interesting that Holst’s first movement of “The Planets” relates so much to Williams’ Star Wars, and the last movement of “The Planets” relates so much to Williams’ Harry Potter leitmotif. Remember, the last movement of “The Planets” is called “Neptune, the Mystic.” How close in definition are Holst’s “mystics” to Rowling’s, and hence, Williams’ “wizards”?
John Williams would compose two others film scores for the Harry Potter film series to date. They are the scores for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). Williams was used to composing scores for multiple films in a series: he had composed the Star Wars music, the music for Indiana Jones and the music for two of the Jurassic Park films. Writing music for a series would not be new to him. However, scoring Harry Potter would be a unique piece of work, just as it was a unique literary phenomenon and continues to be a unique film phenomenon. After all, the films have now overtaken the Star Wars saga in box office receipts.
Writing a film score is no easy task. It seems that it would be much like writing an orchestral symphony that can last anywhere from one to two or maybe even three hours long. Especially in Williams’ case, musical form had to be followed. The form of music has a large bearing on how music works to one’s ear and connects to one’s mind, though many who have not studied music may not realize what is going on at the time they hear it happen. A form can be as easy as “A” “B” and “C”. Literally. A musical piece takes theme “A” and then plays something related yet different in idea and calls it theme “B”. Then it reiterates theme “A” (which masquerades around as theme “C”) making some slight changes. One could almost say “the beginning is at the end” or “I open at the close” (to use famous Potter quotes inscribed on a certain golden snitch). It’s like the “Golden Rule” of music. If all else fails, take a theme, play a variation, and then reiterate the theme at the end.
This whole idea can be expanded upon in a trilogy of movies. Each movie becomes a movement of a musical piece. Irvin Kershner, the director of the second original Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back, spoke in the documentary Empire of Dreams (2004) on the fact that he saw the second part of the film trilogy as akin to “the second part of a symphony.” In that documentary on the making of the Star Wars saga, Kershner stated, “I thought of the film as a second movement of a symphony. That’s why I wanted some of the things slower. And it- it ends in a way that you can’t wait to see, to hear, the next movement, the vivace, the allegretto. I didn’t have a climax at the end. I had an emotional climax.”[7] The music written by Williams in Star Wars Ep. V: The Empire Strikes Back was written in a similar direction to match the wishes of its director. The “vivace” movement of the Star Wars symphony would occur in 1983 as the entire score of The Return of the Jedi.
But what was John Williams to do with the case of Harry Potter? It was pretty evident after the success of the first film that sequels would be produced by Warner Bros. Would Warner Bros. produce the entire Harry Potter series? Hypothetically, if Irvin Kershner were to comment on the Potter series like he did on Star Wars, where would the second movement of the symphony begin? Would Williams commit to writing possibly seven film scores for one series? There is no doubt in one’s mind that he would do it and he had the ability to do it. However, John Williams did not compose the music for the fourth Potter film, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, or the fifth or sixth films, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, respectively. John Williams, did, however, one will argue here, set the stage for a collaborative effort on the part of all the Potter film composers to complete the Potter symphony correctly. Williams opened the second movement of the Potter symphony with the score to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and he left it in the second movement one-third of the way through.
Listen very carefully to the finale music in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The celebratory theme that plays where the film ends, with Hagrid’s standing ovation in the Great Hall, has the ability to move one to tears. It is triumphant and reminiscent of Williams’ other celebratory themes. Then listen very carefully to the final notes of the music in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The music is extremely different from what it was in the second film. And by “listen to the final notes” here I mean listen to the music being played as Sirius Black escapes the castle on Buckbeak the Hippogriff after having his final conversation with his godson, Harry, in that movie. The music that follows this scene is tag music: music that reiterates themes from the entire movie and drives the film to the end credits. Don’t be distracted by the tag: listen again to the score as Sirius flies away. This is somber, sad music. It foreshadows events in the future, and is ironically the reiteration of a theme on the official soundtrack known as “A Window to the Past.” In fact, the two most popular themes from that entire soundtrack are “A Window to the Past” and “Double Trouble.” (The reiteration of “Double Trouble” is the tag music that follows Sirius’ successful escape and which plays at the beginning of the credits.)
What did John Williams accomplish by leaving the main storyline of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on a somber note? Williams had effectively written the first part of the Potter symphony. However, that first part was finished with the ending of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. He then began, and set the stage of, the second movement of the Potter symphony with his orchestral score for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. But then John Williams left the Potter scene, and the second movement a third-completed. How would the second movement of the Potter symphony be completed? This task was up to two men, Patrick Doyle and Nicholas Hooper, to complete before the vivace could be started. The scoring of the Potter films, be it either intended or not, had become a collaborative project.
[1] as cited in Susan Gunelius’ book, table on p. 67.
[2] Gunelius, p. 68.
[3] www.imdb.com. Wikipedia credits Williams with 109 film scores / songs for film.
[4] Williams won the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1977 for Star Wars Ep. IV: A New Hope, as well as a Golden Globe and BAFTA award. He was nominated again for the same category in 1980 by the Academy for The Empire Strikes Back and in 1983 for The Return of the Jedi. The Star Wars prequel films, The Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith (Ep. I and III, respectively) both garnered Grammy nominations, the latter of which receiving two Grammy nods.
[5] Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) received multiple Grammy nominations, winning for the category of Best Instrumental Composition.
[6] Lesser known is the fact that Williams also composed the music for the NBC Nightly News, Meet the Press and The Early Show, as well as NBC Sunday Night Football
[7] Irvin Kirschner in Empire of Dreams (2004), at 1 hr., 54 min and 10 sec. to to 1 hr., 54 min. and 34 sec. (Chapter 7 in the Featurette on the DVD).
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