You're getting closer, Mr. Williams.

I'm listening to John Williams's score CD to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban right now, and while he has yet to really win me over with his music for this series, this score is getting really close. I mean, really close. There's a lot of good stuff here. (I think that a lot of my problem with these scores might just boil down to the fact that I just don't like "Hedwig's Theme", which is the overarching theme of the series thus far.)

Prisoner of Azkaban is, as many commenters have noted, when the series starts getting a bit darker, and likewise, Williams's music gets darker too, which I find to be a substantial relief. As much as I love John Williams, I've never really been able to reconcile myself to his "happy" music, which dominated the first two films of this series.

On this CD, the first few tracks are pretty scattershot, with a rambunctious pastiche of a classical waltz in the second track ("Aunt Marge's Waltz"), a bizarro bit of swing-band stuff in the third ("The Knight Bus", which actually reminds me of Alan Sylvestri's work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit), and culminating in a medievally-styled song called "Double Trouble".

Then, finally, we get to the "meat and potatoes" of the score, and it arrives literally with a bang: track #6, "Buckbeak's Flight", opens with a thunderous passage for timpani, and then we're into the kind of string writing Williams is so good at: a lush minor key melody soaring in the violins over a churning harmonic background in the lower strings and rhythmic woodwinds, punctuated by an ascending horn motif. All the Williams trademarks are here, in a way that they have been absent from the first two scores of the Harry Potter series. Later on, though, Williams is called upon to return to the faux-medievalism of "Double Trouble", which makes for a finely varied listening experience on CD.

John Williams does a lot more wholesale borrowing and homage-paying to his classical forebears in the Harry Potter scores than in other scores of his, which irks some but doesn't bother me, really, since a key aspect of the Harry Potter stories in the first place is the way J.K. Rowling freely mines tropes from just about anywhere she can find. I mean, we're talking about what is pretty much a standard "British boarding school" story, mixed with children's horror elements, the good old English ghost story (Rowling has surely read a good deal of M.R. James, or I miss my guess), and even classical mythology and alchemy. Williams's pastiche-approach to scoring these films seems appropriate, seeing as how the stories are pastiche to begin with.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to hearing what Williams comes up with for Goblet of Fire, which is in my opinion the best of the books thus far. I can't wait to hear how Williams scores the scene when Dumbledore tells Harry, "I am your father."

(No, that didn't happen.)