Thursday, November 12, 2009

Something for Thursday

Here's a bit of film music from quite recently. It's from the film Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and it scores a scene where Harry Potter and a number of the kids at Hogwarts decide that their professors aren't doing enough to train them against the Dark Arts, and that therefore they should undertake such training themselves, with Harry himself teaching them. Much of the music in the Potter films tends to be the kind of thing you'd expect from movies about wizards and magic and whatnot, especially when most of the themes in the series sprang from the pen of John Williams, who scored the first three films. But this one, the fifth, was scored by Nicholas Hopper, who took a decidedly different approach, as we can hear in this cue. It's not heavy or portentous at all; in fact, it's some of the most optimistic music written in the whole series. Here's "Dumbledore's Army".



(This is actually a recreation of the cue by a person using a synthesizer, but it's really pretty amazingly close in sound to the original composition for orchestra, and the music's forward-looking nature really comes through.)

2 comments:

wordnerd (Rebecca Carey Rohan) said...

I love this score, especially Fireworks and The Flight of the Order of the Phoenix. I thought this was a refreshing change from John Williams -- not that I think there's anything wrong with his work, but this score gave the movie a whole new feel and flavor that I really liked. I believe Hopper did Half-Blood Prince as well, or Williams borrowed some of his themes/motifs.

David said...

The opening three notes I think are the same, interval-wise, as the beginning of Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man", another optimistic piece of music that was written to celebrate the ordinary folk rather than the Hero or Great Leader.