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.)