Skelly

The shawm and tambourine tracks are interesting because they're examples of how Cuaron blurs the line between underscore and diegetic music (or even sound effects) in a way that hasn't been popular or standard pretty much since the 1930s. Like Hitchcock famously asked, "Where is the music coming from?" The shawm is ostensibly coming from somewhere in the pub, but then it slides into orchestral underscore and for a moment the two are laid on top each other. The Dufay track seems to be normal underscore at first as Buckbeak nuzzles Harry, but suddenly one cut later it's paranormal music that constantly follows the headless horsemen. Or the lute track, where it isn't until the shot's conclusion that we see the "underscore" is actually coming from someone randomly playing his own instrument. Or the Boggart scene where the difference between underscore and source music is the difference between fear and fun, but when the two intertwine during Harry's turn -- where's the music coming from then? There are other examples but those are the most obvious. I think the opposite of that might be part of why the Diagon Alley music in the first movie was dropped and replaced with the Great Hall cue. Harry steps out of the Leaky Cauldron (which had obvious source music) and into Diagon Alley, and even though Williams puts an orchestral delineation up as the brick wall disassembles, he goes back into wizardly music that tells us more what Harry is probably hearing as opposed to what he's feeling. I think the filmmakers wanted to keep the score firmly from Harry's perspective, and the only cue I can think of that deviates from that is "Filch's Fond Remembrance" (which was cut down a lot in the actual movie).

You can get a pretty clean copy if you play with it enough https://clyp.it/ii3urvna?token=a618b4472874f54494e3fe135eba2294

Thanks for sharing that! Is there another copy of that interview you posted up there in 2013? The video has since been removed.

One of Williams's go-to anecdotes for the press was that he doesn't like to read scripts before he works on a movie, but that in this case he read the book before he even knew a movie was in production.

It sort of sounds like an extension of this bit... ... but one where the evil climax is suppressed and the energy is sucked out of the room. Who knows how finished the VFX were on the cut Williams was working on, but it sounds like he was trying to capture the idea of Harry bearing a huge shield and using it to force the Dementor back into its trunk. Less like a victory and more like a tension has been relieved. In the end it looks less physically demanding than that, and I think Cuaron wanted the concept of a patronus to be more psychological anyway. That way it ties into Harry's self-confidence about his parenthood and identity, which would explain why he wanted Williams to do a version with the "Family Theme" on triumphant brass instead.

I was poking around archived copies of the Film Music Mag site and found the old store page which had a lot of interesting items for sale (audio seminars and all sorts of neat little guides). All of it seems to have totally vanished. As far as I can tell the current FMM site is kind of in a state of disrepair (lotsa dead links) and I can't even find an email address I could contact. Are any of these old store items still available anywhere, or have they fallen into internet oblivion?

I have a weird question. Do you know where this image came from? http://celluloidtunes.no/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/valhalla2.jpg I've always wondered whether the film had a widescreen version, but every release that I know of has it in fullscreen (even the digital).

I often hear "Elliot Goldenthal" and "Polish avant-garde" in the same sentence. I know he takes a lot of inspiration from Kilar and Penderecki in particular (and of course his old mentor Corigliano also uses some of these ideas), but what are some other names/works or even just general techniques which you can hear as his influences?

Generally “demo” refers to mock-ups of cues, but if you mean musical ideas that come before the spotting, then Marco Beltrami did a few jazz ideas for “Logan” with four or five players. Some were adapted into cues and others didn’t make the cut.

it was, but with tracked music. I don't think that scene was even spotted, or if it was, it would have been a much longer 1M10.

For number 1, I don't think there was any original music written for those scenes. The closest Williams did to scoring a "deleted scene" was the original Time Transition, which I assume was written in response to Dumbledore's silly line that the Mirror of Erised shows him with brand-new socks. When this line was removed it probably made the cue seem really inappropriate for the sentiment the scene now ends on, which is about the danger of getting sucked into fantasies and ignoring reality. But Number 2 had music written for nearly all its incorporated deleted scenes. I don't know how much of it ended up being used in the extended editions though. And even the deleted scenes that weren't scored, you can see that some were at least spotted in that "On the Track" list of the cues (at least two Hermione recovering-from-being-a-cat scenes, and the Dursley household receiving a letter about Harry's alleged spell-casting).

There was definitely something in that scene that was added in late. I don't think anything was left intentionally unscored, least of all the dialogue; almost all the dialogue in the movie is underscored once we reach Hogwarts, and if it isn't, it's usually because the music was dialed out! My guess is that Williams scored a cut where Filch's cat didn't begin to follow Harry. Maybe Harry nearly bumped into Snape/Quirrel on his own (and note that the cat seems to suddenly disappear in the final cut). Here's a quick and dirty edit of what I think Williams was trying to underscore... https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ZzCQJvEmp066iRyT8hnocEluinYzbomz The actual movie tries to have three big crescendo moments with the music: when the cat follows Harry; when Snape reaches out for Harry; and when all the faculty leave the corridor at the end. The cue as written only has one. When you line it up with the third instance, the little quote of Harry's theme plays about when Snape grabs empty air, which makes sense to me and is way more fun than what they did in the final cut.

Yeah, it was. It's so barely audible though that I doubt most people hear it in the first place... kind of a weird choice.

Oh, but it is! (Unless you meant as originally written.)

Everyone calls it the Pettigrew motif because that's what it was edited to be (it's even sloppily applied when he turns back into a rat near the end). I think Williams intended for it to be more representative of danger, or evil usage of magic. It's like a sinister version of the Nimbus 2000 theme.