2020-03-29, 04:23 PM
![[Image: star-wars-skywalker-kora-john-williams_8nze.620.jpg]](https://sm.ign.com/t/ign_hu/screenshot/default/star-wars-skywalker-kora-john-williams_8nze.620.jpg)
John Williams once again immortalized himself to a generation of young movie-goers with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, producing an effusive neo-romantic score at a time when that style was considered long-outdated and sappy. But as studios today try to make their music edgier, noisier, and more abstract, I think Williams's traditional score helps ensure that the original Harry Potter will be a timelessly accessible film. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets follows the original movie stylistically (sometimes note-for-note; most of this music was adapted/arranged by William Ross as Williams didn't have the time to fully commit) while Prisoner of Azkaban takes a drastic left turn towards the weird, altering between sparse and outrageous underscoring as the scene demands.
Williams is one of the few film composers today who chooses (or is allowed!) to follow the action and movement of the film while still writing long-form self-contained music, and Harry Potter shows his mastery of this with great sequences like the Quidditch match in the first film, the flying car in the second, and the werewolf transformation in the third. I've edited isolated scores of all three so that you can see just how carefully he follows the action or dialogue of a scene with orchestrational details that might not come across in the normal audio mix.
For most of the project I used La-La Land Record's recent release of the three scores, but bootlegs were used to fill any gaps. I tried to reinstate any music that was "dialed out"/unused, so long as it seemed to make sense with the picture. Almost all the edits made to the music on the dubbing stage were recreated, so these audio tracks won't float out of sync with the on-screen action. For the first two films I synced to the Amazon Web-DLs and for Azkaban I used a copy of the Blu-ray, but I hope these files are in sync with any copy of the movie. Sometimes the music editor decides to cut up a piece of music or use a cue from a different section of the movie instead of keeping what the composer originally wrote. In these cases (such as the Shrieking Shack scene) I used the originally-written music instead and matched it to the movie as best I could. I think you might be surprised at how differently some of these scenes play out with the original music (Azkaban has a lot of these).
The only music I couldn't truly use was the shawm source cue in Azkaban where Mr. Weasley warns Harry about Sirius Black. I tried looping and changing the pitch of the small portion I had to recreate the cue but it didn't turn out very well -- you can be the judge. Otherwise the entire scores are presented here in fantastic quality.
All files are FLAC 16-bit; anyone interested can PM me.
