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THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING
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The wizard of film scoring tackles 'Harry Potter'
By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff, 5/18/2001
In London, Williams met with film director Christopher Columbus to look at the rough cut for ''Harry Potter'' and ''spot'' the film - that is, decide which parts of the movie need music. Williams will compose the score at home in Los Angeles and at Tanglewood this summer, before returning to London in August to record the music.
Over tea last week, the genial composer talked about the ''Harry Potter'' project and the ''Evening at Pops'' television program that he taped earlier this week.
''I've actually seen a little of the film already,'' Williams said. ''A couple of months ago I saw the first trailer, which is 110 seconds long, and I wrote and recorded some music for it.''
The trailer is now on the Web (harrypotter.com), where it has been minutely analyzed and hotly discussed. In it we see the Hogwarts Express depart from Platform 93/4 at King's Cross Station
and catch glimpses of some of the key characters - Harry, of course (Daniel Radcliffe), his nemesis Draco Malfoy, his best friends Hermione and Ron, Hagrid the giant, and the Durleys, his awful muggle family. We also see Alan Rickman as Professor Snape, Dame Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall, and Hedwig the bird.
There is little dialogue: What carries the trailer along is a darkly alluring orchestral waltz by Williams. ''I developed a theme for Hedwig,'' Williams says. ''Everyone seemed to like it, so I will probably use that music as one thread in the tapestry.''
Williams does not yet know the score's length, but he says, ''I imagine there will be a lot of music in the film, and Chris Columbus has told me that the film is long and that he needs to whittle it down. That's a very hard and heartbreaking process for a director, and it's very difficult for a composer, too. Sometimes I have written as much as 20 minutes of music for a film that was never used. I am a composer who likes to develop and combine themes, and it is awkward to develop themes that have never been properly introduced because the scenes they were written for have been cut from the film.''
One of Williams's longstanding rules is not to read books or plays on which the films he scores have been based. ''It is more valuable to me to be a tabula rasa - most of the audience doesn't know what's coming, and it's important to place myself in that same position. I want the film to make the first impression, and it is also the film itself that has to give me the right sense of pace and timing.''
Williams did break this rule this time; he has read the first Harry Potter book. ''I liked it very much, and it made me want to read on, especially now that people have told me that each book gets better than the one before.''
Experience has made Williams wary of films with prominent parts for children. ''It is very hard to predict on the basis of auditions just what you are going to get from a young performer, but sometimes you get lucky. I have to say that everyone from Warner Brothers who has seen the film is very excited about it, including the hard-bitten professionals.''
Just before coming to Boston for his Pops dates, Williams finished his work on ''AI'' (''Artificial Intelligence''), the new Steven Spielberg film based on a project developed by the late Stanley Kubrick. It will be released next month.
''AI'' has been surrounded by secrecy, but Williams volunteers information about the score. ''Jude Law plays a robotic character, a seducer of women, and it was up to me to fill his head with appropriate music, so I chose songs from the '30s. Also I learned that Stanley Kubrick didn't really have any preferences about the music, but he did want to hear the waltz from Strauss's `Der Rosenkavalier' on the soundtrack ... Kubrick loved waltzes - to use `The Blue Danube' in `2001' was a stroke of genius, because the whole point of a waltz is to be without gravity, floating, suspended. I found a place where the `Rosenkavalier' waltz might work in `AI,' so I made a little paraphrase of it. It lasts only 30 seconds or so, but I like to think of it as my `homage a Kubrick.'''
This week's Pops TV taping - which Williams will repeat at Tanglewood July 17 - also represents an homage, this one to composer Harry Warren, who wrote more than 400 songs for nearly 100 movies between 1928 and 1981.
Visual interest in this tribute comes from Busby Berkeley's extravagant cinematic choreography for bev ies of beauties, and Williams describes these sequences with delight. ''Berkeley had all these women making geometric patterns - sometimes they look like flowers, but one of the patterns looks to me like a particularly delicious shrimp cocktail! I couldn't begin to imagine how Busby Berkeley did some of the things he did. We sometimes get so wrapped up in ourselves, and in the things we know how to do, that we forget how terrific our predecessors were.''
For the tribute, Williams attempted something he hasn't done before - having percussionists synchronize with the onscreen tap-dancing. Of course, most screen tap-dancing was postsynchronized; choreographer Hermes Pan dubbed the sound for Fred Astaire's dancing. Williams makes a significant musician's point about this: ''It is possible to synchronize a tap to the exact sprocket hole of the film, but it won't sound right if it is not synchronized to the music. You can't fool the ear, and if the musical effect is right, the eye will buy it. What you are hearing affects what you are seeing.''
The primary attraction of this year's Pops project was not Berkeley, however, but Warren.
''Harry Warren had this wonderful melodic and rhythmic gift, an upward swing, this Depression soft-shoe thing, and Al Dubin's lyrics for songs like ` 42nd Street,' `Lullaby of Broadway, ' and `Shuffle Off to Buffalo' just came to meet those dancing feet. What they did in the aftermath of the stock market crash really did help change the mood of the nation.''
Williams was a child when he first met Warren. ''He was a good friend of my parents, and I renewed our acquaintance when I went to Hollywood. When he was around musicians he was always fun to be with, but at other times he was permeated with the idea that he had been overlooked. How do you survive when people like George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern are working? Harry Warren held his own in that company. That's an impressive accomplishment.''
This story ran on page 14 of the Boston Globe on 5/18/2001.
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esterday John Williams had an experience the rest of the world will have to wait until Nov. 16 to share.