Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Soundtrack, James Hannigan, 2007
There is some irony in the fact that, in several interviews, James Hannigan voiced concern about film scores automatically overshadowing the music written for game adaptations. If anything, Hannigan’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix soundtrack is the opposite case. Nicholas Hooper’s film score was widely deemed underwhelming, while Hannigan’s game soundtrack drew praise as the superior work. Indeed, it gets almost everything right for a fantasy epic as sweeping yet relatable as the Harry Potter series. Hannigan strikes an ideal balance between humour, magic, and gravitas, handling shifts of mood and orchestral colour with consummate skill. The only thing missing is a more pervasive sense of adventure and romanticism. Fortunately, that is something he would address in The Half-Blood Prince.
Stylistically, Hannigan’s lushly orchestrated and meticulously crafted compositions do not stray far from the kind of generic fantasy sound one might expect from an assignment like this. This is not a work like EverQuest II, out to expand or subvert genre conventions. Then again, on a project like this – the sixth entry in a series with an already established musical world – overturning expectations was never really the point. Instead, Hannigan’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix soundtrack fits comfortably into the franchise’s musical history. At the same time, it is emphatically not a mere imitation of its illustrious predecessors.
Hannigan writes three recurring themes of his own, though they appear less frequently than “Hedwig’s Theme” across the game. In that sense, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix sits somewhere between John Williams’ densely thematic approach and Jeremy Soule’s largely theme-less franchise scores. Easily the finest of Hannigan’s thematic ideas is the Friendship theme, which spectacularly sets the tone in “Welcome to Hogwarts”. It is a warmly ingratiating and highly malleable creation. Small wonder that it adapts so easily to the different contexts in which Hannigan deploys it: calmly introspective in “A Gathering of Friends”; almost a love theme in the beautiful cello and flute duet “Cho and Harry”; surprisingly skittish in “A Task at Hand”. Its most memorable appearance, however, comes in “To Catch an Owl”, where it becomes a majestically soaring melody – one of the score’s rare but glorious moments of optimistic grandeur.
Hannigan’s imposing action cues deliver some of the most viscerally satisfying bombast game music has produced. Beginning with “The Inquisitorial Squad”, he never falls into the trap of writing mere directionless sound and fury, a failing endemic to so much action music for games. Instead, his battle pieces always retain a melodic backbone that gives shape and direction to the huge brass eruptions, crashing percussion, and insistent string ostinati. The album release wisely groups these pieces towards the end, raising the stakes at exactly the right point.
And even after all the orchestral violence that precedes it, “Dumbledore & Voldemort” still manages to outdo the rest. Its passage for unaccompanied fortissimo choir is hair-raising in its intensity. In their sombre, almost liturgical gravitas, Hannigan’s action cues recall Patrick Doyle’s similarly weighty writing for The Goblet of Fire. Yet the sheer elemental force driving Hannigan’s battle music ultimately sets it apart within the Harry Potter canon.
The second major element that gives Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix its own stylistic identity is the sustained sense of nocturnal wonder and mystery that begins to pervade the album after its bright opening stretch – something not really found in the franchise scores of Williams, Doyle, or Soule. Feelings of hushed tension and loneliness run through these intriguingly brooding pieces. At the same time, Hannigan never neglects the requisite sense of magic, making frequent use of harp and celesta. One could argue that the album’s subdued second half moves still further away from any swashbuckling fantasy spirit. Yet it is also here that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix departs most clearly from standard fantasy-score tropes and achieves a surprising degree of intimacy.
This gradual movement into darker territory is reinforced by the soundtrack album’s sequencing, which follows a fairly clear pattern. The first half is stacked with playful, at times frolicking material. The mood then darkens, signalling the encroachment of danger, before exploding in a turbulent closing stretch of rousing battle cues. Hannigan handles that movement from one emotional pole to the other with complete assurance.
In the album’s busier passages, Hannigan adopts the scherzo style so often associated with John Williams. This whirring agility reaches its peak when he applies that format to action music in “Wand Combat”. Combining the celesta-aided sense of mystery heard elsewhere on the album with the brassy force of its battle writing, “Wand Combat” is the most spectacular and virtuosic composition on a score hardly lacking those qualities elsewhere. Imagine “Basket Chase” from Raiders of the Lost Ark transposed into the world of Harry Potter – it really is that good. One may argue that Hannigan is working within a prescribed formula here and elsewhere. But within those parameters, he comes tantalisingly close to perfection.
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