The Music of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings

Reviews / Votes

"Full of perceptive analysis and drawing on original interviews with relevant practitioners, Daniel White's rewarding study explores how music and sound take us 'there and back again' - time and again - into and out of the worlds of fantasy cinema. Focusing on the crucial role of music in the screen adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth and J.K. Rowling's Wizarding World, White addresses the process of worldbuilding and how audiences are encouraged to enter into and inhabit these screen worlds via their scores and then return to and reconstruct them beyond the cinema - whether in theme parks, stage productions, video games, fan projects or our daily lives. Steeped in the lore of his case studies and informed by relevant theory, White considers the importance of title sequences and closing credits, the use of leitmotif and song in such a way that, although delving deep into fantasy, the ideas developed within The Music of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings: Sounds of Home in the Fantasy Franchise can be applied fruitfully to other franchises or genres in order to enhance our understanding of how music enables us to reside within and consume the worlds presented to us on film."

David Butler, Senior Lecturer in Drama and Film Studies, University of Manchester, author of Fantasy Cinema: Impossible Worlds on Screen (2009).