Music really wasn't as much of an element in the Harry Potter books because it was not the kind of thing with a soundtrack ... books usually aren't, of course. You had the book 6 Christmas concert on the wireless by Celistina Warbeck, and you had the Weird Sisters play the Yule Ball, and while I like the latter because I think what JKR heard and put on the page would remind me of a certain strain of Tom Waits's (while the ghostly musical saws in book 2 might remind me of other strains of Waits), their music was never a central thing (and in my opinion, with what they did with "wizard kids are cool too" with the pop-punk/pop-goth thing in the movie ... yeah whatever, they might as well not have put anything in).
I do think JKR likes music as magical but that she sees it as a deeper form of magic that is simply beyond the scope of the type of work she is writing. When Dumbledore, at the start of term feast one year, personally directs the last few lines of Fred and George's funeral dirge version of the school song and then says something to the effect of "ah, music, a magic deeper than anything we do here," that's a sort of lighthearted mention of it. A more serious allusion is that Snape's incantation in healing Draco from Harry's use of the sectum sempra spell in book 6 is almost like a song.
But, in Harry Potter, even those elements are just occasional, and a book is not something in which you really experience a soundtrack or musical quality. And the score of the movies was all orchestral with no real soundtrack (unless you count the "weird sisters" crap in movie 4, which, as I said, you shouldn't). In Fantastic beasts, while that jazzy bit is not a distinct isolated song, especially not with lyrics, as it is used in the film, I would still say that it has a much stronger and more unique presence than any of the music in the Harry Potter series of films.
I think this is because, in Harry Potter, the score always matched the action and the emotion incited in the audience by the action, as is the usual function in action and drama. But in Fantastic Beasts, that jazzy bit hooks to the setting itself ... the New York City street in the 1920s. Sound and music are powerful things in how they hook in to the psyche, and I think they did a wonderful job of using it to give a distinctive and gripping feel to the street. As I said, especially with the re-intro of it after the obliviation rain, it's "back to the bustle and the hustle."
I can't really put the the core of this "street thing" into words, but I would also compare it to the way that, for instance, not with music but with other elements, Chaim Potok managed to give you the smell and the feel on the skin (often sweaty summer stickiness) of the Brooklyn streets. Beyond that, maybe the best I could do to describe what I am talking about is to put my own musical tag on the New York I know from eight years living there recently, and that would be Balkan Beat Box, whom I saw four or five times at Webster Hall on 11th St between 3rd and 4th aves (just south of Union Square): a mix of Mid-Eastern/Eastern Euro world beat with electronica and hyped up dance elements ... and a lead singer who pretty much owned the stage (they adapted one of their songs to basically keep chant "jump" as their opener, and I swear you could feel the floor shake).
My main point in all this has been just to say I think the film makers (whoever was responsible for that music being chosen etc) have included music in a cool way that actually fleshes out the material physical setting of the story, not just the action and emotion of it. I'm excited to see what they choose for Paris in whichever of the upcoming films is supposed to be set there. I'd love to see the skin on the elements of the 5-film chiasm be textured with a different musical feel for a succession of cities.
"Jo Logic":
A Little Bit of Larger
Theoretical Consideration
Actually, that bit about the Weird Sisters above and this whole thing kind of brings to mind a broader point of JKR's artistry, and that is, to quote a Tom Wait's title, "that feel": the way she creates a feel, a texture. The way she described the band in Goblet of Fire from just an account of the instruments being brought on stage and a few musical types mentioned (waltz etc) and mentioning how people were dancing (Fred and Alicia so energetically, Hagrid and Maxime cutting a wide swath etc) gave a distinct impression of feel with minimal elaboration. Personally, for me, the Weird Sisters are totally Tom Wait's bohemian mix of jazz instrumentation and structure with sonic experimentation (as well as some of his earlier straight up raspy jazz) ... for some reason, it just seems to me that the Weird Sisters would be down with phrases like "pawnshop marimba" and titles like "Swordfish Trombone"(and the bass, percussion, and marimba of the latter are definitely Weird Sisters material ... and, seriously, to what other kind of music could Mad Eye Moody dance?).
I would put this under what Steve Vander Ark discussed in his 2006 talk at Lumos as "Jo Logic." The first half of his talk, "Wizard Logic," was pretty amazing, but that is another discussion. What he means by "Jo Logic" is her ability to describe and give a feel for something. He showed a map he drew of the Hogwarts grounds he drew early on from her descriptions and then the map she actually released, and they were pretty much identical, and this was possible (he argued) because of her power of description in the books themselves.
He had also tracked out, he was pretty sure, the location of Hogsmeade station. By this, he meant that he figured there was someplace that she had been or seen that had given her the idea and the feel for the Hogsmeade/Hogwarts area. So, he applied some actual logic and research skill to it (like figuring it would be one of the side lines of the rail system, maybe even defunct, rather than one of the main lines, and basing a few other search criteria on a few text details) and found Rannoch Station, the stop for Rannoch Moor on a sideline (it may be a terminus, I'm not sure). He showed a picture of Rannoch Station and one of Hogsmeade station from the first movie, and they are practically identical. There was a neat bit too about how the placard warning visitors of the dangers of deceptively shifting scenery on the nearby moor itself sounds a lot like the feel of Hogwarts castle with the shifting architecture described in the first book (some stairways that led someplace different on Thursdays, doors that are really walls and walls that are actually doors, etc.)
The point of all that is not that this is some new evidence that proves some theory or other. The point is artistry. It's very likely that she visited Rannoch at some point (it's in Scotland) and that it stuck in her mind as the texture she wanted for Hogsmeade, but the point is that she was able to carry it through in descriptions (if not Rannoch, there is still probably some real place she visited that gripped her imagination texture-wise and that she was able to carry through texture-wise in her books).
Just as with the map of the grounds, she carries through on the realism of detail in such a way that an interpreter (be it Vander Ark drawing a map or Chris Columbus setting a stage for the station) can construct something very close to what was in JRK's head (as likely in the similarity between a real world train station and an independent film adaptation of a fictional train station, or nigh-on-proven by the similarity of Vander Ark's map to Rowling's own).
And this is what I think of the little jazzy piece in Fantastic Beasts: it adds texture in a way that is similar to JKR's own prowess for conveying texture in written works. Even though my experience of midtown and other sections of town are recent and not 1920s, that jazzy bit still makes me able to smell that hotdog Tina's eating when we meet her and the classic NYC pretzel sold from a lot of the same carts.
No comments:
Post a Comment