Harry Potter movie theme music played on water-filled wine glasses. For this, you need glass—metals and polymers just don’t have the chops. Credit: YouTube.
J.K. Rowling published the first of the Harry Potter books in 1997 and an entire generation spent the next decade reading the seven volumes of the story as they were released one-by-one. The story of the boy wizard’s epic battle of good versus evil, his growing up and his friendships continues to delight in a series of movies.
Movie music, when done well, conjures up the entire story with just a few bars of music. Like an aural “floo powder,” the rest of the piece transports us magically into the story. For me, movie music brings back my reactions to the story, even more than it does the story’s plot lines.
This video offers an amazing rendition of the HP movies’ theme music played on wine glasses. The Scholarly Kitchen’s Kent Anderson explains that wine-glasses-as-musical-instruments are “friction idiophones,” as are other nontraditional music-generating objects, like saws. One wonders, too, “How did they figure out how to do this?”
The generation whose childhood common cultural experience is Harry Potter was born in the late 1980s and early 90s. Most of them are now “of age,” and I cannot help but wonder how this would sound if the glasses were filled with chardonnay rather than water.
Enjoyamus!