Harry Potter and the Magical Divergence.

The Deathly Hallows pair was sorely disappointing. I'm no expert on cinema, but I can say pretty confidently that one of the big problems was the music. I found it weird that the music took a downward turn in Deathly Hallows when I actually liked the music from The Half-Blood Prince. Turns out the production switched composers for the 7th and 8th movies from Nicholas Hooper to some guy named Alexadre Desplat who, in my opinion, should be composing music for daytime soap operas, not epic finales. Nicholas Hooper also did the music in Order of the Phoenix. As I recall, the scores for both movies were okay, but the main reason I liked the music in The Half-Blood Prince was because it was pretty stylistically diverse for a Hollywood movie. I caught emotional tones well outside what I expected to hear and yet, somehow, it worked. During several places, Hooper even seemed to be channeling Aaron Copland. You're probably familiar with Aaron Copland, even if you don't recognize the name.

This is a clip from Copland's "Hoe-Down." His music is used in everything from commercials to firework shows and represents Americana at its purest: The wild west; purple mountains majesty; cowboys; and humble country living. So what is his spirit doing in a movie that couldn't be less about America? And more importantly, why does it work so well?

When we think about a kind of romanticized historical America, we generally think of the point in history starting right around the California gold rush of 1849. People were packing their belongings and following the Oregon Trail to cheap land and a new life. The Civil War ended in 1865, connecting the north and the south, and the first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, connecting the east and the west. America was no longer a cluster of settlements but a sprawled and united nation. The era from about 1850-1880 is the America we hear depicted retroactively in Copland's music and see in countless dumb paintings.

Thomas Edison's light bulb of 1880 changed everything though, and not just in America. Electrical work by Edison and adversary Nikola Tesla ushered in the Technological Revolution around the world and the relatively primitive tools of the Industrial Revolution slowly became replaced with more convenient (and often electrical) devices.

Now notice that the technology present in Harry Potter's wizarding world is consistent with real-world technology up until exactly this point. The Industrial Revolution was a boom in our ability to create and produce while the the Technological Revolution was a boom in our ability to make creation and production cheaper and less demanding of manpower. Yet only "muggles" need manpower to be managed for them in such a way. To a wizard, a lightbulb is illuminated with no greater ease than a candle. Both just require a flick of the wrist, so why even bother with the bulbs? Why buy a Model T when you've already had enchanted brooms for centuries? And who needs telephones when you can just force your head into someone's fireplace via the Floo Network? The Technological Revolution was mostly irrelevant to anyone with magical power, so that seems to be the precise point where the wizarding world and muggle world diverge.

Nicholas Hooper's occasional Copland-inspired music in The Half Blood Prince reminds me of the point immediately before the magic-tech divergence which is why I think it works so well. It puts the listener in the real-world era that he/she can most easily parallel with the world on the screen, making the imaginary world a little more accessible. I found it most obvious during the credit sequence. Listen for a couple minutes:

It's curiously reminiscent of "Hoe-Down," right? The 6th Harry Potter story line is arguably the most emotionally dark story in the series but, as the credits roll, the music transitions and turns the bleak ending into an upbeat harvest festival. It's a bold move but feels strangely okay. My guess is that it's because we already know this to be the veritable soundtrack of 1850-1880—the era that agrees most with the world we were just staring at for 2+ hours. It's an amazingly clever way of engaging the audience, don't you think? However, I've admittedly never heard the magic-technology divergence of 1880 explicitly mentioned anywhere else so I can't tell for sure if Hooper consciously wrote a masterfully manipulative score around it or if he just got lucky.

What's most interesting is that even though I haven't seen this idea discussed, the time period associated with the magic-tech split is definitely not limited to the Potter-verse. In all of the typical fantasy worlds I'm familiar with, any technology invented in the real world past about 1880 is represented by something magical, if at all. Even quintessential fantasy universes that seem more aligned with late Medieval/early Renaissance Europe often have more recent inventions like flint-lock pistols or steam-powered trains. For example, the game, World of Warcraft, has an entire class of items that can be "engineered" by players but even the most advanced of these items are still powered by either gears and cranks, steam, or 19th-century-style combustion engines. That's apparently where the line is drawn and it's fascinating to me that literally different universes can agree across all media about where their technological limitations are. Are these universes just complying with decisions made by the forefathers of fantasy or has this paradigm stabilized over time to its most sensical state?

(An "advanced" gun from WoW. Basically a decorated 18th-century blunderbuss with a steam pressure chamber up top and presumably some kind of mystic gem housed above the trigger.)

And how aware was Nicholas Hooper to all this when he wrote the 6th Harry Potter Score? Either way, his music felt appropriate. I'm curious how other countries responded to it though. Even today, we Americans hear Copland's music used repeatedly in the context of historic U.S. patriotism so referencing his musical nationalism brings us back to the magic-tech divergence pretty easily. But Copland was only one of many composers (and one of the later ones at that) in an era when music honoring one's home country was a worldwide trend. 1850-1880 sounds way different for, say, Spain than it does for America. Try watching those credits again or imagining your favorite Half-Blood Prince scene, but this time mute it and play this in the background:

¡Harry Potter y el Misterio del Príncipe!
...No?
Oh well...