Harry Potter's score is a masterpiece in orchestral writing and one of the things
that really sets John Williams apart is how skillfully he handles the woodwind section.
Even if you don't read music you can probably tell from a glance that this is on another level.
I studied the orchestral score to Hedwig's Theme from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's
Stone and will show you five ways that John Williams uses the woodwind section
in that piece to add air and color and energy to his orchestral writing.
I've worked with a lot of student composers who say that the woodwinds are the hardest
section to write for, mostly because they don't really know what to do with those instruments.
Then they look at something like this from John Williams and it feels just unattainable.
Let's start from the most straightforward
techniques and we'll work our way up in complexity.
Number one: doubling other instruments
Te woodwind section is actually made up of four different families:
flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons.
These different instruments all have distinct colors and timbres,
so they can be used to add different flavors to other instruments of the orchestra.
For example, this melody on the violins is doubled at the unison with the flute.
The flute is almost more felt than heard but it
adds some air and a little bit of shine to that violin part.
Here the English horn is in unison with four French horns.
The greater number of French horns obviously dominates the sound,
but the English horn has a nasal and biting quality that adds a little bit of extra grit.
It's this attention to the fine tuning of timbre that sets great music apart.
We get a similar thing with the trumpets and oboes here.
The trumpets are just naturally louder instruments,
so for the most part they just cover up the oboes.
But those oboes are adding just a little bit of extra punch and bite.
Method number two: enhancing other instruments
In all those previous examples the woodwind was playing the exact same pitch as the instrument
it was supporting, but they can also play in other octaves or with slightly different lines.
Here the oboes are being used an octave above the French horns, but only every other bar.
If you look at the French horn part you can see there's an accent written there,
so Williams's intention is that that second part of the phrase is louder and more pronounced.
By saving those oboes only for the second part he's deliberately using his orchestration
to support what he wants to express.
Here we have an example of the heterophonic texture,
which is something I talked about in an older video.
Basically this is where you have multiple versions of the same melody playing at the same time.
Here the trumpets are so loud that they take our focus as the main sound.
The woodwinds are given a variation of the
same line where some notes get skipped and some are ornamented.
The combined result is a texture that feels much
more active and playful than the melody by itself would be.
Method three: working as a group
The woodwinds can also of course function as their own independent unit.
In this part the woodwinds are the only instruments playing, handling the melody,
rhythm, and chords on their own in a chordal texture.
Of course you don't have to make all your other instruments stop playing,
but the fact that John Williams does do that here really helps to bring out the unique color of the
wind section and sets up a nice contrast compared to the other parts of the piece.
Method 4: adding energy and excitement
The woodwinds are very agile and nimble, which means they
can play very fast moving parts that add those fine grains of texture and energy.
So here when the entire orchestra plays this half note the winds give it an extra shake
with a trill, and when they double this line in the horns and violins
they also use trills to give it a little extra flair.
By putting the trills only in the winds he's able
to add vibration without making it a foreground feature of the sound.
Runs are also something that woodwinds are famous for, but if you haven't written them before you
might wonder how you possibly know if you should use septuplets or quintuplets or whatever else.
The musical math is actually pretty simple.
In this run he wants to hit the high G as his target.
Musicians practice scales their entire lives, so to make this easy to play he just makes it a g
minor scale and that just happens to have seven notes before it hits the G again on the beat.
The same thing is going on here where he starts a fourth plus an octave below the target note.
He's not thinking "How can I fit ten notes into this space?"
He's thinking "I want to have a nice long run up into that note. What's an easy note
to start on? The fourth below. How many notes does that take? Ten."
Method five: creating background textures
It turns out that those complex background textures also follow a similar idea.
These clarinets behind the trumpet and violin melody are playing arpeggios.
Arpeggios are a lot like scales: something musicians spend their entire lives playing
and are almost effortless to play when presented in a pretty straightforward way.
So this background part with these tiny little notes in these 10 and 11 tuplets, whatever you
even call those, is almost entirely arpeggios with a few scalar steps on the downbeats.
It looks really busy and complex but it's actually a pretty straightforward way to
get a shimmering and moving background part, because it's mostly just arpeggios!
And then the only reason it's spaced out like
this is to give the real human players a chance to breathe.
The woodwinds add so much color and life to orchestral music,
but the backbone of the orchestra is the strings.
If you really want to write music that is powerful
and expressive that is the first section that you need to master.
This video here will walk you through step by step
how to build a huge and cinematic sound with the string section.
Thanks for watching, I will see you in the next one!