Tag 'hp'

Click to play (1 min 42 sec)

Also on YouTube.

Click to play (1 min 51 sec)

Also available on YouTube.

For comparison, you can listen to the theme in piano from the Harry Potter Septet. This section is inspired by Dumbledore's speech at the end of Book 4, and spans from the theme entrance to the end of the movement.

Click to play (3 min 21 sec)

Click to play (1 min 43 sec)

Also available on YouTube.

Vi Hart, a Stony Brook University senior music major, has been wild about Harry since she was about the same age as the adolescent wizard in J.K. Rowling's first novel, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.” Hart will conduct the premiere of the “Harry Potter Septet” she composed for string quartet, violin, piano and two female voices. It's based on all seven Rowling books in the series.

The book that launched a thousand marketing schemes has now spawned a classical chamber piece, composed by a Stony Brook music major with a flair for mathematical wizardry. The Harry Potter Septet [is] an ambitious but accessible composition for string quartet, piano, and two female voices... It's the work of multi-talented senior Vi Hart, whose obsession with J.K. Rowling's adolescent sorcerer dates back to the sixth grade.

“I'm a composer and I've been composing for as long as I can remember. I got inspired last year by none other than the Harry Potter series. The project started off as a cute idea and then I just ran with it. It took about 14 months. But I completed a septet—originally 2 hours of music, which I've cut down to one and one-half hours.”

“I think there's definitely a connection [between music and mathematics]. Maybe I'm biased because those are the two things I know how to do, so they're the only things I know how to see connections between. They're similar in that sense of discovery, having things fit together. When I'm composing a piece, I often feel that I know what has to come next and what makes sense. Certain notes work and other notes don't work. If you can figure it all out and put it together, you end up with a beautiful piece. Mathematics is often the same way where you're on this trip of discovery. Certain things work, certain things don't. And when you're done, you have something beautiful, elegant.”