Film Music

John Powell in his score for How To Train Your Dragon , like Howard Shore, uses a Wagnerian Leitmotif style of composition, whereby the things in the film are represented by individual Leitmotif's which can be rearranged and harmonized and developed to help tell the story in the movie. In this analysis, instead of focusing on an individual track and its use of leitmotifs as I did in my previous post on The Lord of the Rings, I will be looking at a few of the themes within the movie and how they evolve over the course of the film to tell the story. I specifically want to track the leitmotif's for Hiccup and Toothless and the Vikings. This is because, as I will show, those Viking themes, and Toothless' leitmotif are theoretically connected to Hiccup, and elucidate the tension within his character throughout the movie. Here is a transcription of almost all the musical moments mentioned in this blogpost: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YpLprPtnskUw4lfA1jw44AZkEg1SF74G/view?usp...

"Journey to the Grey Havens" is the nearly the end of the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and as such features a number of recalled themes all reaching their natural conclusions. As a preface to this it should be noted that Douglas Adams wrote a magnificent book called The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films: A Comprehensive Account of Howard Shore's Scores in which he identifies all the different leitmotifs or musical representations of things within the narrative, and does a track by track analysis. My analysis will use his names by and large for different leitmotifs, and will occasionally cite his insights on the score. This blogpost will look at the the track: "Journey to the Grey Havens" and its different leitmotifs and how the score tells the story of the scene. Follow along with the music and with this transcription that I did: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cVHzlYMQbx_C5Vx_Xv-5reNLrNr3aaIJ/view?usp=sharing The track opens with a new piece ...