Legacy Themes: Tracking the Musical Register(s) of the Wizarding World in Hogwarts Legacy

Description

Perhaps the most prominent addition to the Wizarding World in over a decade, Hogwarts Legacy was released in 2023 amidst both great anticipation and calls for a boycott (as a result of J.K. Rowling’s involvement) but having sold over 34 million units it stands as one of the best-selling videogames of all time. As an addition to one of the world’s most cherished fantasy franchises the weight of expectation fell not only on the game’s narrative, characters, mechanics and crucially its depiction of the franchise’s primary homespace, but also on the music, which has played a key worldbuilding role in all other franchise media. A team of three named composers (plus other composers and sound designers) worked on the score, which is notable not only through its collaborative development, but also through the release of two soundtracks in advance of the game’s release, as well as a seven-minute behind-the-scenes featurette on the music, which was released several months before the game and seeks explicitly to put fans at ease by linking the scores to existing franchise music.

This paper analyses the music of Hogwarts Legacy, hearing it as an extension of various parts of the franchise’s existing musical world (largely those composed by John Williams). Timbral, motivic, harmonic and other gestural similarities render Hogwarts Legacy a particularly useful site for the application of notions of musical register (after Farmer and Summers, 2023) by examining how the Legacy composers sought to legitimise their addition by using familiar musical language and devices. The paper also tracks some of the most prominent Legacy cues elsewhere in the franchise including their use in the Amazon series Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking.

Period	15 Jul 2026
Event title	MSMI 20th Anniversary / Sound on Screen Annual Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Manchester, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International