The company of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Lyric Theatre in New York.
Matthew Murphy
Imogen Heap created 100 music cues for the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the latest installment in J.K. Rowling’s universe, which tells the story of a grown-up Harry and his son. The show, split into two segments and clocking in at five hours, is running in London and on Broadway. On Nov. 2, the 40-year-old Heap will release The Music of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a further evolution of her work for the stage. Free of dialogue and sound effects, the 42 tracks are divided into four suites representing the different acts, for which she tapped into “different sound worlds.”
Now on her Mycelia World Tour, where she’s performing and spreading the word about her blockchain technology, Heap is still finding herself in the world of Potter — she’s calling from “a little odd cupboard in a hotel in a stairwell that used to be an old school” in Amsterdam. She tells Billboard about composing Potter and making her album — without revealing too much of the behind-the-scenes magic, of course.
How did you get involved with Cursed Child?
[Movement Director Steven Hoggett and I have] known each other for many years. When he and and [director] John Tiffany were workshopping in the early days, they threw in a lot of my music that a lot of people don’t know and it seemed to magically fit with what was going on in the workshop space.
What was the important thing you learned in adapting to this new medium of composing?
I learned not to be too precious, and that’s something I find hard in my own environment where I’m the only one in the studio, the only one making the sound, the only one calling the shots. And it’s just the total opposite of that. You’ve got to give in if someone thinks, “You know what, that is not working.” It might be your favorite, favorite thing. And you’ve got to learn to get the work done. There are so many cues. 100 cues of music. Even though we still had months of time, workshopping and rehearsal, it was only just enough time. Even then I was up to 11 or 12 at night in the theater trying to get it ready for the opening night.
Is there something that you found sonically that really conveys magic?
There’s this beautiful instrument called a Marxophone. And it has little metal hammers that you play, and it kind of bounces on the strings. There’s something quite light and delicate about it but it’s also slightly out of tune, it’s always slightly not perfect. There’s certain types of sounds that I always use in my music that were really really coming more to life here. I used a lot of harmonic ponticello on the strings — it’s when you play not in the most resonant part of the strings around the body, but around the bridge. It gives it a little wispy, eerie [sound]. And then just tons of vocals. Loads and loads and loads and lots of breath. But sometimes you don’t know whether something is a drone or a sort of violin or a voice. It’s just this living sound.
The track “Edge of the Forest” is an adaptation of an arrangement of “Hide and Seek,” which is one of your most recognizable songs. How did you think about recontextualizing it?
I can’t claim the credit for that one. Steven and the team had been discussing this. There was nowhere else in the whole play where there’s any lyrics. All of the vocals are all vocalizations. There are all kind of textures and rhythms, but this is the only time there was going to be a lyric. I actually really love that the only time you don’t hear my voice is when somebody’s singing my song. We ended up getting the London Contemporary Voices choir to do [the song].
Do you have any specific examples of how you melded a pre-existing song into the show?
Every cue has a very different approach. Sometimes it might just literally be one vocal sound, one piano key, or one drum beat. And sometimes there would be four or five songs mixed together. I was limited in time and I had to record everything literally from the theater seat. So when everyone went out to lunch or everyone left in the evening I’d sing some vocals directly into my computer and then I would work away with those. Quite a lot of the vocalizations were all done in the theater when no one was there or when I’d ask people to be quiet. And then it’s really a case of working very much in tandem with my friend and assistant Alexis Michallek. I could not have done it without him. He was basically in my home studio and I was just like, “Right I need this, this, and this,” and he’d like go into my back catalog and pull out the old session and try to make it work and quickly extract all the stems so that then I could work with that in a program called Ableton.
I also had a secret weapon which, as if by magic, had only been just invented, like literally finished about a week before. A company called Soniccouture had come into my studio and we’d recorded my mbira, my Marxophone, my cello, my drum kit, my body percussion, loads of vocals from me and they developed virtual instruments.
We got all these weird instruments that I love and the idea was that I’d be able to take that on tour with me and be able to play those instruments and those sounds without having to take all the instruments. When I got the Harry Potter gig it was like this perfect thing that I needed because I could be in the theater seat with all my signature sounds at my fingertips.
Was there any particular moment that was a challenge?
The one I find the most hard was for a long montage in the beginning, because it’s the longest cue, about 10 minutes long. Essentially, a lot of it comes from a song called “Lifeline” and you can only squeeze so much out of the song. That one I had to generate quite a lot of new music for very quickly and it was constantly changing because it was a montage. To try figure out what of the ten minutes to put into the album was quite hard as well.
They are two very different things. The stage production is two-and-a-half hours worth of over 100 cues, so on the album it was a challenge of how to make the four acts an enjoyable listening experience without it sounding too stop-start or too long. It was like a puzzle to try to get 15 or 20 cues into one 20 minute piece of music so we could fit it all on a CD, but also not be bombarded by too much change in one listen. It took me longer to do the album than to do the music.
Now that your work on Potter is done, you’re in Amsterdam for your Mycelia Tour. Can you talk about how you’re using blockchain technology on tour?
I became aware of this technology four years ago, and I got greatly inspired by what impact it could have in the music ecosystem. Essentially, we’re talking about simplifying payments, simplifying data, allowing people to be acknowledged for the work they’ve done, and to be visualized, to put music makers on the map.
What I’m doing is, I realize there’s a missing layer in the music industry and it’s become so apparent. I couldn’t wait any longer and I wasn’t seeing anyone else do it so I thought, “Dammit, I’m going to start something.” What we’ve developed is something called the Creative Passport, and it’s an identity for music makers so that we can host and own our own data, and so that we can pick and choose the services that we might use and we might see are flourishing.
We’re going around the world trying to convince music makers that this is something they should download in December, when it’s going to be ready, to put ourselves on the map and show how many many many many potentially millions we are. We literally must be over 100 million music makers on the planet and if we can mobilize and own our data and show that we’re here then unimaginable good can come from that.
This article originally appeared in the Nov. 3 issue of Billboard.