Home › Music

Music

The music of HBO’s Harry Potter is composed by Hans Zimmer with Kara Talve and Anže Rozman, of Bleeding Fingers Music. Whether John Williams’s “Hedwig’s Theme”, the music everyone knows from the films, will be heard in the series has not been confirmed. This page collects what is known, and will be updated when the music is released.

The composers

Hans Zimmer is the composer of The Lion King, Gladiator, Interstellar and the Dune films. Kara Talve and Anže Rozman worked together on the music of the documentary series Prehistoric Planet. Announcing the news, the three composers said that the music of Harry Potter is “a touch point for composers everywhere”, and that they want to honour that legacy while reimagining its sound for a long series [HarryPotter.com].

Will Hedwig’s Theme be in the series?

Nobody knows yet. In September 2026, Zimmer told Collider: “I can’t write like John Williams.” He said he would try to stay as far away from it as possible and be original, as he did with Man of Steel, where he did not use Williams’s Superman theme.

Several sites took this to mean that Hedwig’s Theme has been dropped, but that is not what Zimmer said, and neither HBO nor the showrunner, Francesca Gardiner, has said anything about it. Many fans expect that the theme could still appear, at least as a short quotation.

The music of the teasers

Neither of the two teasers, released in March and September 2026, uses Hedwig’s Theme, and according to the official site none of Zimmer’s music for the series has been heard in them yet [ComicBook.com]. The music in trailers is often written specially for them, or taken from music libraries, and no official source has named the pieces. The absence of Hedwig’s Theme was one of the most common fan complaints about the first teaser.

See the trailers, with a scene-by-scene guide to the first and second teasers.

Music in the book

There is music in Philosopher’s Stone too. At the start-of-term feast, Dumbledore has the whole school sing the Hogwarts song, each to a tune of their choice, so that everyone finishes at a different time, and Fred and George last, to a slow funeral march (ch. 7). The films never showed it. Fluffy falls asleep to music: Hagrid tells Harry that you only have to play it some music (ch. 16), and Quirrell leaves a harp by the trapdoor. Harry gets Fluffy to sleep by playing the flute Hagrid carved for him at Christmas.

See also the creative team and the FAQ.