ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the music of the closing sequences of the Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and Harry Potter films. Here, the foregrounding of non-diegetic music acts as a form of desuture, signalling the end of the film and facilitating the viewer’s smooth return to the real world. Musical and sonic tropes are identified within each franchise that make these transitions even more effective, and the role of credit songs in the Middle-earth films is also interrogated in terms of suture and narratology. Furthermore, instances of musical foregrounding between filmic acts or chapters reveal music acting as both suture and desuture in a dialectical relationship to reorganise viewer attention and create narrative breathing points, enabling different modes of inhabitation and furthering music’s worldbuilding agency.
