Joanne Wheeler is a big enough Harry Potter fan to have his picture on her locker in Crouse College.

But even Wheeler, a junior music education major, didn’t hear about tonight’s event with Patrick Doyle, who composed the film score for ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,’ until a friend saw it announced on a fan Web page.

‘She sent me a Facebook message because she knows I love Harry Potter as much as she does,’ Wheeler said.

The news that the award-winning score composer was coming to Syracuse University made it to the top of international fan pages over the weekend, but many SU students are still unaware about the event.

The Bandier Program for Music and the Entertainment Industries will be hosting Doyle for the next two days. Doyle will speak to individual film, music and composition classes, and will also take part in a free, public screening of ‘Goblet of Fire,’ the fourth book of the Harry Potter series at 4 p.m. today in Grant Auditorium.

A question and answer session will follow at 6:45 p.m. and continue until 8 p.m.

Doyle’s scores have appeared in several major motion pictures including ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary.’ He earned two Academy Award nominations for best original dramatic score; one for ‘Hamlet’ and the other for ‘Sense and Sensibility.’

David Rezak, director of the Bandier Program, expected a few ‘Harry Potter aficionados’ to be interested in the event. That’s part of the reason he made this afternoon’s free screening and question and answer session open to the public.

‘My intention is to share,’ he said. ‘Scholarship in Action means being interactive with our community whether locally or globally, and we want to share what we’re learning up on our hill with everybody.’

He said he recognized that a film composer such as Doyle would appeal to film majors at the College of Visual and Performing Arts as well as television, radio and film majors at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Doyle’s experience with popular films sets him apart from other guests of the music school.

‘We get a lot of people who are big in their fields,’ said Rosie Rion, a junior cello performance major, ‘but no one who’s big to everybody.’

So she said she was surprised that she had heard so little about the event. Rion said that an announcement was made in one of her seminars, but that no one explained who Doyle was and why he was significant.

‘Oddly enough, they didn’t advertise it in the music school at all,’ she said. ‘No one caught on to what a big deal it was.’

Stefan Schuck, a junior music composition major, knew exactly how big a deal it was – for him anyway. He saw Doyle’s visit listed on one of his syllabi, but didn’t know about the screening event until yesterday. Though he read a few of the Harry Potter books, as a student hoping to go into film composition, he said he looks forward to hearing about Doyle’s process most.

‘I found it interesting how he played with themes from the first movies,’ Schuck said.

Rachel Pavlas, a sophomore in the Bandier Program, echoes Schuck’s sentiments about the event. If it weren’t a class requirement, she said she wouldn’t go just to see the movie again, but the question and answer session piques her interest. She just doesn’t know who else knows about it.

‘I don’t know if many people know about it,’ she said. ‘I haven’t talked to anyone outside (the Bandier Program) who’s going.’

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Published on February 9, 2009 at 12:00 pm