Last night, at the Harry Potter Celebration in Universal Orland Resort, the visitors had the chance to watch a deleted scene from Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them. The scene shows Queenie and Tina performing the Ilvermorny School Song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzN-3vLsJ7Q
The interesting part is the comment made by the presenter after the preview. “Director David Yates and producer David Heyman want to give you this message, pay attention: ‘We love the Ilvermorny School song. Jo wrote the words and Alison did the music.'” This new fact is super interesting because so far, we thought that Alison Sudol was the author of the song.
Past interviews from the film promotion seem to confirm this. In an interview with /Film, David Yates said:
There’s another scene where Alison and Katherine [Waterston] sing the Ilvermorny song, the school song. I asked Alison would she write it, and she wrote this beautiful Ilvermorny school song.
Something similar said Yates to Den of Geek:
There’s a great, lovely song that we got Alison to write, an Ilvermorny song.
In the same interview, Alison Sudol says:
They asked if I’d write a school song for Ilvermorny, and it was just like, ‘Woah.’ That was a song-writing assignment like I’ve never had before, and it was really fun.
The mystery will remain unsolved until Rowling or Sudol clarifies it (both of them have Twitter accounts). It is possible that both Yates and Sudol were referring to the music in the interviews, though “song-writing assignment” sound something more related to the lyrics.
What do you think? Who wrote the song, J.K. Rowling or Alison Sudol?