MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer James Horner died on June 22, 2015, when the single-engine S-312 Tucano aircraft he was piloting crashed in the Los Padres National Forest near Santa Barbara, California. He was 61.

One of the most successful and recognizable film composers of his generation, Horner wrote music for more than 100 films during a career spanning almost four decades, including Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Aliens, Field of Dreams, Glory, Braveheart, Apollo 13, Titanic, A Beautiful Mind and Avatar. His combination of sweeping melody, unusual instrumental colors, electronics and powerful orchestral writing made him one of Hollywood’s dominant musical voices of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.

James Roy Horner was born in Los Angeles on August 14, 1953, the son of Austrian-born production designer and director Harry Horner and his wife Joan. His father enjoyed a distinguished Hollywood career of his own, winning Academy Awards for his art direction on The Heiress and The Hustler. James began playing piano at the age of five and spent part of his youth in England, studying at London’s Royal College of Music. He subsequently returned to California, studied music at USC and continued his graduate studies at UCLA, where he also taught music theory. Initially intending to pursue a career in concert music and academia, Horner discovered film scoring after composing for student productions at the American Film Institute.

Like many important Hollywood filmmakers of his generation, Horner received his first professional opportunities from Roger Corman. His early assignments included The Lady in Red, Humanoids from the Deep and Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), the latter allowing him to write an ambitious orchestral science-fiction score on an extremely limited budget. The production also brought him into contact with future director James Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd, beginning relationships that would become enormously significant later in his career.

Horner’s breakthrough came at the age of 28 with Nicholas Meyer’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). Unable to afford Jerry Goldsmith, who had scored the first Star Trek film, Paramount turned to the young Horner, who responded with a vigorous, nautical-influenced adventure score built around memorable themes for the Enterprise and Khan. Its success immediately elevated him into the front rank of Hollywood composers. He returned for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), while other early successes included Walter Hill’s 48 Hrs. (1982), the lavish fantasy Krull (1983), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) and Cocoon (1985).

His first collaboration with James Cameron, Aliens (1986), was famously difficult, with Horner forced to write and record under severe time pressure as the film continued to be edited. Nevertheless, the resulting combination of pounding action music, dissonant orchestral effects and moments of lyrical warmth earned him his first Academy Award nomination. The same year he scored Don Bluth’s animated An American Tail and co-wrote “Somewhere Out There” with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, earning a second Oscar nomination and one of the biggest popular songs associated with an animated film of the period.

By the end of the 1980s Horner had established an unmistakable musical personality. The Land Before Time (1988) and Willow (1988) displayed his gift for large-scale fantasy and adventure, while Field of Dreams (1989) was unusually restrained, blending orchestra, electronics, piano and panpipes into an atmosphere of nostalgia and mystery. Edward Zwick’s Glory (1989), meanwhile, combined orchestra, percussion and the Boys Choir of Harlem in one of Horner’s most emotionally overwhelming scores. Field of Dreams brought him another Academy Award nomination.

The 1990s represented perhaps Horner’s most extraordinary period of productivity. He worked on The Rocketeer, Patriot Games, The Pelican Brief, The Man Without a Face, Legends of the Fall, Jumanji, Ransom and numerous others, sometimes completing several major scores in a single year. His collaborations with Ron Howard became especially important, beginning with Cocoon and continuing through Willow, Apollo 13, Ransom, A Beautiful Mind and The Missing. Apollo 13 (1995), with its soaring trumpet writing, chorus and mixture of patriotic grandeur and spiritual awe, earned Horner another Oscar nomination. Remarkably, that same year he was nominated again for Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.

Braveheart became one of Horner’s defining works. Rather than attempting strict historical authenticity, he created a romantic musical image of Scotland using orchestra, choir, uilleann pipes, whistles and percussion. Its expansive love theme and intensely emotional battle and funeral music became enormously popular, and the score established many of the Celtic colors that audiences would subsequently associate with Horner’s music.

His greatest commercial triumph came when he reunited with Cameron for Titanic (1997). Despite their difficult experience on Aliens, the two found an extraordinary musical language for the film, with Horner combining orchestra, synthesizers, wordless vocals and Celtic instrumentation to provide both intimacy and epic scale. The soundtrack became an international phenomenon, selling tens of millions of copies, while “My Heart Will Go On,” written by Horner with lyricist Will Jennings and performed by Céline Dion, became one of the most successful film songs ever recorded. Horner won Academy Awards for both Best Original Dramatic Score and Best Original Song, as well as Golden Globes and Grammys.

His success continued after the turn of the millennium. Horner scored The Perfect Storm (2000), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), Enemy at the Gates (2001), A Beautiful Mind (2001), The Four Feathers (2002), House of Sand and Fog (2003), The New World (2005), Apocalypto (2006) and The Amazing Spider-Man (2012). His work for A Beautiful Mind and House of Sand and Fog produced further Oscar nominations, with both scores demonstrating his increasingly sophisticated use of voices, electronics and unusual solo instruments.

Horner reunited with Cameron once more for Avatar (2009), spending almost two years developing the musical world of Pandora and collaborating with ethnomusicologist Wanda Bryant to create an imagined musical culture. The enormous score combined orchestra, chorus, electronics, percussion and invented vocal techniques, and brought Horner his tenth and final Academy Award nomination.

Although Horner was sometimes criticized for repeating his own musical ideas and drawing conspicuously on classical composers, his scores possessed an emotional directness that made them immediately identifiable. His frequent use of Celtic instruments, shakuhachi, children’s voices, unusual percussion and recurring four-note motifs became part of his musical vocabulary. More importantly, he understood instinctively how music could supply a film with emotional weight. Whether writing the melancholy Americana of Field of Dreams, the romantic sweep of Legends of the Fall, the martial tragedy of Glory or the oceanic grandeur of Titanic, Horner was rarely afraid of sincerity.

In addition to his film work, Horner continued composing for the concert hall. His works included Spectral Shimmers, the double concerto Pas de Deux for violin and cello, premiered in Liverpool in 2014, and Collage, a concerto for four horns premiered in London in 2015. He also wrote the music accompanying the CBS Evening News during Katie Couric’s tenure, composed for the Horsemen P-51 Aerobatic Team, and scored the National Geographic documentary Living in the Age of Airplanes. Aviation was one of his great passions; he was an experienced pilot and owned several aircraft.

At the time of his death Horner had completed music for Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Wolf Totem, Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw and the Chilean mining drama The 33. A final surprise emerged after his death when it was revealed that he had already begun composing themes for Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven, based only on the screenplay. His longtime collaborator Simon Franglen and Horner’s musical team subsequently developed that material into the finished 2016 score, providing a poignant posthumous conclusion to his career.

Horner received ten Academy Award nominations, winning twice for Titanic, along with six Grammy Awards and two Golden Globes. He is survived by his wife Sara and their daughters Emily and Becky.

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On a more personal note, I wrote this on my Facebook page the day Horner died, offering some more intimate reflections on his life and what he meant to me, and I thought it would be appropriate to also share them here:

I didn’t know James Horner. We weren’t friends. We didn’t spend any time together. He may have had some vague recognition of my name, from having maybe read a review of mine once, or something like that, but beyond that I’m certain he didn’t know me. I met him just once, when he was the guest at a screening of The Mission at the Skirball Center here in Los Angeles in August 2007. Jon Burlingame interviewed him on stage about his life and career, and the fact that his own favorite score was Morricone’s score for that film. My entire personal interaction with him lasted around 3 minutes, as the Q&A ended: a shake of the hand, a brief comment about how much I loved his work, him saying thank you, me asking him to sign my Legends of the Fall CD, and asking him to pose for a photo, taking said photo, and shaking hands again as he turned to greet someone else.

For him, the interaction was likely instantly forgettable, just another hand shaken amongst many hands. For me, considering today’s utterly devastating news that James Horner was killed in a plane crash this morning, it is now the only personal memory I will ever have of the man who changed my life more than he could possibly imagine.

I apologize upfront for making this all about me. Clearly his family, his daughters, and his friends are the ones who are grieving the most right now. They have lost a father, and a brother, and I can’t even begin to understand what they must be going through. I’ve been reading Facebook posts and comments from other composers, musicians, colleagues in the film music industry, who knew him well, worked with him, and collaborated with him on some of his most amazing works, and obviously their grief is different to mine. But this is something I need to write, just for myself, to come to terms with this as it unfolds in my head. I have all these emotions spilling out of me right now, and I need to write them down.

James Horner could never have known what an impact his music would have on a young kid in England when he wrote Krull, and Star Trek II, and Cocoon, and Willow, the scores which first planted the seeds of what film music was, and how it made me feel. Film music was always present in my life; I already had, and continue to have, an affinity for John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith and John Barry, but the deep emotional quality of Horner’s music touched my soul in a way that no other music ever has. I have vivid memories of being profoundly moved by Spock’s funeral scene at the end of Star Trek II. I remember watching Cocoon on TV shortly after my own grandfather died in 1989, and feeling an intensely personal connection with the film, and the grandfather-grandson relationship between Wilford Brimley and Barret Oliver’s characters, and the way Horner’s music spoke to that connection. I remember the first time I saw Field of Dreams, and how much I cried at the finale when Kevin Costner reconnects with the ghost of his long-dead father over a simple game of catch. Horner could never have realized how those moments felt to a teenager thousands of miles away, being moved by the combined power of cinema and music in a way that he never had before.

He had no idea that, as 20-year-old in April 1995, I would go to see Legends of the Fall at the Warner Village Cinema in Sheffield, and leave the cinema that day primed to embark on a journey that would utterly change my life. As a result of seeing that film – and subsequently seeing Braveheart and Apollo 13 later that summer – I began collecting film scores. This led me to begin writing about film scores for my website, which would eventually become Movie Music UK. As a result of writing about film scores, I began travelling to the United States, to attend and subsequently write about various film music-related events. On one of these trips to Los Angeles, I met the woman who became my first wife. Because I married her, I eventually moved to LA – and here I remain. Although I’m not married to my first wife any more, the fact that I was able to move here with her led to me getting a job, settling down, meeting and making new friends, becoming an American citizen, and best of all embarking on my second (and last!) long term relationship, with the wonderful Holly McQuillan, who shares many of my passions and whose love and support is meaning so much to me right now.

He had no idea that, as a result of my love for this music, he would bring me into contact with kindred spirits who shared my passion. The members of the old Horner Shrine – Tom Hudson, Sheri and Martin Paternoster, Julie Brown, Marann Fengler, Karsten Spreen, and others whose names are escaping at this moment – guided me through this wonderful journey of musical discovery. The times we have spent together – in that crappy basement hotel room in London, drinking red wine from teacups and reading One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish in German, dancing the night away at the Equinox in Leicester Square, standing on a cliff top in Laguna Beach as Sheri and Martin got married – are some of my most treasured memories, and none of them would have been possible without James Horner bringing us together. We don’t talk as much as we should, because I’m terrible at keeping in touch with people, but I don’t think they know now much their friendship means to me. I’m damn well going to tell them next time I see them.

I wanted to finish this by saying something pithy, related in a clever way to something he wrote. “His heart will go on”, or something about him being in “The place where dreams come true”, but that’s trite and stupid. Truthfully, I’m just sad. Sad and angry and confused that someone who I didn’t know at all, except through their music, is making me feel like this as a result of a fucking plane crash. He never knew how much his music meant to me, or how much it changed my life for the better, and now I’ll never get the chance to tell him. It’s only just really dawning on me that I now have to start writing about James Horner in the past tense. That, after Southpaw and The 33 are released, I will never again experience the anticipation and exhilaration of discovering a new score by him. It’s almost too much to take in. I had never quite understood what I was seeing when I saw people on TV, lamenting and weeping at the deaths of their favorite pop stars; Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston, or whichever enormously famous person died too young. Today, I do.