James Horner

James Roy Horner (born August 14, 1953) is an American composer and conductor of orchestral and film music. He is noted for the integration of choral and electronic elements in many of his film scores, and for frequent use of Celtic musical elements. Horner won two Academy Awards for his score and song compositions for the film Titanic in 1997.

Early life

Horner was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Austrian immigrants Joan (née Fraenkel) and Harry Horner, who was a production designer, set designer and occasional film director.^[1]

Horner started playing piano at the age of five. His early years were spent in London, where he attended the Royal College of Music and studied under György Ligeti. He received his bachelor's degree in music from the University of Southern California, and eventually earned a master's and started working on his doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles where he studied with Paul Chihara, among others. After several scoring assignments with the American Film Institute in the 1970s, he finished his teaching of music theory at UCLA and turned to film scoring.

In his youth, Horner was acquainted with Carrie Goldsmith, daughter of the famous composer and peer Jerry Goldsmith.^[2]

Film and television scoring

Horner began his film scoring career by working for B movie director and producer Roger Corman, with his first composer credit for Corman's big-budget Battle Beyond the Stars. His works steadily gained notice in Hollywood, which led him to take on larger projects. Horner made a breakthrough in 1982, when he had the chance to score for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, establishing himself as a mainstream composer. Horner continued composing music for high-profile releases in the 1980s, including 48 Hrs. (1981), Krull (1983), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), Commando (1985), Cocoon (1985), Aliens (1986, earning his first Academy Award nomination), Willow (1988), Glory and Field of Dreams (both 1989).

Horner's scores also began to see a secondary life with their usage in film trailers for other movies. Excerpts from his score for Aliens rank second in the most commonly-used soundtrack cues for film trailers.^[3] Also, an unused fragment from Aliens was featured in a scene from Die Hard. Several films whose scores were composed by Michael Kamen have had Horner music for the trailers; most notably, the music from Willow is substituted for the theme Kamen wrote for the 1993 remake of The Three Musketeers.^{[original research?]}

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Horner also displayed a talent for writing orchestral scores for children's films (particularly those produced by Amblin Entertainment), with credits for An American Tail (1986), The Land Before Time (1988), An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991), We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story (1993), and Casper and Balto (both 1995).

1995 saw Horner produce no fewer than six scores, including his commercially successful and critically-acclaimed works for Braveheart and Apollo 13. Horner's greatest financial success would come in 1997 with an enormously popular score to Titanic, which was greatly influenced by the music of Clannad.^[4] The album became the best-selling instrumental soundtrack in history with over 24 million copies sold worldwide, and is the third best-selling soundtrack album ever, trailing only Whitney Houston's The Bodyguard soundtrack (over 37 million) and the Bee Gees' Saturday Night Fever (40 million). In early 1998, Horner won Academy Awards for Best Original Dramatic Score and Best Original Song for "My Heart Will Go On" (which he co-wrote with Will Jennings), in addition to three Grammy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.

Since Titanic, Horner has continued to score for major productions (including The Perfect Storm, A Beautiful Mind, The Mask of Zorro, The Legend of Zorro and Bicentennial Man. Aside from the major projects, Horner periodically tackles smaller projects as well (such as Iris, Radio and Bobby Jones: A Stroke of Genius). He frequently scores for the films of director Ron Howard, a partnership that began with Cocoon in 1985. Coincidentally, Horner's end title music from Glory can be heard in the trailer for Howard's Backdraft.

Horner composed the current theme music for the CBS Evening News. The theme was introduced as part of the debut of Katie Couric as anchor on September 5, 2006. It has since been adopted by most other CBS News programs as well.

Recently, Horner finished the score for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

Critical debate

Horner has been accused of transposing hooks, orchestral motifs, or larger passages from other scores of his own or of other composers.^[5][6][7] These contentions are points of fierce debates between proponents of Horner and his detractors.^[8]

List of film scores

Television scores

Short films

Concert works

• "Conversations" (1976)
• "Spectral Shimmers" (1977)
• "A Forest Passage" (2000)

Miscellaneous works

• Logo music for Universal Pictures, Lionsgate and Icon Productions
• THX trailer "Cimarron"

Awards and Nominations

Trivia

Horner can be seen briefly in a cameo appearance as a crewman in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

References

External links

• Website by Sony Classical
• James Horner at the Internet Movie Database at the Internet Movie Database
• James Horner interview (1983) from CinemaScore magazine
• JamesHorner.de - Fansite (in German)