James Horner

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**James Roy Horner** (August 14, 1953 – June 22, 2015) was an American composer, conductor, and orchestrator of film scores. He was known for the integration of choral and electronic elements in many of his film scores, and for frequent use of Celtic musical elements.

Horner was an accomplished concert hall composer before he moved into writing film scores. His first major film score was for the 1979 film *The Lady in Red*, but did not establish himself as a mainstream composer until he worked on the 1982 film *Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan*. Horner's score for *Titanic* is the best selling orchestral film soundtrack of all time while *Titanic* and *Avatar*, both directed by James Cameron, are the two highest-grossing films of all time.

Horner collaborated multiple times with directors Jean-Jacques Annaud, Mel Gibson, Walter Hill, Ron Howard, and Joe Johnston. Horner composed music for over 100 films, and won two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, three Satellite Awards, three Saturn Awards, and was nominated for three British Academy Film Awards.

## Early life

Horner was born in Los Angeles in 1953, the son of Joan Ruth (Frankel) and Harry Horner. His father, a set designer and occasional art-director, was born in Holíč, Czechoslovakia, and moved to the United States in 1935. Horner had a brother, Christopher, who is a writer and documentary film maker.

Horner started playing piano at the age of five. His early years were spent in London, where he attended the Royal College of Music. He subsequently attended Verde Valley High School in Sedona, Arizona. He received his bachelor's degree in music from the University of Southern California. After he earned a master's degree, he 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 teaching a course in music theory at UCLA and turned to film scoring.

Horner was also an avid pilot.

## Career

One of Horner's first major film scores was for the 1979 film *The Lady in Red*. He began his career scoring films by working for B film director and producer Roger Corman. His first composer credit was for Corman's *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. The film's director Nicholas Meyer famously quipped that Horner had been hired because the studio couldn't afford to use the first film's composer Jerry Goldsmith again, but by the time Meyer returned to the franchise with *Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country*, the director found that he couldn't afford Horner either.

Horner continued composing music for high-profile releases during the 1980s, including *48 Hrs.* (1982), *Krull* (1983), *Star Trek III: The Search for Spock* (1984), *Commando* (1985), *Cocoon* (1985), *Aliens* (1986), *\*batteries not included* (1987), *Willow* (1988), *Glory* and *Field of Dreams* (both 1989).

*Aliens* earned Horner his first Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score in 1987, at the 59th Academy Awards. "Somewhere Out There", which he co-composed for *An American Tail*, was also nominated that year for Best Original Song. He would go on to be nominated 10 times in total.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s and the 2000s, Horner also wrote orchestral scores for children's films (particularly those produced by Amblin Entertainment), with credits for *An American Tail* (1986), *The Land Before Time* (1988), *The Rocketeer* and *An American Tail: Fievel Goes West* (1991), *Once Upon a Forest* and *We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story* (all in 1993), *The Pagemaster* (1994), and *Casper*, *Jumanji*, and *Balto* (all from 1995) and *Mighty Joe Young* (1998) and *How the Grinch stole Christmas* (2000).

1995 saw Horner produce no fewer than six scores, including his commercially successful and critically acclaimed works for *Braveheart* and *Apollo 13*, both of which earned him Academy Award nominations. Horner's greatest financial and critical success would come with the score to the 1997 film *Titanic*. The album became the best-selling primarily orchestral soundtrack in history, selling over 27 million copies worldwide.

At the 70th Academy Awards, Horner won Oscars for Best Original Dramatic Score and Best Original Song for "My Heart Will Go On" (which he co-wrote with Will Jennings). In addition, Horner and Jennings won three Grammy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards for the soundtrack and *My Heart Will Go On*. *Titanic* also marked the first time in ten years that Horner worked with director James Cameron (following the highly stressful scoring sessions for *Aliens*, Horner declared that he would never work with Cameron again and described the experience as "a nightmare").

Since *Titanic*, Horner continued to score for major productions (including *The Perfect Storm*, *A Beautiful Mind*,
*Enemy At The Gates*, *The Mask of Zorro*, *The Legend of Zorro*, *House of Sand and Fog* and *Bicentennial Man*). Aside from scoring major productions, Horner periodically worked on smaller projects such as *Iris*, *Radio* and *Bobby Jones: A Stroke of Genius*. He received his eighth and ninth Academy Award nominations for *A Beautiful Mind* (2001) and *House of Sand and Fog* (2003), but lost on both occasions to Howard Shore. He frequently collaborated with film director Ron Howard, a partnership that began with *Cocoon* in 1985.

Horner composed the 2006–2011 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.

Horner recollaborated with James Cameron on the 2009 film *Avatar*, which was released in December 2009 and has since become the highest-grossing film of all time, surpassing *Titanic* (also directed by Cameron and scored by Horner). Horner spent over two years working on the score for *Avatar*, and did not take on any other projects during that time. His work on *Avatar* earned him numerous award nominations, including his tenth Academy Award nomination as well as Golden Globe Award, British Academy Film Award, and Grammy Award nominations, all of which he lost to Michael Giacchino for *Up*.

Regarding the experience of scoring *Avatar*, Horner said, "Avatar has been the most difficult film I have worked on and the biggest job I have undertaken... I work from four in the morning to about ten at night and that’s been my way of life since March. That's the world I'm in now and it makes you feel estranged from everything. I'll have to recover from that and get my head out of Avatar."

Horner also composed the score for the 2010 version of *The Karate Kid*, replacing Atli Örvarsson. This film—the first that Horner worked on after *Avatar*—was released in 2010. In 2011, Horner scored *Cristiada (aka For Greater Glory)* which was released a year later and *Black Gold*. In 2012 Horner scored *The Amazing Spider-Man*, which starred Andrew Garfield and premiered on July 3. In a recent interview on his website, Horner revealed why he didn't return to compose the second movie; that he didn't like how the movie resulted in comparison to the first movie, and even called the movie "dreadful." Upon his departure, he was replaced by Hans Zimmer.

At the beginning of 2015, Horner wrote the music for Jean-Jacques Annaud's adventure film *Wolf Totem*, which marked his fourth collaboration with Annaud and also Horner's first film score in nearly three years.

At the time of his death in 2015, projects to which Horner was attached included the forthcoming film *The 33* for director Patricia Riggen, and *Southpaw*, a sports drama film directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Rachel McAdams. Both films are slated for release later in 2015.

Horner's scores have been sampled in trailers for other films. The climax of the track *Bishop's Countdown* from his score for *Aliens* ranks fifth in the most commonly used soundtrack cues for film trailers.

### Orchestral work

In 2014, Horner composed the commission piece *Pas de Deux*, a Double Concerto for Violin and Cello, which was premiered on November 12, 2014, by Mari and Hakon Samuelsen with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vasily Petrenko. The work was commissioned to mark the 175th season of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Horner also composed *Collage*, a Concerto for Four Horns, which premiered on March 27, 2015, at the Royal Festival Hall in London by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jaime Martin, with David Pyatt, John Ryan, James Thatcher and Richard Watkins as soloists.

## Musical borrowing

Many of James Horner's film scores incorporate passages from his earlier compositions, and feature brief excerpts or rework themes from other classical composers, generally avoiding legal action by sufficiently varying the music. For example, his scores from *Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan* and *Star Trek III: The Search for Spock* include excerpts from *Alexander Nevsky* and *Romeo and Juliet*, both by Prokofiev, while the heroic theme from *Willow* is based on that of Robert Schumann's Rhenish Symphony. The climactic battle scene in *Glory* includes excerpts from Wagner and Orff. A frequent criticism of Horner has been that his tendency to borrow passages from other composers as well as his own earlier work makes his compositions inauthentic or unoriginal.

## Death

On June 22, 2015, unconfirmed reports emerged that Horner was killed when his Embraer EMB 312 Tucano turboprop aircraft crashed into the Los Padres National Forest in southern California. He was the sole occupant of the aircraft. Though the pilot was not immediately identified, Horner's attorney said, "We know it's his plane, and we know we haven't heard from him." *Variety* later confirmed Horner's death. His assistant wrote on her Facebook page, "We have lost an amazing person with a huge heart and unbelievable talent [who] died doing what he loved."
The FAA indicated the official identity of the deceased pilot will be confirmed by the local authorities.

## List of scores

### Film

#### 1970s

* 1978 *The Drought* (for the American Film Institute)
* 1978 *Fantasies* (for the American Film Institute)
* 1978 *Gist and Evans* (for the American Film Institute)
* 1978 *Landscapes* (for the American Film Institute)
* 1978 *Just for a Laugh* (for the American Film Institute)
* 1978 *The Watcher* (for the American Film Institute)
* 1979 *The Lady in Red*
* 1979 *Up from the Depths*

### Television

* 1981 *A Few Days in Weasel Creek*
* 1981 *Angel Dusted*
* 1982 *A Piano for Mrs. Cimino*
* 1982 *Rascals and Robbers: The Secret Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn*
* 1983 *Between Friends*
* 1985 *Amazing Stories*
* 1985 *Surviving*
* 1989 *Tales from the Crypt*
* 1990 *Extreme Close-Up*
* 1992 *Fish Police* (theme and pilot episode)
* 1999 *Michelle Kwan Skates to Disney's Greatest Hits*
* 2000 *Freedom Song*
* 2006 *CBS Evening News*

### Short films

* 1986 *Captain EO*
* 1989 *Tummy Trouble*
* 2012 *First in Flight*

## Awards and nominations

Horner won two Academy Awards, for Best Original Dramatic Score (*Titanic*) and Best Original Song ("My Heart Will Go On") in 1998, and was nominated for an additional eight Oscars. He also won two Golden Globe Awards, three Satellite Awards, three Saturn Awards, and has been nominated for three British Academy Film Awards.

In October 2013 James Horner received the Max Steiner Award at the Hollywood in Vienna Gala, an award given for extraordinary achievements in the field of film music.

### AFI

In 2005, the American Film Institute unveiled their list of the top twenty-five American film scores. Five of Horner's scores were among 250 nominees, making him the most nominated composer to not make the top twenty-five:

* *Apollo 13* (1995)
* *Braveheart* (1995)
* *Field of Dreams* (1989)
* *Glory* (1989)
* *Titanic* (1997)

### List of accolades

Grammy

* 1988: *An American Tail* – Best Album of Original Instrumental Background Score Written for a Motion Picture or Television
* 1988: "Somewhere Out There" (from: *An American Tail*, Winner) – Song of The Year
* 1988: "Somewhere Out There" (from: *An American Tail*, Winner) – Best Song Written specifically For a Motion Picture or Television
* 1990: *Field of Dreams* – Best Album of Original Instrumental Background Score Written for a Motion Picture or Television
* 1991: *Glory* (Winner) – Best Instrumental Composition Written for a Motion Picture or for Television
* 1996: "Whatever You Imagine" (from: *The Pagemaster*) – Best Song Written specifically For a Motion Picture or Television
* 1999: "My Heart Will Go On" (from: *Titanic*, Winner) – Record of The Year
* 1999: "My Heart Will Go On" (from: *Titanic*, Winner) – Song of The Year
* 1999: "My Heart Will Go On" (from: *Titanic*, Winner) – Best Song Written For A Motion Picture or for Television
* 2003: *A Beautiful Mind* – Best Score Soundtrack Album for Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media
* 2011: *Avatar* – Best Score Soundtrack Album for Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media
* 2011: "I See You" (from: *Avatar*) – Best Song Written For A Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media

## References

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8. ↑ http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/James\_Horner.aspx#2
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11. ↑ MacDonald, Laurence E. *The invisible art of film music: a comprehensive history*. Ardsley House Publishers, 1998: p. 328 [1]
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21. ↑ HFPA – Awards Search
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27. ↑ Horner assigned to *The Karate Kid* film remake
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32. ↑ DATES ANNOUNCED FOR HORNER'S DOUBLE CONCERTO, jameshorner-filmmusic.com, May 17, 2014. Retrieved September 19, 2014
33. ↑ Horner Concerto for 4 Horns – London, british-horn.com. Retrieved September 19, 2014
34. ↑ Alan Rogers, "My Favourite Scenes–1938" in *Reel Music*, 4 Nov. 2011.[2].
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36. ↑ "Glory", in *Filmtracks: Modern Soundtrack Reviews* (1998, 2006).
37. ↑ Thomas Muething, "Wen immer es angeht" (To Whom It May Concern), in: Der Deutsche Film Musik-Dienst, Nr.30/1995 (in German)
38. ↑ Alex Ross, "Oscar Scores", in *The New Yorker,* March 9, 1998.
39. ↑ Lukas Kendall & Jeff Bond, "Letters about James Horner's *Titanic*," in *Film Score Monthly,* 1997.
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57. ↑ *Czech American Timeline* by Miloslav Rechcigl, Jr. (2013), pp. 402
58. ↑ James Horner to receive Max Steiner Award, January 24, 2013. Retrieved March 4, 2013
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## External links

* Very comprehensive website about James Horner
* James Horner at the Internet Movie Database
* James Horner interview (1983) from CinemaScore magazine

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