James Horner

James Horner was born on August 14th 1953. in Los Angeles. His family moved to England, London when he was around 10 years old and there he spent his adolescence years. He enrolled in the Royal College of Music, where he studied music with famous composer György Ligeti.

He and his family moved back to Los Angeles in the 70-ies, where Horner enrolled in the USC, where he got his Bachelor’s degree in composition. At UCLA he also earned a Masters degree and a PhD in music composition and theory, where he also taught music theory for a few years.

James Horner composed a concert piece in 1978, called Spectral Shimmers. He was trying very hard to get the composition performed and although he succeeded in getting the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra to perform it once, there were many difficulties to get rehearsal time and the orchestra willing to play it, which made him hostile towards the academic world. He then started to score student movies for the American Film Institute, where he met Roger Corman, an author of low-budget horror and sci-fi movies. He scored few of his films, such as ‘Battle Beyond the Stars’ and ‘Humanoids from the deep’.

Those moves opened Horner the opportunity to score big-budget studio movies. The first one (in 1982) was ‘Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan’. This score was a success and gave Horner an excellent career boost. In 1982, he scored several movies, among which ‘Gorky Park’, ‘Brainstorm’ and ‘Krull’. His fame got bigger as the time went by and he composed scores for such movies like ‘Aliens’ (for which he got an Academy Award nomination), ‘An American Tail’, ‘Cocoon’ (for which he got a Golden Globes nomination), ‘Braveheart’ and ‘Apollo 13’ (both of which earning him 2 Academy Award nominations) and ‘Legends of the Fall’ (nomination for Golden Globe).

See Horner talkes about the scoringprocess for the movie "A Beautiful Mind"

However, many of Horner’s new scores sound very much like the older ones. Apart from self-plagiarism, he was also accused for borrowing and stealing music from other composers, which all made him one of the most controversial Hollywood composers. He divided a movie music world in two parts – those who love his music and those who cannot stand it.

At the end of 1997, James Horner joined James Cameron who was filming ‘Titanic’ at the time, as he felt that this was a movie he was born to score. And he was not mistaken, as both the score and the song ‘My heart will go on’ were a huge success, earning him his first two Academy Awards. The soundtrack was on the top of Billboard chart for 16 consecutive weeks and was sold worldwide in over 30 million copies, which made it the best-selling soundtrack of all times.

He proved himself as an extremely capable tunesmith, who can create scores for any occasion. His themes have a kind of a nostalgic feel to them, whether it is the tune with a Celtic flavor, or those gentle, family ones. His skill is in building tension and excitement into grandiose climaxes.

Although he was frequently scoring action movies such as ‘Apocalypto’, he is also excellent in scoring for character-driven movies like ‘Beautiful mind’ or ‘Iris’, which allowed his lyrical talent to display a wide freedom of expression.

A relatively young composer, Horner will certainly be remembered for the great classics that he wrote, and will certainly continue to write. Since 1997, he preferred to include a soloist part in all of his recordings and has been producing thematically provocative and effective scores to this day. However, his early scores like those for ‘Glory’ and ‘Willow’ stand out among his finest works.

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