James_Horner
James Horner
James Roy Horner (born August 14 1953) is an American composer 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 Joan (née Fraenkel) and Harry Horner, who was a production designer, set designer and occasional film director. He started playing piano at the age of five. Horner's 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 masters and started working on his doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles where he studied with Paul Chihara and others. After several scoring assignments with the American Film Institute in the 1970s, he ended his teaching of music theory at the UCLA and turned to film scoring.In his youth Horner was acquainted with Carrie Goldsmith, daughter of famous composer Jerry Goldsmith.
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. 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.
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).
The year 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. 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 1997 he 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 Legend of Zorro and Radio). Aside from the major projects, Horner periodically tackles smaller projects as well (such as Iris 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 scores for The Spiderwick Chronicles, directed by Mark Waters, and Life Before Her Eyes, directed by Vadim Perelman.
Controversy
Horner has been accused of (perhaps unintentionally, perhaps as an homage) transposing hooks and orchestral motifs from other scores, both his and those of other composers. The most notorious was his borrowing of the work "Powerhouse" by Raymond Scott for the opening credits of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, which resulted in a lawsuit against Disney for not crediting the work's original composer. The suit was ultimately settled to all parties' satisfaction. Portions of his score to Patriot Games bear considerable resemblence to Aram Khachaturian's ballet Gayaneh, while parts of Star Trek III echo Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet; furthermore, Battle Beyond the Stars and Troy lift cues from the cantata from Prokofiev's score for Alexander Nevsky:In his score for Aliens he sampled the opening of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony. In his score for Willow he helpfully simplified the first theme of Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony. In the title theme of Glory he took the 'Humming Chorus' from Prokofiev’s Ivan the Terrible and grafted on Elgar’s 'Enigma Variations.'|||Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker
Horner has also been accused of self-plagiarism—reusing elements of his previous scores in another: For example, sections of Horner's score for the aforementioned Battle Beyond the Stars reappear in near-identical form throughout his other scores of the 1980s. The signature themes for the Klingons in Star Trek III and the Xenomorphs in the film Aliens are identical. Many of the melodies from A Beautiful Mind are similar to those from Bicentennial Man, which in turn are very similar to those from Braveheart.
These contentions are points of fierce debates between proponents of Horner and his detractors. While they generally acknowledge that Horner has a tendency to reuse musical ideas, opinions on the issue vary greatly: Some believe it truly compromises the merits of Horner's music, while others feel it is a minor problem that has been exaggerated, and a common practice generally inclusive of other composers.
List of film scores
2009
2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 |
1996 1995 1994 1993
1992 1991 1990 1989 |
1988 1987 1986 1985 1984 1983 1982 1981 1980 1979 1978 (for the AFI)
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Television scores
2006
2000
1992
1990
| 1985
1983
1982
1981
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Short films
1991
1989
| 1986
1985
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Concert works
- "Conversations" (1976)
- "Spectral Shimmers" (1977)
- "A Forest Passage" (2000)
Miscellaneous works
- Logo music for Universal Pictures and Icon Productions
- THX trailer "Cimarron"
Awards and Nominations
Academy Award
| Golden Globe
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Grammy
| Satellite Awards
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Trivia
Horner can be seen briefly in a cameo appearance as a crewman in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.References
External links
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Thursday October 02, 2008 at 07:33:31 PDT (GMT -0700)
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