composer who knew the score
James Horner Composer and conductor BORN AUGUST 14, 1953 - DIED JUNE 22, 2015 AGED 61
WHEN composer James Horner sat down at his desk to write the score for the 1997 movie Titanic he had not read the script or seen any footage. Instead he focused on the type of sounds that would have been heard aboard the doomed liner to highlight the contrasting cultural worlds of the star- crossed lovers. “To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colours and brushes,” he once explained. “I think very abstractly when I’m writing. Then as the project moves on it becomes more like sculpting.”
What Horner never could have imagined, though, from those very early beginnings, was just how phenomenally successful the Titanic score would become. As well as earning him two Oscars for best original score and best original song for My Heart Will Go On, which he co- wrote with well- known lyricist Will Jennings, the film’s soundtrack sold 27million copies worldwide.
When both the album and theme song, performed by Celine Dion, topped the charts it finally dawned on Horner what he had achieved. “I think it was at that point I realised the music had transcended being film music and Titanic was taking a place in history,” he said.
In addition to his Oscars wins, Horner won six Grammy Awards, and two Golden Globes, as well as receiving a further eight Academy Award nominations for his work on films such as Avatar, Braveheart and Apollo 13. He had just completed scores for two forthcoming movies Southpaw, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, and “33”, a film based on the 2010 mining disaster in Chile.
The son of Austrian immigrants. James Roy Horner was born in Los Angeles and grew up with an appreciation of the inner workings of Hollywood, given that his father was the two- time Oscar- winning art director/ set designer Harry Horner. He started playing the piano when he was five and later attended the Royal College of Music in London before receiving a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Southern California.
His entry into the movie business in the late 1970s came about totally by accident. Horner recalled: “I was having a piece performed and in attendance was the director of the American Film Institute, he asked if I’d ever done a movie before... I said sure, I’ll give it a try.”
To his great surprise, he found composing for films “liberating”. He added: “Once I had written my first piece against picture I sort of fell in love with it.
“It was like lightning hit me. I found that I could write anything I wanted to write and there wouldn’t be a label attached to it. I was no longer considered conservative and no longer considered avant- garde or anything in between.”
After his breakthrough in 1982 with Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan he won his first Oscar nomination with Aliens in 1986. From there the offers came in thick and fast and he composed for more than 150 films – but after the success of Titanic he admitted that he had become much choosier: “I look for very small things, gems that are probably not that commercial but things I like to do for my heart and the film- makers want that kind of approach.”
A qualified pilot and aviation buff, Horner had recently completed work on the documentary Aviation: The Invisible Highway, narrated by fellow flying enthusiast Harrison Ford.
Unlike Ford, who survived a crash in his small plane in early March, Horner tragically died after crashing his single- engine plane in Southern California this week.
He is survived by his wife Sarah and their two daughters.