James Horner, 1953-2015

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James Horner, who died shockingly in a light aircraft crash in Santa Barbara on 22 June, was, above all, a gifted melodist. His was a broad, emotional canvas, giving old-fashioned heart to movies that were often at the cutting edge of technology, both in form and content. Famously during the making of James Cameron’s mighty Titanic (1997) (and acutely aware that Cameron’s first instruction had been “No Fucking Violins!”), Horner developed what would become Celine Dion’s massive hit song My Heart Will Go On in secret, hiring the singer without the director’s knowledge and warily introducing Cameron to the idea of a sentimental tune front and centre of the film’s reception. He would develop two ideas for each cue in Cameron’s later Avatar (2009), one ‘Cameron-lite’ to please the notoriously picky director and one that he actually wanted to go in the movie and, to be fair, often did. This was how James Horner saw his place in the movie-making process – the classic idea of the film composer as operatic voice beneath the hurly-burly of visual narrative, anchoring the film to emotions we all feel and understand.

Horner trained at the Royal College of Music, USC and UCLA, gaining his PhD there in composition and music theory – his first scores were for student films but it is his early collaboration with Roger Corman in Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) which seems to set him on his path – from breakthrough score Star Trek II – The Wrath of Khan (1982) through 48 hours (1982), Krull (1983), Cocoon (1985), Aliens (1986), Willow (1988), Glory (1989) and Field of Dreams (1989), all in the 1980s Horner studiously avoided being typecast by genre but brought a keen sensibility to such varied movies without being overly precious about what he was doing. In later years people decried the bluntness of his emotional appeal, as well as hearing other composers’ music and, indeed, rehashes of his own past scores in the music he produced; but he laughed off the criticisms – he knew, as Corman did, that movies were only so much about art and innovation. Usually they were much more about speed, necessity and compromise.

Not that Horner’s prolific output was in any way humdrum – his scores for Wrath of Khan, Apollo 13 (1995), Braveheart (1995), Titanic, A Beautiful Mind (2001) and Avatar and will stand the test of time with the best of them, and always there is an unignorable emotional pull to his work, even in a film and score as understated as Richard Eyre’s Iris (2001). Again and again across differing genres he returned to the lilting modes of his beloved Celtic music, mixing wistful orchestral lyricism with solo ethnic instruments to powerful effect. That is the saddest thing about his early death – he had so many more scores still in him, many of which would have put him back in Oscar-contention. We have all been robbed.

For me, his finest score will always be Field of Dreams, that warm, old-fashioned, life-affirming tale of salvation within the American Way of Life and, well, baseball. Here Horner’s score is fragmentary, made up of tiny slivers of musical ideas which suggest movement just outside our own fields of vision, ethereal ghosts that cannot take complete shape until everything is properly prepared (“If you build it, he will come!”). And, as always in Horner’s hands, these ghosts are warm, emotional and, in the best possible way, familiar.