Earlier today, I found out that one of my very favorite film composers, James Horner, probably best known for having composed the music and theme song for James Cameron's Titanic, died in a plane crash. Of all the celebrity deaths I've ever heard of, this is perhaps the saddest for me, along with Robin Williams' suicide.
I grew up with James Horner's music. When I was eleven I watched Amblin Entertainment's An American Tail on Betamax. As utterly ridiculous as this sounds, I was convinced I was in love with the main character's sister after hearing her (and the main character), sing the song "Somewhere Out There" in the course of the film. I was, of course, captivated by the song (though oddly enough, not the pop version by Linda Ronstadt) and in particular by James Horner's contribution to that melody. He wrote the score, which permeated the film and, as performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, was simply haunting. It left a heck of an impression.
About four years later, Horner blew me away, perhaps a bit more this time, with the soaring choral music of the Civil War epic Glory, a story of African-American soldiers fighting for equality during the War between the States. That was when he became one of my favorite composers of all time.
My love for his music continued into the 1990s, thanks to an aunt who brought me extremely hard to find CDs from the United States. His first foray into the superhero genre, The Rocketeer, was as magnificent as the film itself was ill-fated at the box office, but I was also a fan of his less bombastic stuff, like the jazz-flavored music of Phil Alden Robinson's Sneakers. I also liked his work on Edward Zwick's Legends of the Fall, the film that arguably launched Brad Pitt's career but which I remember better for its sweeping, if slightly overbearing musical score, which featured seventy-five glorious minutes of Horner music being played by the London Symphony Orchestra.
Then he came up with, for me, some of the very best work of his career: the one-two punch of Apollo 13 and Braveheart, the latter of which got him the job that would seal his status as a pop-culture icon: Titanic. People tell me they still cry when they watch that movie, even 18 years after it first came out, and I'm willing to bet Horner's music plays a huge part in that.
Of course, while everyone else went back to their pop music after that, Horner geeks like me continued to follow his work; in particular I loved his music score for Martin Campbell's The Mask of Zorro, yet another foray into the action-adventure genre, the very next year.
Then, the 2000s came, and with it the superhero renaissance courtesy of the X-Men and Spider-Man, and while these films dominated the box-office landscape for the better part of a decade, Horner kind of fell under the radar for me, although he continued to work. He even snagged a couple of Oscar nominations in 2002 and 2004 for A Beautiful Mind and House of Sand and Fog, respectively.
When James Cameron's Avatar started breaking box-office records in 2009, of course I bought and thoroughly enjoyed James Horner's high-flying soundtrack, but if I may be honest, after over twenty years of enjoying this man's music I found myself recognizing a little too often the hooks, motifs and cues from his other work, which kind of affected my appreciation just the slightest bit, especially that four-note "enemy" motif that has featured in a lot of his film scores, and I started wondering if he'd run out of tricks. He had always been guilty of a bit of recycling (which, arguably can also be said of the likes of Hans Zimmer and even the heralded John Williams), but it struck me a little that he was doing it quite a lot in this music.
Horner then wrote the music for the remake of the 1984 film The Karate Kid, and while it was serviceable, it felt even more like a regurgitation of his previous work than Avatar did. He seemed to be in a bit of a creative slump.
Then Horner did something I had not expected him to do: he joined the Marvel Age, and wrote music for Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man. I had always associated the comic book movie genre with the likes of Danny Elfman, Alan Silvestri and Zimmer. Heck, even John Williams only composed music for the first Superman movie (though the theme still endures thirty-seven years later, even after Zimmer's rather clumsy attempt to create a new one); I hadn't figured Horner would be a fit for this, even though he arguably had some superhero work under his belt with the little-seen Rocketeer. Suddenly, a childhood dream I didn't even know I had was being fulfilled.
Better still, Horner's work on the movie truly surprised me. Yes, there were cues borrowed from his other work, but the Shakuhachi (Japanese wood flute) and four-note motif were nowhere to be found, and with the full-bodied brass that played Spider-Man's theme when he swung across a bridge after foiling a carjacker, Horner convinced me that not even John Williams himself could have done a better job of scoring this movie. Not just that; but more than just about all of the superhero scores, including the work of the aforementioned Elfman, Zimmer and Silvestri I had heard over the last ten years prior to this, Horner's music had an extraordinary emotional range. I loved the Peter/Gwen theme every bit as much as I enjoyed the superhero-ey stuff.
What really took me by surprise was the fact Horner poured so much character into what could have easily been treated as another paycheck. I mean, Webb wasn't one of his frequent collaborators like Ron Howard, James Cameron or Mel Gibson, so he could have rejiggered another of his lesser known scores from the 1990s and passed it off as something new. After all, The Karate Kid had been nothing but a patchwork of all his former score. It wasn't the case here, and quite frankly I found myself falling in love with Horner's music all over again, and not just because Spider-Man happens to be my favorite comic book character.
Immediately thereafter, however, he went into a long period of silence. The Amazing Spider Man came out in 2012, and for two years thereafter nothing came out with his name on it. Sure, there were rumblings of a series of sequels to Avatar, but considering that James Cameron is not in the habit of making a movie more often than every six years at best, assuming Horner would even work on the movies, they were a long way into the future.
Finally, this year, Horner was slated to work on not just one but three movies, including a rather promising drama starring Jake Gyllenhaal entitled Southpaw.
And now he's gone.
It saddens me greatly that someone whose music I grew up with has passed on, and arguably well ahead of his time considering that he was a sprightly 61 (for purposes of comparison, consider that John Williams is now 83 and still composing music), but what pains me more was that he went at a time when I was starting to rediscover him. I take some consolation that I can look forward to at least three more movies with the music of my favorite composer of all, the wonderful James Horner.
Thank you for the music and the memories, Mr. Horner.
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