James Horner: His own thread

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Even Andrew Lloyd Webber songs are more melodic...

Horner also manages to introduce the minimum amount of thematic material throughout a two hour span (ie one theme!), although he does enjoy predictable stereotype variations on said theme (the sneaky plinkplink, bad guy minor low brass, triumphant love fanfare).

That being said, his theme's are cheesy (see "ethnic vocal music" from Troy - if you can handle it) and completely forgettable. Try humming Titianic, Braveheart, Appollo 13, Field of Dreams...Now try ET or StarWars - He makes Williams look like a musical genius.

He has been nominated for 100000 academy awards, so somebody must be able to say something nice about his music.

ddd (ddd), Tuesday, 3 August 2004 16:45 (nineteen years ago) link

Try humming Titianic,

"There...you are...like a throbbing star..."

Oh wait.

Ned Raggett (Ned), Tuesday, 3 August 2004 16:53 (nineteen years ago) link

holy christ is he awful

g--ff (gcannon), Tuesday, 3 August 2004 16:55 (nineteen years ago) link

tentative theory: a good litmus test for a film critic is if they say "x film is good/bad etc...the james horner score, however, is cloying/appalling/terrible etc"

g--ff (gcannon), Tuesday, 3 August 2004 16:57 (nineteen years ago) link

the bit in the Aliens score with the HUGE ANVILS is all right (and got re-used in countless movie trailers therafter). There's quite a nice critique of the score (and Horner in general) here:
http://www.moviewave.net/titles/aliens.html

zebedee (zebedee), Tuesday, 3 August 2004 17:00 (nineteen years ago) link

I've always liked his Field of Dreams score.

Back when Titanic came out, I think he was on NPR talking about how his score used a lot of low end and a lot of high end but not very much in the middle. He seemed very proud of this technique.

jaymc (jaymc), Tuesday, 3 August 2004 17:02 (nineteen years ago) link

how his score used a lot of low end and a lot of high end but not very much in the middle.

disco??????!?!?!?!

ddd (ddd), Tuesday, 3 August 2004 17:03 (nineteen years ago) link

I don't care much for James Horner overall as a composer, but in the context of the film "Aliens"' score works great.

latebloomer (latebloomer), Tuesday, 3 August 2004 17:42 (nineteen years ago) link

He certainly should get credit for the latter-day "Star Trek" theme, no?

phil d., Tuesday, 3 August 2004 22:58 (nineteen years ago) link

ten years pass...

http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6605678/titanic-james-horner-plane-crash-pilot-dead

Plane registered to Horner has crashed in California. Pilot is dead, but has not been positively identified.

Johnny Fever, Tuesday, 23 June 2015 02:01 (eight years ago) link

Sounds confirmed. RIP.

Naive Teen Idol, Tuesday, 23 June 2015 04:41 (eight years ago) link

I'm completely crushed. He was in a really good phase of his career where he was only doing a couple of scores a year and really making them count. His score for Annaud's Wolf Totem this year was overwhelmingly great.

He's probably a figure of lol on here because of titanic and Braveheart, but at his best, and there are many many examples of such, he was the master of a kind of post-Strauss post-Delius pantheistic painterly ecstasy. Despite the frequent borrowings of musical phrases from the classical repertoire he had his own sound in spades which no one else could approximate.

Tomorrow I'll listen to avatar, search for spock, brainstorm, iris, wolf totem, sneakers and whatever else strikes me.

RIP

demonic mnevice (Jon Lewis), Tuesday, 23 June 2015 05:10 (eight years ago) link

this is such a fucking bummer you guys.

np searching for bobby fischer OST

demonic mnevice (Jon Lewis), Tuesday, 23 June 2015 14:51 (eight years ago) link

ten months pass...

wolf totem was such a tremendously strong score to stand as (one of) his last completed. Best film score I heard last year. crazy that it's been almost a year since the plane crash. Other kinds of music are rife with untimely passings but film composing never suffered something like this before. Film composers tend to get pretty old and keep on working. Horner was a couple of decades past his lol horner titanic/braveheart period and in this millenium had attained a real mastery of the form; it would have been so cool to hear what he would have done. So ridiculously fluent but always aiming for the ecstatic place.

final track on the wolf totem OST, 'return to the wild', just made me cry a little.

It has come out that he had almost completed a full score for the forthcoming A Fuqua remake of the Magnificent Seven as a 'surprise' for Fuqua and without having even been hired for the job yet. When this was reported soon after he died it seemed farfetched but apparently it's true, and that's the score they'll use in the movie.

scarcity festival (Jon not Jon), Thursday, 12 May 2016 17:59 (eight years ago) link

three weeks pass...

Just seen the start of A Beautiful Mind and the opening piece is stunning.

Robert Adam Gilmour, Sunday, 5 June 2016 20:59 (seven years ago) link

That's a good one. Album is quite long but usually draws me through to the end. Also has one of the better examples of his penchant for end credits songs (he usually loses me there)

scarcity festival (Jon not Jon), Sunday, 5 June 2016 22:57 (seven years ago) link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-8D6j5LPho

Philip Nunez, Monday, 6 June 2016 15:26 (seven years ago) link


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