Of course he didn’t! It’s a stupid question! Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote The Sound of Music.
But I ask that question because James Horner, among all composers, produced some of the most beautiful sounds of music ever to grace the silver screen. He’s easily in my top five favorite movie score composers, and I say that only because once you reach that level of greatness, it’s meaningless to rank them any further.
His scoring career began when he wrote the music for Battle Beyond the Stars, a film by B-Movie schlockmeister Roger Corman, known as the “Pope of Pop Cinema” and for being instrumental in starting bigger careers than his own for the likes of James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper, Ron Howard, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, William Shatner, and Sylvester Stallone.
Already in this early effort you can hear the proto-styles that Horner would develop further in his Star Trek scores.
Horner’s big break came when he was hired to score Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, replacing too-expensive Jerry Goldsmith who did the first Star Trek movie. Goldsmith left huge shoes to fill, having created the movie theme that became the iconic theme song for Star Trek: Next Generation. But Horner grabbed a shoehorn and slid his feet in just fine, devising a theme of his own that is also instantly recognizable as Star Trek, including the obligatory Alexander Courage fanfare from the original series.
He went on to score Star Trek III: The Search for a Good Odd-Numbered Star Trek Movie, but he also went on to score over a hundred movies throughout his career before his tragically early demise. Obviously I can’t discuss every one of them here, but among them are megahits like 48 Hours that made Eddie Murphy a movie star, Schwarzeneggar’s Commando, the rare sequel-as-good-as-the-original Aliens, Ron Howard’s Willow, Field of Dreams, Honey I Shrunk the Kids—and that’s just in one decade.
But if you want to talk about breathtakingly beautiful music, in my opinion it started with Cocoon. The score over the end credits in particular feels like being tucked in a warm blanket before a blazing fire on a winter night.
It turns out, he was just warming up. Three years later Horner produced what could rival any symphony in the classical repertoire for beauty and sophisticated development for a children’s animated film that at the time was called “Bambi for dinosaurs.” His music took a nice, entertaining fantasy film and lifted it up to something magical and momentous.
Horner’s output in the decade of the 1980’s constituted its own pair of big shoes to fill. He had his work cut out for him for the 1990’s. He quickly responded by scoring sequels to two of his previous films, Another 48 Hours and An American Tale: Fieval Goes West and a number of other significant films like Apollo 13 and Jumanji. Then he got two projects dropped in his lap that blew the lid off what he’d done before.
Horner had a tendency to incorporate Celtic influences into some of his work. One megaproject that was right down that alley gave him the opportunity to pull out all the stops with some of the most haunting use of bagpipes that ever pleasured the human ear. Braveheart won the Best Picture Oscar, not least because of the atmosphere James Horner’s music contributed to it. The score was nominated for an Oscar, but lost out to Il Postino.
His use of Celtic motifs didn’t stop there, nor did his groundbreaking career. Following only two years after his stellar work on Braveheart, he worked on a project that gave new meaning to the word “blockbuster,” yet he delivered as much beautiful intimacy and poignancy to that as he did the other.
If he’d died after this one, the preeminence of his career would have already been sealed. But he didn’t die for another 18 years. During the 15 years of the 21st century before his death, he composed the scores for 35 more films that were released, plus left behind two other scores of films not yet released. In addition to this massive output, he had an opportunity to work on one more history-making project.
In Avatar his magical music blended with the magical visuals of James Cameron to give birth to a synergistic marvel of arguably the most transcendent worldbuilding in the history of cinema. Who didn’t want to cast their mundane humanity aside and dwell as a native in the mystical world of Pandora, revelling in the interconnectedness of all life?
On June 22, 2015, James Horner died while flying his own airplane at the tragic age of 61, two years younger than I am as I write this. He had a career few people could even dream of, and still it was cut short, making us wonder and lament what other great works of art he would have created. He won two Academy Awards and two Golden Globes and was nominated for many more.
In 1983 Horner said, “I guess I’d call myself more of a classical composer, and my scores tend to have more of a classical sound.” Yes, James, you were, and yes, they did. No one would confuse you with the creators of The Sound of Music, but they might be forgiven to think you stand among the greatest composers of history, Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, etc.