James Horner - Appreciation Thread

[John Johnson]

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2015/06/ ... a-barbara/

[Edmund Kattak]

There are some posts on FSM saying he has died, but not sure if anything is credible. It doesn't sound promising, though.

[Eric W.]

Composer Jeremy Soule just posted an RIP James Horner message.

This isn't looking good.

[AndyDursin]

Just unbelievable that I go months without buying a new CD, and I pick up both his concerto and the Annaud CDs literally last week...and now he's gone.

There's a lot and yet so little to say except film music just died a little bit more today. He's one of the greats and that his talents had been used less and less speaks to where this medium has fallen.

So sad because there was still music to be heard from someone whose sense of dramatic scoring was second only to Williams in my mind.

[John Johnson]

Sad day indeed.

[Monterey Jack]

Sorry for the profanity, Andy, but...****. I may have groused about Horner's predilection for self-plagiarism in the past, but when he was firing on all cylinders, he wrote some exceptionally fine and musical film scores, the kind that have become an endangered species in this day and age. The fact that we've prematurely lost one of the only composers we had left who could actually write music instead of noodling around on a keyboard saddens me greatly.

[AndyDursin]

I had the same reaction MJ. This makes me feel worse than say Elmer or Barry or Jarre because he was still relatively young and had music left in him....

[Monterey Jack]

I had the same reaction MJ. This makes me feel worse than say Elmer or Barry or Jarre because he was still relatively young and had music left in him....

I felt the same about Michael Kamen, Basil Poledouris and Shirley Walker...all taken far too soon. Granted, all of these composers were increasingly marginalized and/or semi-retired by the time they died thanks to the crappy state of what passes for "film music" these days, but still, it hurts when the ones with genuine talent are gone, while Harry Gregson-Williams, Steve Jablonsky and Trent Reznor continue to pour sewage into our ears on a weekly basis.

[Monterey Jack]

[AndyDursin]

This impacts me more than any of those passings, it really does.

And I don't mean to diminish the careers of Basil or Michael Kamen (as there are a few scores of theirs that I obviously love), but to be honest, Horner was in a different class than them when you look at his body of work. Just as the composers who have essentially replaced him -- the likes of Giacchino and Desplat -- don't have a fraction of his talent (it's actually depressing when you listen to something so lousy as Jurassic World and realize, again, Giacchino is the heir apparent to Williams and Horner. It's beyond sad).

Horner's ability to enhance pretty much every film he was a part of is something very, very rare. His sense of dramatic underscoring, how to use an orchestra, when to turn it on -- that was Williams-esque, and very few composers of this generation possessed that. His early career fell back on the same motifs at times, but eventually, he broke out of that and became an even more effective composer. Obviously TITANIC, BRAVEHEART (a magnificent score) and his sci-fi scores always got the most play among fans...but TO GILLIAN ON HER 37TH BIRTHDAY is so beautiful and poignant and low-key that it's as good as anything he wrote in my mind.

He just made movies better. Even something like ENEMY AT THE GATES -- even though it had a bit of Schindler's in the main theme...I remember the cue that ended the film. It was freaking gorgeous, and it made me like the film, overall, more.

Yes there were times he was on auto-pilot and was less than inspired (I was never a big fan of WILLOW) -- but for the most part, and especially as his career wore on, his work became even more interesting musically. THE NEW WORLD is utterly beautiful (a shame Malick threw most of it out), and as he relied less on the recurrent motifs of his early scores, his work became more mature.

This is especially devastating given his age, because there was always the hope there that the movies would go back to him, in time...and now we'll never have that opportunity.

[Monterey Jack]

The horn flourish at 3:37 never fails to make me smile...THIS is what film music should be.

[AndyDursin]

That was another, that would be in a Top 10 Horner list. Magnificent score.

Put Zimmer all over that, and the film's appeal is diminished...greatly.

[Monterey Jack]

This is especially devastating given his age, because there was always the hope there that the movies would go back to him, in time...and now we'll never have that opportunity.

When Horner got replaced on the Amazing Spider-Man sequel, it was a pretty damning indictment of the appalling tastes of film producers and directors these days...the first Amazing film was heavily flawed and a needless retread of what Raimi's films had already done, and done better, but Horner's music pretty much singlehandedly made the whole thing worth sitting through (okay, and Emma Stone as well). Once upon a time (he mused), getting the original composer back on a sequel was as important as getting the original cast and/or director back in order to complete the "package" that the first film promised...imagine if Jerry Goldsmith had scored The Empire Strikes Back, and Elmer Bernstein had scored Return Of The Jedi. And at least those were "real" composers! Going from Horner on the first Amazing film to Hans Zimmer and the "fabulous six" or whoever the phuck was assisting him on that only accentuated all of the filmmaking and narrative mistakes of that film in particular and the whole film industry in general. There are no rousing themes you leave the theater humming and enticing you to go to your local music store and pick up the soundtrack album and wear it out by listening to it a hundred times because the VHS/cable release was a year-and-a-half away...nowadays it's all sludge, nothing more than an extension of the already-punishing sound design of modern-day cinema. Recently I watched the film Day Of The Falcon, which was a pretty anemic and forgettable wannabe old-school epic, but Horner's elegant music elevated that film from "mediocre" to "somewhat watchable" all by itself. It was far from his greatest work, but I could actually recognize it AS HIS, which rarely happens anymore...all of Hansie's various "pets" are interchangeable from each other (John Powell excepted), and while the occasional good score might sneak out, all it proves is the truism that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

[AndyDursin]

Relatively recent interview with Horner from a fan site that's worth reading:

http://jameshorner-filmmusic.com/conver ... es-horner/

Again, what a shame as he was having a big year in 2015 with SOUTHPAW (a synth score for the Jake Gyllenhaal boxing drama), Annaud's WOLF TOTEM (which I bought from ImportCDs for $13 plus shipping), and THE 33, which given its late release, may end up being the final film to have a Horner score.

[Monterey Jack]

Great, one of the last Horner soundtracks is a synth score. I was hoping for one last rousing symphonic score from him (especially for a sports/boxing drama, which has always been a genre receptive to great film music), but looks more like what happened with Shirley Walker's last score for that horrible Black Christmas remake (a tinny, disappointing synth effort).