James Horner was the composer responsible for getting me into film scores. My father bought the Braveheart soundtrack after seeing the movie and I never picked it up until years later to listen to it. It became a recurring CD in my bedroom and was such a piece of my high-school years that I cannot listen to it now without it calling back the emotional events I dealt with at that time. Listening to it now is like forcing nostalgia upon myself, a nostalgia I’ve preferred to shy away from. But after hearing the news of James Horner’s death I brought out the CD to pay my respects.
He was considered one of the great composers working today. He worked with iconic directors and some of his scores are the highest-grossing in history (Titanic). His discography is immense and considered to be of incredible artistic fidelity. He was known for his beautiful melodies, emotional color, and endearment to musicology, i.e. the research of music and its tie to humanities, seen in the native instruments used for the characters and settings in his films (Apacolypto, the New World, Black Gold, Braveheart, etc.) Before scoring Avatar, he sat down and created a musical language for the Na’vi based on their lives and the way they lived. He did not just approach film scoring with an emotional eye but also with an academic and scholarly one, meaning above all to get to the core of the people in the film and present them musically in a way that matched their identity. He admitted he was a perfectionist and put great efforts into the music he wrote.
James Horner died in a small plane crash he was piloting on June 22, 2015. He will be missed. Not just by us but by the films that could have used his touch.
Listen here to Braveheart, my favorite work of his: