James Horner

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James Horner

Background information
Birth name James Roy Horner
Born August 14, 1953 (age 53)
Origin Flag of United States Los Angeles, California
Genre(s) Contemporary classical, film score
Occupation(s) Composer

James Roy Horner (born August 14, 1953) is an American composer of orchestral and film music. He is noted for the integration of choral and electronic elements in many of his film scores, and for frequent use of Celtic musical elements. Horner has won two Academy Awards for his score and song compositions for the film Titanic in 1997.

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James Horner was born in Los Angeles, California. His father, Harry Horner, was a production designer, set designer and occasional film director. Horner's early years were spent in London, where he attended the Royal Academy of Music and studied under György Ligeti. He received his bachelor's degree in music from the University of Southern California, and eventually earned his masters and doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles where he studied with Paul Chihara and others. After several scoring assignments with the American Film Institute in the 1970s, he ended his teaching of music theory at the UCLA and turned to film scoring.

Horner began his film scoring career by working for B-movie director and producer Roger Corman. His works steadily gained notice in Hollywood, which led him to take on larger projects. Horner made a breakthrough in 1982, when he had the chance to score for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, establishing himself as a mainstream composer. Horner continued composing music for high-profile releases in the 1980s, including Krull (1983), Star Trek III: The Search For Spock (1984), Cocoon (1985), Aliens (1986, earning his first Academy Award nomination), Willow (1988), Glory and Field of Dreams (both 1989).

Horner's scores also began to see a secondary life with their usage in film trailers for other movies. The track "Bishop's Countdown" from Aliens is probably the single most used track for action film trailers. In a strange twist, several films whose scores were composed by Michael Kamen have had Horner music for the trailers, most notably the music from Willow is substituted for the theme Kamen wrote for the 1993 remake of The Three Musketeers.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Horner also displayed a talent for writing orchestral scores for children's films (particularly those produced by Amblin Entertainment), with credits for An American Tail (1986), The Land Before Time (1988), An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991), We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story (1993), and Casper and Balto (both 1995).

The year 1995 saw Horner produce no fewer than six scores, including his commercially successful and critically-acclaimed works for Braveheart and Apollo 13. But Horner's greatest financial success would come in 1997 with an enormously popular score to Titanic, which became the best-selling instrumental soundtrack in history with over 24 million copies sold worldwide. That year, he won Academy Awards for Best Original Dramatic Score and Best Original Song for "My Heart Will Go On" (which he co-wrote with Will Jennings), in addition to three Grammy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.

Since Titanic, Horner has continued to score for major productions (including The Perfect Storm, A Beautiful Mind, and The Legend of Zorro). Aside from the major projects, Horner periodically tackles smaller projects as well (such as Iris and Bobby Jones: A Stroke of Genius). He frequently scores for the films of director Ron Howard, a partnership that began with Cocoon in 1985.

Recently, Horner finished the scores for All the King's Men, directed by Steve Zaillian, and Apocalypto, directed by Mel Gibson.

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