STANDOUT SET PIECES #3: COMING HOME FROM THE SEA (THE PERFECT STORM)

3.0 Bringing you up to speed Reportedly, James Horner really wanted this assignment, and for good reason, because The Perfect Storm (2000) offered him the kind of canvas he liked to work on: it’s chockful of action sequences big and bold, and yet at the core of it all is a tragic and very human story of ordinary men who brave extraordinary circumstances and end up paying the highest price. Based loosely on Sebastian Junger’s novel, the real-life story centers around the crew of the Andrea Gail, a trawler headed by Billy Tyne (George Clooney), a captain who is down on[...]

THE TODD-AO YEARS

Todd-AO Scoring Stage, CBS Radford, Studio City. If you happen to carefully read the liner notes in your Horner albums, you must have noticed the name of this recording studio several times. The composer has indeed recorded more than forty scores there, or almost half his discography, from Swing Kids (1992) to Deep Impact (1998) and finally The Spiderwick Chronicles (2007). Let's go back to this historical place where the maestro's brilliant notes sounded in thousands. In the 1920s, producer Mack Sennett, owner of Keystone Studios, master of silent films and the man who famously launched Charlie Chaplin's career, moved his production[...]

BETWEEN INTELLIGENCE AND SENSITIVITY: TWO DISSECTED UNTRUTHS

Everybody has a right to judge James Horner's music and not to like it. Generally this disenchantment is reflected in terribly pejorative verbs such as dig up, borrow, pump, copy, plagiarize ... The kind of actions the composer is accused of, putting forward the idea of ‌‌a lazy craftsman's poor and sloppy work: the pickaxe as an unsubtle tool, borrowing as a sign of weakness, pumping for large quantities, copying for the lack of creativity, plagiarism as a lack of respect towards the other composers. It is difficult to go against this phenomenon because the allegations are undeniable: Indeed, it is indisputable[...]