Harry Horner

James Roy Horner was born in Los Angeles on August 14, 1953, the year Sergei Prokofiev died, as if Horner’s first steps in this world were a sly wink to the creator of Romeo and Juliet, one of the Maestro’s musical fathers. He was the eldest son of Harry Horner (July 24, 1910 – December 5, 1994), an artistic director of Austrian desceligetnt born in Holitz (the present Czech Republic), who along with Max Reinhardt emigrated to the United States in the mid-30s and enjoyed a distinguished career in Hollywood – he was nominated for five Academy awards and won two.

Christopher Horner

James Horner was born of the second marriage of his father in 1952 with Joan Fraenkel. He had two younger brothers, Christopher and Anthony.

"I had been playing the piano since the age of four and I decided at the age of 10 or 11 that I wanted to be a composer. I remember distinctly when that moment happened: I was listening, at school (ed. note: probably the Holland Park School in London), to the 2^nd movement of Beethoven's 7^th Symphony. I already knew the piece, but for some reason it just really struck me as especially stunning that day. When I went home I listened to it again, maybe 20 times, and that was the day I decided I wanted to compose." ¹

"My musical abilities prompted my father to enroll me in an undergraduate class at the Royal College of Music in London, where we were living. I was very intimidated by the idea of entering this venerable institution. When I saw that the alumni list on the brochure included Benjamin Britten, Colin Davis, Gustav Holst and John Ireland, I wondered if I would ever be able to walk in their footsteps. But the warm and creative environment quickly dispelled my doubts. I ended up totally immersed in the surroundings and discovered a taste for composition and conducting." ²

"I was going to college at the Royal College of Music and I was studying what everybody studies in college: Bach… I was completely, in my own head, in a different place. I was writing requiem masses and I was thinking of arias and different worlds… I left college after my 2nd year." ³

He transferred to The Hamburg University of Music and Theatre, where he studied under the famous Hungarian composer György Ligeti. At the time, Ligeti’s music featured prominently in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Three excerpts from Ligeti’s visionary work suitably depicted the metaphysical side of the American director’s ground-breaking science-fiction epic. The first was Requiem for soprano, mezzo-soprano, two mixed choirs and orchestra, which acts as a theme of sorts for the monolith and whose influence stretches all the way to the concluding strains of Death of Titanic (Titanic, 1997), where James Horner drew on Ligeti’s uncompromising approach of death to express the fury and terror of the moment. The other two Ligeti cues that Kubrick used in 2001 were Atmospheres and Lux Aeterna, which plays during Dave Bowman’s trip through an alternate reality. The time spent with Ligeti left a profound stamp on the early stages of James’s career.

"I took time off and I went to Hamburg and studied with György Ligeti. We didn’t study so much his music,

but we studied Renaissance music (ed. note: Thomas Tallis) which was a love of mine in college and a love of his, and if you study Lux Aeterna or his requiem or a lot of the Ligeti pieces, they are put together in a way that I very much admired. In a very traditional way it ends up sounding very atonal. When we first heard Lux Aeterna in 2001, when you first heard these pieces, they were considered as avant-garde in those days; but, really, they were put together like Renaissance pieces and his voicing was very similar. I was intrigued by that and I did study with him. I was also interested in studying Benjamin Britten. I had all these weird things that I liked, Prokofiev… None of the stuff was particularly taught in college, it was just the particular interests that I had." ³

"I returned to California to get a teaching job and work on my doctorate." ⁴

"I thought if I could land a job teaching in the United States, it would be easier to be granted scholarships, subsidies and funds to have my work performed." ⁵

"And even having grown up in England, I felt it was more pragmatic to get an American degree; things were bleak academically in the UK, and so I got American post-graduate degrees." ⁶

James Horner – 1971

Front page of program from James Horner recital, in 1973.

"I attended school during the last gasp of modernism. The focus was avant-garde 20th-century music, from Arnold Schoenberg to such then-leading lights as Luciano Berio, György Ligeti, and Witold Lutosławski. Post-Romantic music was considered hopelessly tacky. No one studied Richard Strauss. But I remember Jamie walking around with Strauss’s Alpine Symphony score under his arm. He was smarter than everyone else." ⁷

"I worked very, very hard on that piece and I worked very hard on pushing it around, sending it to all kinds of people, working very hard to finally find and orchestra to play it and a place to perform it. I went to Indianapolis and pushed them very hard to get rehearsal time and after all that work they perform it for one evening, and you say, "Now what?" It gave me such a feeling of having had an impact only on the immediate four hundred people in the audience. It was very well received but it didn't have any impact – I couldn't get another performance. It was too expensive because it was a big orchestra piece, and it's a modern piece and there were a lot of things that were going against writing modern pieces." ⁸

"The almost empty hall shook my faith in contemporary music and its impact on the public. That's when I was asked to write music for a student film." ²