FOND MEMORIES – EPISODE 2: 1978 – FINDING A NEW LOVE: FILM MUSIC

^{“It was never my intention to go into film music. I was going to be a composer, that was my calling.” 1}

^{“I was studying music and my plan was basically to write serious avant garde classical music per se and exist in the world of grants and commissions. For this you really need a power base of being in a University, being a professor.  2}

^{“I was having a piece performed and in attendance was the director of the American Film Institute and he asked if I had ever done a movie before… I said “Sure, I’ll give it a try.”” 3}

^{Arguably, the piece James Horner refers to is not Spectral Shimmers, which was performed only once, in January 1979, and that was after the AFI scores.}

^{“There was no money. They could hardly pay the musicians. I was destitute. And I didn’t have any training in film technique. I sort of jumped in and learned the job. I lied my way in at the beginning. Said I knew more than I did. I was too embarrassed to say that I didn’t know”. 4}

^{His first experience was on The Drought, a feature film directed by Dick Lowry (picture), with whom James Horner made three more TV movies: Angel Dusted (1981), A Few Days in Weasel Creek (1981) and Rascals and Robbers: The Secret Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn (1982). Notably, The Drought featured the prolific Clu Gulager, an actor who will turn up again in these columns, a decade later in My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys (1991).}

^{“I was asked to do an AFI film, The Drought. I said what the hell. I fell in love with the film, like a stroke of lightning. I suddenly knew what I wanted to do—write film music.” 5}

^{“Once I had written my first piece against picture, I sort of fell in love with it. It was like lightning hit me. I found that I could write anything I wanted to write and there wouldn’t be a label attached to it. I was no longer considered conservative, I was no longer considered avant-garde or anything in between.” 3}

^{“That was my second lightning moment: when I realised my compositions could change depending on the material I was writing for : horror films, westerns, space movies and love stories all require very different types of composition, and I became enamoured by the storytelling ability of music when it was married to picture.” 6}

^{“So I turned my back on academia and that world all together, I just had a change of heart completely after spending my whole life in conservatories and turned my attentions to film music.” 2}

^{“Nowhere else do you get the opportunity to write something, and four weeks later stand in front of the best players in the city and hear your work. It's the best learning experience in the world.” 8}

^{“When I left academia, and left school, and started writing for film, I thought I’d found a new media for myself because I thought going into a dark hall and just listening to Strauss or Bruckner or Mahler being played–for younger audiences, that wasn't a world that was going to work for me anymore. What younger audiences were interested in was going into a mixed media world where there would be dance and music, or film and music, and that's what really drew me into film music, that it was mixed media.” 1}

^{The added power of music married to visuals, the gratifying experience of actually getting his worked performed, the promise of a wider audience, the sad experience of Spectral Shimmers, all of these elements contributed to Horner pursuing a career in film rather than in the world of contemporary music, which the composer always felt was "dying". 9}

^{“I did about seven or eight AFI films, and a bunch of student films, and gradually I went to low-budget independent films, and slightly higher-budgeted independent films. Then I worked for Roger Corman.” 8}