James Horner (born August 14, 1953 in Los Angeles, California) is an American film composer. He is noted for his effective integration of choral and electronic elements in many of his film scores, and for frequent use of traditional Irish (Celtic) musical elements.
Horner began his 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 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, establishing himself as a mainstream composer.
Read more Horner continued composing music for high-profile releases in the 1980s, including Krull (1983), Cocoon (1985), Aliens (1986, earning his first Academy Award nomination), Willow (1988), Glory and Field of Dreams (both 1989).
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), 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, The Missing, 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.
Despite Horner's prolific career and considerable commercial success, he remains a somewhat polarizing composer among fans of film music, due to accusations of self-plagiarism in his works.
Horner has been accused of (perhaps unintentionally, perhaps as an homage) transposing hooks and orchestral motifs from other scores, both his and those of other composers. (As an example, the signature themes for the Klingons in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and the Xenomorphs in Aliens (1986 film) are identical.) While copying music (but not entire themes) from one's own previous scores is common practice, this point is one of fierce debate between proponents of Horner and his detractors.
