In 1997, James Cameron’s Titanic made its sensational appearance at the cinema, and with it a colossally popular soundtrack album of that movie’s powerhouse orchestral score by James Horner, which won him Oscars for original score and song. The album sold 30m copies – and continues to sell – featuring the song which he co-wrote, My Heart Will Go On, sung by Celine Dion. Horner’s aria of emotional defiance and survival, hurled like flotsam from the oceanic swell of his overall composition, was a key moment of the film, a moment which existed both inside and outside its narrative. When we saw Leo and Kate at the prow of the ship, when we remembered the awful final moments in the lifeboats, it was Horner’s music that thrummed through our hearts and minds.

Watch Celine Dion sing My Heart Will Go On – video

James Horner was one of the elite group of Hollywood composers – people like Alexandre Desplat, Carter Burwell, Hans Zimmer, John Williams, Ennio Morricone or indeed Bernard Herrmann – who can be relied upon to score a movie with imagination, sensitivity and professionalism. Horner’s work would give film an all-important substance and solidity which we can feel almost subconsciously, perhaps without noticing what the music is doing, how it is working with the images on screen and how it is guiding our emotions. Horner created scores which worked on three levels: the film’s deep structure and texture, the higher, intermediate level of counterpoint with narrative (when the music underscores the apparent mood, and when it is in contradistinction) and the topmost flourish, the standalone whistle-outside-the-cinema tune, the As Time Goes By or Third Man moment.

In one of the last TV interviews before his death in a plane crash in southern California, Oscar-winning composer James Horner talks about the success of Titanic and his musical score to the film Guardian

Like the greats, Horner was staggeringly prolific, who produced music as naturally as breathing, but who set himself a daunting workload, often working 16-hour days. Incredibly, for the year 1993 he scored 13 films, including Alan Pakula’s The Pelican Brief and Mel Gibson’s The Man Without a Face – more than 20 hours of recorded music in a single year, all with complex arrangements. Billy Wilder said that in movies, you make the subtleties obvious, and that is part of what a Hollywood composer does: create music designed to be perceived in tandem with images, but subtlety and strength go together. When the music is jarringly obvious, the composer is not doing his or her job.



Horner’s breakthrough score is often thought to be Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, in 1982, in which music conveyed the excitement of voyaging through outer space; it combined a clamorous Williamsesque deployment of theme with something more distinctive, with a nautical signature, maybe even like something by Aram Khachaturian, a surging, propulsive score appropriate for journeying – ideas to which he, of course, returned in Titanic.

My favourite James Horner score is his work on another outerspace spectacular, Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, a thoroughly enjoyable movie for which the music is all-important – particularly Horner’s stirring theme for The Launch, which conveys the excitement, the rapture and the awe with a melodic line which at times suggests secularised church music and appears to quote the Christmas carol Oh Come All Ye Faithful.

Listen to the Launch from the Apollo 13 soundtrack – audio

It may have influenced Hans Zimmer’s score for the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar, although I prefer Horner’s theme. It is a tremendous score, and Horner was a Hollywood giant.

