James Horner Quotes

"I'm a fanatic about Irish music. I love its moody, modal and timeless quality. I'm different from some other composers, because I don't look at this as just a job. I think of music as art." 
James Horner

I wanted, in "Titanic" to give the sense of voices without being a choir. I was scared to death of it becoming like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and a sort of holier-than-thou type of church sound. And so, the choir I've treated -- and it's sort of quasi-electronic sounding. It's not a pure vocal, like a choir singing in a church. But in other films where I've used boys choir or voice, it's very -- it's the most human of instruments to me. And there's something so compelling about it and naked, when it sings by itself, that I just find so emotionally powerful. And I don't know if you remember, in the end of the sinking sequence, when the ship actually does finally go down, there's this whole sort of wailing...
James Horner

I was educated primarily in London where I went to the Royal College of Music and from there went to the University of Southern California and got a Master's Degree in theory and composition, then went on to a doctarate and got a teaching job in LA. Primarily, all this academia was because I didn't find out about film music until I'd say eight years ago. Prior to that point, I was studying music and my plan was basically to write serious avante gard 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, and even having grown up in England and having gone to a conservertory there, {I felt it was more prgamatic to get an American degree; things were bleek academically in the UK, and so I got American post-graduate degrees. As soon as I got my doctorate 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. I was aksed to do a student film, and then I went on to do several more and that led to doing vvery low-budget horror films for Roger Corman, then that led to my first feature film, my first big Hollywood feature film, which was like eight years go and then it was onward from there.
James Horner