In February of 1990, I was among a smallish group of college kids representing San Bernardino in the Junior Olympics in Chicago. (Also in that group? WIRED editor Adam Rogers.) We were fencers. Having washed out of the competition in the first 40 minutes or so, we found ourselves with a few days to fill in a brutally cold city. So we went to the movies. We saw Glory.
By the time the composer James Horner scored Glory, he had already done music for dozens of the films that make up my personal cinematic Pantheon. I grew up during the golden age of space movies, which was also the golden age of premium cable, so something of Horner's was almost always playing in my house (the Star Trek sequels; Aliens; is Battle Beyond the Stars supposed to be a guilty pleasure?) But in 1990, I was in the middle of a transition from film music fanboy to prospective professional, still entranced and amazed by a mysterious art, but with an emerging knowledge of both the craft and the business of film scoring that had me thinking "maybe I can do that." That night in Chicago, while everything froze outside, came a molten surge of inspiration to try. And it wasn't even a space movie.
Denzel Washington's performance in Glory won him his first Oscar, and anybody who's seen the film can call out the scene that clinched it. His character Private Trip is lashed for desertion, and in a two-minute performance of remarkable restraint and precision, without uttering a word or even parting his lips, Washington seems to trace the whole history of slavery in America up to that moment. For me, seeing that scene for the first time in Chicago is the most durable memory from a trip crowded with memories.
But the delicate emotional gradient shifts that give that scene its force owe an awful lot to James Horner. How much? I'd have been tempted to submit only the sound from that one scene to the Academy, and see if Washington still got his nomination. The steady pulse of the timpani and the measured crack of the punitive lash set up a polyrhythm that helps make the music both excruciatingly earthbound and, as the closely-voiced strings and oboe rise, transcendent. Play this scene with the sound muted. Now play it with the sound on and your eyes closed. Which one puts a lump in your throat?
While the otherworldly, metallic atmospherics of films like Aliens and Star Trek II still play in a loop in my head, the stirring stuff became his trademark: Field of Dreams, Braveheart, Apollo 13 (okay, that's a space movie). My favorite of all is Searching For Bobby Fischer, which is at least as emotionally ambitious as Titanic, but with more economy of musical gesture. Close intervals twining around each other up high; rich, dark piano strikes down low. Grounded and transcendent. That's how you make someone thaw and melt. I'll be studying that for a long time.
Or maybe plundering, if I'm being honest. I never met James Horner. But he has my thanks for the many ideas of his that I've blithely been a conduit for. Horner himself got accused of plundering a few times, but he has my forgiveness, I suppose, to the extent that he availed himself of some communal knowledge in his own writing. Perhaps the most arresting theme in Aliens came from Khachaturian by way of Kubrick (Gayane's Adagio, which was also featured in 2001:A Space Odyssey). We have a word for that: Tribute. In tribute, then. Thank you, Mr. Horner.
Buckley is a film and TV composer in Los Angeles who most recently worked on the TV shows Odd Squad and Wallykazam!
