I keep seeing people referring to James Horner's "Danger Motif" all over the place. Perhaps I have not heard enough of Horner's scores, but I have no idea what the danger motif sounds like. Would anyone mind posting a sound/YouTube clip so that I have an idea on what everyone's talking about?
(Honestly, I'm not starting this with the intention of bashing Horner nor wanting to add baking soda to vinegar. That's just beating a dead horse, if it hasn't been already.)
What I find interesting is that Chris Gordon uses a similar rhythmic figure but WITH COMPLETELY DIFFERENT INTERVALS! Meaning, he actually wrote something original. This really bothers me about Avatar. I am sick of hearing Rachmaninov's 1st Symphony in Horner's scores.
The Mask of Zorro (Elena's Truth - 0:00) Aliens (all over the place, e.g. "The Complex")
I also seem to recall its appearance in The Land Before Time and The Rocketeer, but I can't find them at the moment if they're there.
I really don't have a problem with it myself. When I heard it in Avatar I smirked a little, but hey... it's probably something only us enthusiasts would even notice in the context of the film.
Pretty blatant, did Horner think anyone wouldn't have noticed?
Horner knows that no one outside of soundtrack geeks gives a damn about film music, and everyone he's cribbing from has been dead for 200 years, so why come up with something original?
Listening to Achilles Leads the Myrmidons again, I make this bold, off-topic statement: it's one of the best first act action set pieces in recent memory, and Horner's 2nd best use of the danger motif in his career to ST II (see kept it slightly on topic!). At the very end when the trumpets come in with those sly first two notes of Achilles' theme when Hector's arrow misses Achilles, I smile every time.
Honestly, the more I listen to it, the more I love Horner's Troy score. Not really sure about the backlash to this one. It doesn't even have that much plagiarism - self or otherwise!
The first time I listened to Enemy at the Gates my thoughts were, ah, Horner's Danger Motive Symphony because it showed up so many times. Check it out from 7:19 to the very end of "The River Crossing To Stalingrad" as just one example in the score.
My all time favorite Horner plagiarism of another composer is the scene in Star Trek III when the Enterprise is burning up. It's taken, with some alterations of the intervals in places and slight ornamentation of the melodic line (with similar orchestration), from the final scene from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. This, for me at least, is a no doubter as it is much more than a few note similarity of a short theme that is unavoidable by any composer. It's a wholesale lifting of an entire passage in almost every aspect with only minimal alteration.
Starting at 1:44 and continuing for approximately 20 seconds.
Starting at the beginning and continuing for a little over 20 seconds. The poor sound quality of the clip obscures the sound of violins as they jump up a couple of octaves at the apex of the second run of the melodic exactly like in R & J.
It didn't bother me all that much because it worked in the scene quite effectively and it's one of my favorite passages from my favorite work by Prokofiev so I enjoyed hearing it in another context. Honestly I'm not bashing because I still like Horner, but rather pointing it out as it just jumped right out at me because of my familiarity with a lot of classical music. Heck, I spent 5 years studying music in college and never really used any of that knowledge after that since I went in another direction professionally, so I'm just trying to get my $ worth back on the investment!
Honestly, the more I listen to it, the more I love Horner's Troy score. Not really sure about the backlash to this one. It doesn't even have that much plagiarism - self or otherwise!
Part of Horner's music in "Troy" sound like botched, defective clones of Prokofiev's "Alexander Nevsky", at least in my recollection.
One of the things that becomes apparent when people continually jump on the Horner plagiarism bandwagon is... many of those people probably don't know their "classical" music as well as they'd like to think.
Horner's vulnerability is that he borrows from the more popular classical composers, so everyone leaps on the clear similarities. Yet there are countless borrowings by almost all film composers, the only difference being that many lean on classical composers whose music is far less well known and so escapes the recognition of those with only a more "popular" knowledge of the classics. To spot a theme derived from Mahler or Beethoven isn't too difficult considering the exposure such famous pieces get. If Horner wanted to disguise things more, it wouldn't be too hard for him to do so. Perhaps he's simply enthralled by the music he chooses to be the source of his inspiration and is not too proud to show it openly.
I've lost count of themes that are borrowed/inspired by/stolen by film composers from obscure baroque operas or concertos, or even renaissance pieces very often composed by anonymous songsters or created for a single instrument, but few people will have heard the originals or recognize the modern translation into a fully orchestral piece.
I'm definitely no authority on classical music but it does amuse me to see Horner jumped on so regularly while other, equally culpable film composers get away with it. That's because while people are observant enough to spot Horner's obvious attachment to Prokofiev or Mahler, they aren't quite so adept at jumping up and saying "Hey! That Delerue theme is lifted from an anonymous piece for lute dating back to 1510.
Perhaps some of those on the Horner-bashing bandwagon are actually revealing a LACK of classical awareness by only spotting the obvious. Well, that's one way to look at it...
