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Posted: |
Jun 27, 2020 - 12:34 AM
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By: |
mark_so
(Member)
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Or maybe, as Nicholas Meyer onces quoted him as saying during the writing of the score for Star Trek II: "I'm young, I haven't outgrown my influences yet."
i've come to see this as a rather wry response, a way of getting around something so as not to waste time on it. fact is i used to take a very negative view of the borrowing, or quoting, or stealing - whatever you wanna call it. finally i came to realize that it was just part of his aesthetic, or way of working if you like, take it or leave it. and the surprising thing was once i got past making a big deal out of it, the music got more interesting, not less. it also helps to have had some experience with other fields where the concern for authorship/intellectual property is understood as a very narrow matter of legal arcana indeed. consider all the polystylist music composed during the last century, especially composers like shostakovich, schnittke, berio, ligeti, gorecki, and on and on and on -- not to mention the bulk of modernist poetry. if we can fairly easily understand a poem to mostly be something that happens in language, and less importantly, the output of a particular hand holding a pencil, then surely something analogous applies in music. horner himself was as often brutally honest as he was evasive on the topic, but his remarks were revealing on either side. his paranoia about "copyright department" and the peculiar status of the studio as the "author" of the music, himself being just a "hired pencil," tells you a lot. so did the chutzpa of his statement in FSM about there being only so many combinations of notes, mathematically. in other words, there's a consistent attitude at play, a way of keeping an annoying controversy from cropping up and getting in the way, and more importantly, to protect a deliberate set of aesthetic work choices that for better or worse constituted his creative voice. i'll end with a quote from the great american poet and fellow-collector marianne moore, who said in 1969, well into her 80s: "in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition."
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I applaud Horner for his judicious use of inspiration. He could've used Prokofiev's "Battle on the Ice" in Casper, but he didn't. That's integrity, people.
All that's left of originality is atonality, and I'm pretty sure the John Cage estate has its hand in that cookie jar.
The funny thing is that this happens all throughout musical history. Does it happen a lot with Horner? Yes. Does it detract from me enjoying his music? Not one bit.
The most sensible post in this totally unnecessary thread and even more so in the week of the 5th anniversary of his passing.
At least now we know there's a five year span on the phrase "too soon". I hope critics brought the cheese, because 2021 is going to be a whinefest. ("Those are people who died, died...")
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