On the Art and Craft of Film Music: A Conversation with James Newton Howard

James Newton Howard has for the past twenty years demonstrated a versatility rare among film and television composers. From early film scores such as Pretty Woman (1990) and The Fugitive (1993) to his recent work in M. Night Shyamalan's films, Howard has earned his reputation as one of the top film composers of his generation. There are various ways one can measure his success: in awards and award nominations (there are many of both), in the critical acclaim of films he has done, or in the number of websites and YouTube postings devoted to his work. Ultimately the most significant indication of his standing is simply this: only a handful of film composers active today will attract musically aware viewers to a film, and Howard is one of them.

Howard's film career shows a trajectory from keyboard to symphony, exhibiting in his early years the influences of the pop and rock styles of his friend and employer Elton John to more recent scores that have been influenced by composers such as Stravinsky. The chance to work with orchestra and choir in Flatliners (1990) opened new possibilities for Howard, but the pop background still shows in the electronic percussion sounds of his first action movie, The Fugitive (1993). By Wyatt Earp (1994), after a decade of writing for film, Howard had begun to think orchestrally. Howard's music can rival the aggressive rhythms of Stravinsky or the airy melodies of Copland when the dramatic moment calls for action or heroism. His penchant for driving rhythms has led him to use meters that have five or seven beats to a bar in several films (Waterworld from 1995 and King Kong from 2005, for example), and in Wyatt Earp, one of his best scores (whatever one thinks of the film), he even managed to pull off the sauntering walk to the OK corral in 5/8 time, a feat worthy of Bartók.

The best of the symphonic film composers have closely studied the scores of great classical composers such as Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky. They may have gleaned even more from the ranks of the near great such as Anton Bruckner, Aaron Copland, and Gustav Holst. One difference between James Newton Howard and some of his contemporaries is that his debts to these composers rarely call attention to themselves. There is little in his work that compares to the overt debt that James Horner owes Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man in Apollo 13, or that John Williams has to Holst, Bruckner, and several others in Star Wars or to Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite in his brilliant score for Home Alone.

Successful film composers often find themselves collaborating repeatedly with a particular film director, notably as in the partnerships of John Williams and Steven Spielberg or that of Nino Rota and Fellini, both of which spanned decades. In these two cases, as in that of Bernard Herrmann and Hitchcock, it is frequently difficult to separate images from sounds, so thoroughly do they contribute to each other. Among many recent pairings, Hans Zimmer has scored half a dozen films for Ridley Scott, James Horner has partnered often with Ron Howard, and Danny Elfman with Tim Burton. Howard has worked extensively both with Lawrence Kasdan and M. Night Shyamalan, composing all of Kasdan's films since 1991 (including Grand Canyon, Wyatt Earp, Mumford, and Dreamcatcher) and all of Shyamalan's since 1999 (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water, and The Happening). The next installment of this latter collaboration will be The Last Airbender, scheduled for release in 2010.

Howard's versatility is evident in his willingness to accept markedly different projects at the same time. In the eighteen months during 1999-2000 that he worked on Dinosaur, for instance, he also composed The Sixth Sense, Runaway Bride, Stir of Echoes, and part of Snow Falling on Cedars—a remarkable variety (not to mention productivity), and testimony that one Howard film does not necessarily sound like another. He is, as...