James Horner Braveheart (1995)

James Horner was forty-one when he scored Braveheart and was already two decades into the career that had produced Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Cocoon (1985), Aliens (1986), Field of Dreams (1989), and Glory (1989). The Braveheart score earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score (he lost to Luis Bacalov for Il Postino) and is one of the three or four scores that defined his idiom for a generation.

Born in Los Angeles, trained in London

Horner was born in Los Angeles in 1953 and trained at the Royal College of Music in London under György Ligeti before returning to Los Angeles for graduate work at UCLA. He scored small Roger Corman films through the late 1970s and broke into mainstream Hollywood with the Star Trek II score in 1982, which is now studied as a foundational text in modern film scoring — the use of brass for command authority and the Khan motif as a sustained low growl became templates Horner himself would return to for thirty years.

"Ligeti taught me that the music is a structure first and a feeling second. The structure is what makes the feeling land. If the structure is wrong the feeling is sentimental." — James Horner, Film Score Monthly (2009 interview, archived)

The Braveheart sound

The Braveheart score is built around three textures: solo Uilleann pipes (played by Eric Rigler), a wordless choir (credited on some pressings as the Choristers of Westminster Abbey, on others simply as Anonymous), and a full London Symphony Orchestra. The pipes carry the Wallace and Murron themes; the choir carries the funeral and scaffold material; the orchestra carries the battle scenes.

The two themes that carry most of the score are the "Wallace" theme — first heard over the opening Highlands flyovers^b1 and reprised at every structural turn — and the "Murron" theme, the love theme that plays under the candlelit wedding, the consummation montage,^b13 and the Tower cell scene where Wallace finally names Murron aloud.¹ The two themes are deliberately constructed as variations of each other; Horner has said in interviews that he wanted the audience to hear the love theme inside the Wallace theme without knowing they were hearing it.

"The two themes share a contour. When Wallace's theme plays in the battle scenes, you are also hearing Murron's theme inside it. By the time the Tower cell comes, the audience does not need to be told why Wallace is doing what he is doing — they have been hearing it for two hours." — James Horner, Film Music Magazine (2002, archived)

The Eric Rigler pipes

Eric Rigler's Uilleann pipes are the score's most identifiable sound. Rigler was a session player based in Los Angeles whom Horner had used previously on Patriot Games (1992) and The Devil's Own (1997). The Uilleann (Irish) pipes are technically the wrong instrument for a Scottish setting — the Great Highland bagpipes would be the period-correct choice — but Horner chose Uilleann because they could be played quietly and could carry a melody over an orchestral bed without overwhelming it.

The Highland bagpipes do appear in the score, but in specific places: the funeral for Malcolm Wallace,^b6 the Lanark raid,^b18 the Stirling charge,^b25 and the Bannockburn finale.^b40 The Uilleann pipes carry the love theme and the lament material; the Great Highland pipes carry the war material. Horner kept the two registers structurally distinct.

The "Anonymous" credit on the choral pieces

Some sections of the score's choral material are credited on the soundtrack album to "Anonymous." This is not a copyright accident — Horner used the credit for choral cues that drew on Latin liturgical fragments rather than original choral composition, and several film-score databases have since identified the cues as adaptations of medieval Latin sequences. The funeral material in particular borrows from the Dies Irae plainchant, which Horner had used in his Star Trek II and Aliens scores as a death motif.

"Horner used the Dies Irae more times than any other film composer of his generation. Braveheart is one of the most explicit uses — under the funeral, under the scaffold, under the head set on London Bridge. He treated it as a structural fact, not a quotation." — Daniel Schweiger, Film Music Magazine (2015, archived)

After Braveheart

Horner went directly from Braveheart into Apollo 13 (1995), Titanic (1997, Best Original Score Oscar and the best-selling orchestral score in history), A Beautiful Mind (2001), House of Sand and Fog (2003), and Avatar (2009). He died in June 2015 at sixty-one in a single-engine plane crash near Santa Barbara; he had been an active pilot for thirty years.

"There was the Braveheart sound, the Titanic sound, the Avatar sound. Three of the most identifiable scoring textures of the past forty years. He gave us all of them." — John Williams, statement on Horner's death, The Hollywood Reporter (2015)

Footnotes