Personal archive of composer James Horner donated to UCLA Library

James Horner, 1995. Phil Dent / Getty Images

“I’m happy to see that the UCLA Library will be helping to preserve James Horner’s creative legacy for future generations of composers and filmmakers,” said Academy Award–winning director
James Cameron.

Los Angeles, CA (July 11, 2023) — The personal archive of the late renowned composer James Horner has been donated to UCLA Library by his wife, Sara Nelson Horner.

The collection, valued at more than $2.2 million, features thousands of personal notes, scores and orchestrations. It spans from 1979, the year of Horner’s first credit as a composer for feature films, to 2015, when he died at the age of 61.

The archive includes Horner’s early scores for films by American Film Institute students and for noted B-movie director Roger Corman, as well as full orchestrations from his compositions for blockbusters such as “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” (1982), “Aliens” (1986), “Apollo 13” (1995), “​​Jumanji” (1995), “Braveheart” (1995), “Titanic” (1997), “A Beautiful Mind” (2001) and “Avatar” (2009).

“I’m happy to see that the UCLA Library will be helping to preserve James Horner’s creative legacy for future generations of composers and filmmakers,” said James Cameron, the Academy Award–winning director, screenwriter and producer with whom Horner collaborated on “Aliens,” “Titanic” and “Avatar,” which remains the world’s highest-grossing film. “His impact to film scoring was seismic, so having access to his creative process through his papers is important.”

Ginny Steel, UCLA’s Norman and Armena Powell University Librarian, said the collection — which will be available to researchers beginning in the fall — will be a boon to scholars for generations to come.

“Students and researchers from a wide range of disciplines, not to mention film buffs, can immerse themselves in Horner’s creative process through this one-of-a-kind collection,” Steel said. “From various versions of ‘My Heart Will Go On,’ composed for Celine Dion, to his countless sketches, orchestrations and handwritten corrections created for other legendary Hollywood productions, including television, this collection truly showcases the depth and breadth of Horner’s remarkable musical career and is an exciting addition to our collections.”

The collection was organized over the course of several months by Tomàs Peire Serrate, who earned a doctorate in music composition from UCLA in 2019.

“Horner’s attitude toward composition was ambitious, as he was always eager to try new things and new instruments, and to incorporate electronic instruments into his palette of musical colors and resources,” Serrate said. “I think a detailed look at his scores can inspire composers not only in relation to his musical genius for ‘writing to picture’ but just musically.”

Born in Los Angeles and raised in London, Horner received a Henry Mancini Scholarship to attend UCLA, from which he earned a master’s degree in music in 1976. He is the son of Harry Horner, an Oscar-winning art director and film and television director, whose collection of set designs from 1938 to 1957 is also held by UCLA Library.

After Horner’s death in 2015, Sara Nelson Horner funded the James Horner Composition Endowed Scholarship at UCLA to support students pursuing degrees in music composition.

“My family has a long history with UCLA, including being the alma mater of my mother, environmental activist and ‘mother of the Santa Monica Mountains’ Susan B. Nelson,” said Sara Nelson Horner, who is also a UCLA alumna. “The scholarship support James received from UCLA was so important early in his career, and I hope the gift of his papers and the scholarship created in his name will be able to help others.”

Horner’s work continues to thrive in contemporary filmmaking. Portions of his score for “Avatar” live on in the 2022 film “Avatar: The Way of Water,” which pays tribute to his memory.

The Horner collection will be held at UCLA Library Special Collections, which stewards the campus’s collection of rare and unique materials. It holds more than 500 collections of film music, including the Alfred Newman Collection; Bernard Herrmann Collection of Music for Film, Television and Radio Production; Alex North Collection of Motion Picture Music; and Miklós Rózsa Ben Hur Film Score Collection; as well as performing arts materials related to actors’ collections and personal papers; motion picture stills, posters, scripts and set designs; animation; oral history interviews; and film studios and organizations.