The legacy of James Horner’s ‘Titanic’ soundtrack
I can recall my high school Valentine’s Day disco in almost perfect detail. The sweaty hands, the Pepsi breath, the half-eaten Flump in my jean pocket. I’d just bought a new T-shirt from the recently opened Superdry in Norwich shopping centre and had spent nearly two hours engineering my emo sweep so that it would conceal the great pink spot in the centre of my forehead. On the stage, our teachers would usually scold us during assemblies, a local DJ called Tim Broadside was playing that most romantic of all school disco lentos: the James Horner-composed Titanic theme ‘My Heart Will Go On’.
I had somebody to impress that night: a girl who had shown zero interest in me until a week prior when a minor growth spurt had given me an extra inch over most of my classmates. I knew I was in with a chance because we’d been gazing at each other from opposite sides of the pick ‘n’ mix table all night. Whenever I’d go over for a bag of quavers, she’d be there, dipping her hand into a paper bag filled with pastel-coloured Flying Saucers. At one point, our hands met in a tangle of jelly snakes. There and then, I knew it was love. But I still needed proof, and the only way of determining anybody’s affection back then was to ask them for a slow dance to the sound of Celine Dion.
By the second verse of ‘My Heart Will Go On’, things were not going well. My crush looked bored and distracted, as though I was keeping her there against her will. “Do you want a Flump?” I asked in a moment of panic, but she just rolled her eyes and carried on looking over my shoulder. Eventually, her friends came to the rescue, leaving me awkwardly side-stepping, hands poised at my chest like some jilted Tyranosuarras Rex. When I returned from the toilet, Dion sang the penultimate “Near, far, wherever you are.” I looked around for my crush and saw her wrapped around my friend Drew. Unable to face the rejection, I skulked off to ponder the complexities of love over a Curly Wurly.
That night may have put me off slow dances for life, but it did reaffirm the power of James Horner’s music for Titanic. Horner passed away in 2015, but the 1997 score endures as one of the most famous and beloved movie soundtracks of the 1990s. Its syrupy sweetness made me and my nine-year-old older sister blub when we first watched Titanic for the first time, instilling in me a taste for melodrama. It’s no surprise, then, that like so many people who watched Titanic as children, I wound up being fully obsessed with film soundtracks and classical music in general. By filling his score with historical instruments and references to 20th-century classical music, Horner demonstrated that music could be used to unlock the past, to give life to something that would have otherwise remained unknowable. It was, in retrospect, the ultimate gateway drug to one of the most inaccessible genres. With Titanic, Horner made classical relatable.
