B &W Bowers & Wilkins

James Newton Howard
For James Newton Howard, a musical note isn’t just something you hear. “It’s hard to explain, but I’ve always thought notes have tactile qualities. Some are chewy. Some have … I don’t know … a rust-like quality. Others have a kind of knife-edge, prickly feel about them. In my mind, every note has a distinctive character, much like the characters in a movie. When it comes to scoring films, that’s a useful starting point.”
James Newton Howard created the ambitious score for Peter Jackson blockbuster King Kong.James Newton Howard created the ambitious score for Peter Jackson blockbuster King Kong.Click to enlarge

The film composer James Newton Howard was born in 1951 in Los Angeles.

He was exposed to classical music throughout his childhood, partly because his grandmother was a classical violinist, and by the age of four was following classical piano lessons.

It was an interest in popular music, however, and particularly in the music of the Beatles, that led to James’s first professional job in music as keyboard player for the LA-based rock band Mama Lion.

James went on to become one of the most in-demand session musicians of the period, working as a keyboard player for many famous musicians including Carly Simon, Harry Nilsson and Neil Diamond.

He got his first taste of working with an orchestra as a member of Elton John’s band, while recording the 1976 album Blue Moves.

James had been interested in film music from an early age and dabbled in soundtrack composition throughout the 1980s.

He wrote his first full-length score for the comedy Head Office in 1986, but it wasn’t until 1990 when he got his first real break: scoring the romantic comedy Pretty Woman. The film was a huge box office success, turned Julia Roberts into an international star overnight, and set James on course to become one of Hollywood’s most sought-after and respected film composers.

From that point on James has worked prolifically, often scoring as many as five or six features in a single year.

I’ve always thought notes have tactile qualities. Some are chewy. Some have … I don’t know … a rust-like quality. Others have a kind of knife-edge, prickly feel about them. In my mind, every note has a distinctive character, much like the characters in a movie.|James Newton Howard|Film Composer
James Newton Howard created the ambitious score for Peter Jackson blockbuster King Kong.James Newton Howard created the ambitious score for Peter Jackson blockbuster King Kong.Click to enlarge

Although he has produced soundtracks for a huge range of major films (My Girl, The Prince of Tides, Glengarry Glen Ross, Alive, The Fugitive and Batman Begins, to name a few), some of James’s most successful work has been the result of long-term collaborations with a single director.

He has produced four scores for Joel Schumacher, including compositions for Flatliners and Falling Down, but his most fruitful collaboration has been with M Night Shyamalan, for whom he composed memorable scores for The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, the Village, Lady in the Water and the Happening, which will be released in 2008.

Other recent and forthcoming scores include his ambitious score for the Peter Jackson blockbuster King Kong, the Leonardo DiCaprio thriller Blood Diamond, and the Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to Batman Begins.

James has won many awards for his work, including the prestigious Henry Mancini Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2000 from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.

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