Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Glory by Original Soundtrack
British-born James Horner earned a B.A. from USC, an M.A. and Ph.D. from UCLA and began movie scoring during the late 1970s on American Film Institute student films. His first big-budget commission was to score "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan" (1982). IMDB lists 138 screen credits for him since then, including the Academy Award-winning one for "Titanic" (and That Song also won one). His scores for Aliens , Field of Dreams, Braveheart, Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, and House of Sand and Fog have also been nominated for Oscars.
Ironically, the much-loved score for the much-loved 1989 movie Glory won a Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition. The irony is not that the score was not nominated for an Oscar, since that nomination is for original music but that the major themes from the "Glory" soundtrack were adapted (some have labeled the appropriations "plagiarism") from well-known work by well-known 20th-century "serious" composers. Horner took Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man," slowed it down and transferred the melody from trumpets to the Harlem Boy's Choir, but listening to the soundtrack I better understand why the music sounded Coplandesque to me (the whole soundtrack has the feel of a more plaintive one than Copland's for "The Red Pony" and "Our Town").
The most martial music (track 10) for the suicidal charge on Fort Wagner does not even have the originality of adding voices to instrumental music, deriving from Carl Orff's cantata "Carmina Burana." The (repeated) melody in " In "Brave Words, Braver Deeds" (track 7) was lifted from the "Offeratorium" of Gabriel Fauré's Requiem, and the solo horn figure in "Burning the Town of Darien" (track 6) was expropriated Ralph Vaughan Williams's variations on a theme of Thomas Tallis. (Unlike Horner, Vaughan Williams credited the source of the melody he varied.)
Other parts probably were "borrowed" from other less readily recognizable compositions. (Horner also has a well-deserved reputation for recycling his own work, and wordless choruses are a recurrent device in his soundtracks, emulating Ennio Morricone's movie music, most notably for Burn!.) The theme expropriated from Copland (prominent in tracks 1,4,11,12, quoted in others) recurs so often that the need for other sources was obviated. There is another four-note leitmotif that seems familiar, but perhaps is familiar to me from the movie and may be composed, not just scored, by Horner. (In other scores, Horner has provided four-note themes for villains).
As music to listen to without consideration of plagiarism/originality, the soundtrack is very elegiac—long on mournful wistfulness, short on martial stirringness (except for the fife and drums at the start of "Forming the Regiment" and "The Year of Jubilee"). Even the Orff appropriation sounds like doomed action (very appropriately. since the movie's characters are being slaughtered).
The disc's run-time is only 43 minutes. There are no liner notes, though they would have afforded an opportunity to acknowledge the composers of the music Horner rearranged and forestalled the talk of plagiarism and "Name That Tune."
And whatever the sources, the music worked very well for/in the movie.
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