James Newton Howard

Throughout his prolific career as a composer, musician, and songwriter, James Newton Howard has composed scores of all scales and genres, earning multiple nominations for his work. Howard began his music studies at an early age by studying at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara (California) and then studying Piano performance at the "University of Southern California". Howard later dropped out of college to collaborate with Elton John as a keyboard player during the 1970s and early 1980s before becoming a film composer in the mid-1980s.

By the 1990s, Howard had composed high-quality scores such as they are for the romantic comedy Pretty Woman, later receiving his first Academy Film Award nomination for his music for Barbra Streisand's drama film The Prince of Tides in 1991. He imposed the musical style of many films of that decade and thanks to his skills he was able to handle a variety of different musical genres. He has composed several of the scores for M. Night Shyamalan films such as The Sixth Sense, The Protege, Signs, The Forest, The Incident and The Girl from the Water. In addition, Howard composed the score for the western film Wyatt Earp, The Two Faces of Truth, and the Kevin Costner film Waterworld. He also wrote the music for three films for the Disney factory, these are Treasure Planet, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Dinosaur.

In 2005, alongside the German Hans Zimmer, he composed the music for the film Batman Begins, a collaboration that both had wanted to do for some time. In 2008 they repeated in The Dark Knight.

His musical style is elaborate and, at times, difficult to catalog. In general, it can be said that Newton Howard is a musician of soundtracks halfway between the symphonism of composers like Williams or Goldsmith and more experimental or less classical musicians like Zimmer, Badelt or Powell. He is very adept at action scores, to which he is able to successfully incorporate large sections of percussion and synthesizers. At times, his music becomes darker and incidental, adopting a more serialist or even minimalist style. He is one of the most recognized soundtrack composers of the moment. But his best known work is undoubtedly "The Hanging Tree", in collaboration with Jennifer Lawrence, written by Suzanne Collins and composed by The Lumineers for the film The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1, winning a platinum record and receiving from the public, while critics say he deserved a Grammy Awards nomination

His orchestration tends to be luminous, further away from other styles such as Howard Shore or John Barry. Clarinets, flutes and all woods in general are frequently present in his work. In fact, all its melodic power is usually supported by this family of instruments. It is also common for him to intersperse large symphonic progressions, with a bombastic sound, with martial rhythms based on percussion and brass. Other times, depending on the job and the director he works for, Newton Howard opts for a majority presence of the strings, where he experiments more and leans for a more enigmatic sound. Lately he has included very appreciable violin and cello solos in his soundtracks.

HANS ZIMMER

Hans Zimmer is a German musician born in Frankfurt on September 12, 1957 who since childhood was interested in music and received piano lessons. His first mentor was the composer Stanley Myers, author of several soundtracks of which his most popular work is "Cavatina" for the film "The Hunter". Zimmer collaborated with Myers in the music for low-budget films, of which perhaps the one that had the greatest international repercussion was "My Beautiful Laundrette" (My Beautiful Laundrette, 1986), although Zimmer was attracted by the new wave music that began in those years 80 collaborated with musicians such as Thomas Dolby, Trevor Horn or The Buggles with whom he appears in the video of his most famous song "Video killed the radio star."

In Spain he collaborated with groups such as Mecano, acting as a keyboard player in some of their concerts and was in charge of arranging some of the songs by Miguel Bosé or Amaya Uranga, once he was separated from the group Mocedades. At the same time he began to compose soundtracks. One of those first soundtracks was in 1988 when he composed the score for "Rain man" and the following year "Paseando a Miss Daisy" (Driving Miss Daisy, 1989) for which he got his first Oscar nomination. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.