Film composer and USC Thornton School of Music alum James Newton Howard (DMA piano performance ’69) has donated his collection of scores and sketches to the school. The collection, appraised at more than $2 million, is to be housed in USC Libraries' Special Collections.

During the past two decades, Howard’s compositions have been used in more than 100 motion pictures and numerous TV programs.

His work includes the scores for Michael Clayton, Signs, The Sixth Sense, Runaway Bride and Pretty Woman. He received Academy Award nominations for his work on The Village, My Best Friend’s Wedding, One Fine Day, The Fugitive and The Prince of Tides.

Howard’s collection includes his holographic musical sketches, cue sheets, supplemental scores for recording engineers and music editors, recording call sheets, conductor’s scores (with or without notations), orchestrations, unused and deleted cues and miscellaneous notes for each production.

Such a collection is rarely seen on the market. Studios now recognize the innate value of the components that make up a motion picture and carefully guard their heritage. The collection will provide a unique asset to researches, historians, producers and students in USC Thornton’s flagship program in scoring for motion picture and television.

Brian King, director of the USC Thornton School of Music film scoring program, called the collection a “living archive, one that truly represents the craft and techniques of film music used today.”

The James Newton Howard Manuscript Collection can be used as a study tool by anyone interested in the studios’ music production during the 1980s and 1990s. In addition, the collection will allow researchers and historians to trace the creation of a film or television score from its inception to the synchronization of music to film.

The sketches, scores and recorded materials will be a valued part of the curriculum in USC Thornton’s scoring program. According to King, “these materials will provide the students with many practical and creative examples with insights to composition, orchestration and the direct relationship between composition and technology as developed and mastered by James Newton Howard.”

Although he was trained in classical piano, Howard also took an interest in pop music. He attended the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, where he studied with pianists Leon Fleisher and Reginald Stewart. In addition to his piano performance study at USC, he studied orchestration under arranger Marty Paich, who later conducted several of Howard’s scores.

"James' mastery of both the emotional and cinematic aspects of a scene is truly remarkable; there's no genre for which he doesn't speak the musical language. His instincts are immediate and fully informed by the scene but surprising at the same time. He's a born storyteller,” said David Koepp, the screenwriter of Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, Panic Room and Mission: Impossible.

Koepp is a member of this year’s 20th annual USC Libraries' Scripter Award selection committee.