At our first meeting, I played about 20 brief sound samples for Horner and we discussed their suitability for our purposes. Over the next few weeks, I brought him approximately 250 additional samples. He is quite well versed in non-Western music, so I had to dig deep to find “new sounds” for him. The samples I chose ranged from ten seconds to a minute long. They came from cultures all around the world, illustrating different musical devices, vocal and instrumental timbres, vocal performance techniques and textures, extended instrumental techniques, and song structures. In some cases, the samples were from relatively well known cultures such as India or Sweden. But I also delved into field recordings and the repertoires of lesser known minority cultures...
Horner then met with Jim Cameron for his input on our musical ideas. Cameron is a very hands-on director and wants to be kept in the loop about all major decisions. Most of the ideas we presented were dismissed by Cameron out of hand, rejected with appropriately blue language as either too recognizable (“Oh, that’s Bulgarian”) or just “too fucking weird!” Half a dozen examples were approved as possibilities. Our next step was to begin creating alien music that was informed by the timbres, structures, textures, and styles of those samples. In today’s world, there are few musical cultures that have not been heard by outsiders. Musically uneducated ears can now readily identify Bulgarian singing or Indonesian gamelan. Faced with this increasing awareness of global cultures, we realized that no one musical culture would work. Instead, we created a library of musical elements and performance techniques that would eventually be melded into a global mash-up, fusing musical elements from the numerous world cultures we had explored into one hybrid Na’vi style. Combining unrelated musical elements could evoke the “otherness” of the Na’vi without bringing to mind any specific Earth culture, time period or geographical location.
“Extremely radical departures in musical style risk alienating audiences” (Hayward 2000:25). Similarly, Horner noted: “I couldn't go off into some weird world and present a whole new scale system or a whole new theme system; I had to try to glue everything together... No matter how dense it is on the screen or how alien it might be, there is a thread in the music that keeps it grounded for the audience so they know what is going on and how to feel” (Boucher 2009a)...
In January 2009, Horner emailed me: “[Cameron] rejected most of [our demo recordings] saying one thing sounded like something from Japan, another from China, another was too weird, etc., etc.” (Horner 2009a) ...Eventually, Horner realized the musical culture of the Na’vi using what Cooke calls a “generalized timbral exoticism” (Cooke 2008:505) inspired by the sound samples I presented and the demo recordings we made. Hayward notes that, often, “alienness and otherworldliness are expressed through selective ‘othering’ of cultural conventions” (Hayward 2000:25). Avatar’s final score evokes that otherness.
"Had I been more avant-garde in my musical choices, I believe I would have pushed the audience further away from an emotional centre. . . . I chose beauty, heart, and emotion over trying to radically expand the audience’s musical capacities” (Horner 2009e). “Audiences seem to be much more capable of absorbing new visuals and things that are much more outrageous or avant garde [sic] visually – aurally, audiences are much more conservative,” Horner says. “If I went as far as Jim [Cameron] did visually, and started to use all kinds of weird scales for the music and made it too avant garde [sic] or too out-of-the-box, I would be ungrounding the film. . . . Obviously I’m still writing film music, so it still has to appeal to a film audience in a conventional way” (Horner 2009c).