[Nicolai P. Zwar]

It also depends greatly on what is meant by “originality”. Let’s look at the extremes: Obviously, a composer who is totally un-original, bereft of any ideas of his own, one who just copies what others have done without adding anything to it, whose music and style is just an imitation of somebody else’s music and style, it not ever going to be considered a great, or even good composer.
So in that sense, I’d say originality is an essential element for good or great art. There is no great piece of music, no great symphony, no great film score, that does not have an element of “originality” to it. No, not even a good one.
But of course, it is not the only element, and it depends on how far you take “originality”. For me, “originality” doesn’t mean that every single aspect of any piece of art has to be “original”. In fact, most of the time, it’s not. Paul Hindemith recycled themes by Carl Maria von Weber, yet his Symphonische Metamorphosen is a highly original composition. Just like James Horner was in my view a highly original composer, the fact that he recycled and re-used themes and ideas (his own and others) doesn’t take away from that, because he applied them originally.

Take the opening of ALIEN and the way Horner approached it. The inspiration from Khachaturian’s Gayane is obvious, especially since Gayane already had an association with outer space through its use in 2001. But Horner did not simply quote or imitate it. He altered the entire function of the material. Gayane is a calm, almost hypnotic piece, yet Horner combined its atmosphere with snare drums, irregular percussion patterns, and tense orchestral effects that transform the soothing original into something unsettling. The result is a sound world that feels both familiar and completely recontextualized

In other words, the originality lies not in every individual element being new, but in the way those elements are combined into something that did not exist before. “Originality” is a necessary result of any truly creative process, but it’s not a means to itself.