Best known for his heart-tugging music in blockbuster, Titanic, music composer, James Horner, passed away in a plane crash on Monday, near Santa Barbara.
Horner was flying one of his planes, single-engine S312 Tucano turboprop, solo on Monday when it later crashed and burned, in the Los Padres National Forest, Southern California. With his death, the music industry lost one of the most prolific composers of the century.
While the news of the crash had been confirmed on Monday, his agents Gorfaine and Schwartz confirmed his death as the pilot, on Tuesday in a press statement.
“It is with the deepest regret and sorrow that we mourn the tragic passing of our dear colleague, long-time client and great friend, composer James Horner. A shining light has been extinguished, which can never be replaced.”
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Amongst other hit film scores of the two-time Oscar winner included Braveheart, Legends of the Fall, Apollo 13, Avatar, Star Trek, Aliens, A Beautiful Mind and Glory.
Aged 61 at the time of his death, Horner had been working on creating film scores since the late 1970s. While his first major musical breakthrough was marked by “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”, he received awards for his work much later in the 1990’s for Titanic.
He won 2 Oscars, 3 Grammy Awards and 2 Golden Globe Awards for the best original dramatic score and the best original song for the megahit number, My Heart Will Go On.
A 10-time Oscar nominee, Horner believed that the music of a movie should be so good that the audience forgets how the movie turns out, as stated in an interview at his website.
In yet another interview with Los Angeles Times, he explained how his job as a music composer is to ensure that the audience can feel every event with their heart, “When we lose a character, when somebody wins, when somebody loses, when someone disappears — at all times I’m keeping track, constantly, of what the heart is supposed to be feeling. That is my primary role.”
After three decades of hits, one after the other, Horner was recently working on the sequel of Avatar with James Cameron.
Other film scores by Horner releasing this year include boxing drama, Southpaw, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Wolf Totem and drama film, based on the 2010 mining disaster in Chile, The 33.
Our condolences to his survivors’, wife Sara and daughters, Emily and Becky.
