“I’m different from some other composers, because I don’t look at this as just a job. I think of music as art,” James Horner, music composer of over 150 films, once said.
On Monday, the Oscar winning composer died at the age of 61 in a plane crash near Santa Barbara. Horner was piloting the small aircraft when it crashed into a remote area about 60 miles north of Santa Barbara, officials said.
Horner earned 10 Oscar nominations in all, being recognised for his work on two other Best Picture winners: Braveheart and A Beautiful Mind.
He also received nominations for An American Tail, Field of Dreams, Apollo 13 and House of Sand and Fog.
Here are some of his best compositions.
- Horner won the two Academy Awards in his career, and both for James Cameron’s blockbuster Titanic.
- The Braveheart soundtrack was nominated for an Oscar, and a Golden Globe. It was the second of Horner’s three collaborations with Mel Gibson as director.
- Horner teamed up with director Ron Howard for A Beautiful Mind, a movie based on the life of late mathematician John Nash, and his wife, Alicia.
- In another of his collaboration with Ron Howard, Horner composed the for the music for the space drama, Apollo 13.
- Another space adventure, quite on the sci-fi side, this soundtrack earned him his first Oscar nomination.
- At 28, Horner scored for this sci-fi classic, and went on to compose the music Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
- In another collaboration with James Cameron, Horner took on this sci-fi epic.
- The score of this movie was composed within nine days by Horner.
- Horner scored for this drama set in 1900s US remote wilderness, directed by Edward Zwick.
Horner has three films coming out soon - Southpaw, the boxing drama that stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Rachel McAdams and is due in theaters in July; Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Wolf Totem, out in September; and The 33, a drama based on the 2010 mining disaster in Chile that’s set for November.
(With inputs from IANS)