James Horner died in a plane crash, and we lost the genius who wrote the theme song of Titanic and Avatar

At 9 a.m. local time on Monday (June 22), the private jet of james horner, a famous American film score composer, crashed 60 miles north of Santa Barbara, California. Police said there was only one pilot at the time of the crash and had died in the crash. The American entertainment website "Variety" was the first to confirm that the pilot was Horner himself, and just when people were still expecting a miracle to happen, Horner's assistant Sylvia Patrycja posted the status on Facebook:

"We have lost a brilliant man with a big heart and a great talent who left while doing what he loved, thank you for your support."

The information reaffirms that James Horner was killed at the age of 61.

James Horner, the name may not be familiar to many Chinese film fans, but once again, we're just learning about an artist's amazing talent when he stopped working forever.

Talent: From Titanic to Wolf Totem

James Horner has composed scores for many Hollywood films, most notably my heart will go on for Titanic, for which Horner won the Academy Award for Best Original Music and the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1997. In his abrupt end to life, he was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, winning grammys four times and Golden Globes twice. Other works familiar to Chinese audiences include The Burning Years (1994), Braveheart (1995), Beautiful Hearts (2002), Avatar (2009) and the soundtrack of Wolf Totem, which was released in China earlier this year.

Born in Los Angeles in 1953 to a Czech immigrant father who was also a set designer and art director, it was perhaps under the influence of his father that both Horner and his brother, a writer and documentary filmmaker, were inextricably linked to art.

Horner has been practicing piano since he was 5 years old and spent his early years studying at the Royal College of Music in London for several years. He later received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), a top institution of cinematic arts in the United States.

In 1979, Horner began composing film songs, initially scoring some low-budget horror or sci-fi films produced by the American Film Academy and New World Pictures, and three years later, Horner entered the ranks of Hollywood's first-line composers with the theme song of StarCraft 2: The Roar of Khan.

In 1986, Horner was nominated for the Oscar for original music for the first time by relying on the soundtrack of the science fiction film "Alien" directed by Cameron, and the following year it was nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Song with "American RatTan", and in 1997, Horner's theme song "My Heart Will Go On" for "Titanic" not only won the Oscar for best original song, but also became the highest-grossing film soundtrack album in history, selling more than 30 million copies worldwide.

Horner is good at composing for feature films, and in terms of creative style, he prefers to use classical symphonies and atmospheric music with regional or epochal characteristics to pave the main plot line, and use compact and accelerated orchestral music to match the sudden rhythm of the plot and the culmination of dramatic contradictions, which you can clearly feel if you are reviewing his work.

Horner loves classical symphony unusually, and in Baidu Encyclopedia, there is a paragraph like this: "He thinks that in the face of the creation of classical symphony and film music, he will choose symphony, the reason is very simple, the composer can be moved by the movie picture to a handful of snot and a handful of tears, but when returning to the keyboard to compose, it is impossible to play in the sky, you must stare closely at the movie picture, count the seconds and negative grids, and clearly calculate the starting and ending of the music." Moreover, the space left by the film director for music to play is usually only three or five minutes, and the momentum of the music must be brewed up, and it will end hastily, which is really not addictive. ”

Controversy: Borrowing of music

Many of James Horner's works are a mixture of his own early works, or contain excerpts or adaptations of the works of other classical musicians. For example, in his compositions for Star Trek II: The Wrath of the Khan and Star Trek III: The Dragon and Tiger Fight, he excerpted the works of the famous Soviet composer and pianist Alexander Nevsky and Romeo and Juliet, and the heroic themes and climactic battle scenes in the film were adapted and excerpted from Robert Schumann's Rhine Symphony and Wagner and Orff's works, respectively.

Although "borrowing music" has been commonplace since the Middle Ages, and a large number of musicians have borrowed extensively from the classics of their predecessors in their own works, there are still some critics who believe that Horner's borrowing from other composers, as well as his own early works, has made his works lack authenticity.

Even the most talented artists are inevitably questioned. However, when we think back to Horner, these controversies will be difficult to trace, and the timeless classic "My Heart Eternal" will ring in our ears.