U.S. authorities confirm death of music composer James Horner

U.S. authorities confirmed Tuesday the death of Oscar winning music composer James Horner, as the private plane he was flying crashed Monday near Santa Barbara in California.

“A singleengine S312 Tucano MK1 crashed under unknown circumstances” near Los Padres National Forest about 60 miles north of Santa Barbara, Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement.

“The pilot was killed,” it added.

Later, Horner’s agents, Michael Gorfaine and Sam Schwartz, officially announced the 61yearold composer’s death, Los Angeles Times reported.

A 10time Oscar nominee, Horner won two Oscars, one for the soundtrack of ‘Titanic’ (1997) and the other for the original song ‘My Heart Will Go On’ in the movie, sung by Canadian singer Celine Dion.

Horner had also been nominated for the soundtracks of ‘Alien’, ‘Apollo 13’, ‘A Beautiful Mind’, ‘Avatar’, ‘Braveheart’, ‘Field of Dreams’ and ‘House of Sand and Fog’, and also for the original song ‘Somewhere Out There’ from the movie ‘An American Tail’.

Horner composed over 100 soundtracks for movies including ‘The Mask of the Zorro’, ‘Legends of the Fall’, ‘Casper’, ‘Jumanji’ and ‘The Amazing SpiderMan’.

Born in Los Angeles in 1953, Horner began to play the piano at the age of five, going on to study at the Royal College of Music in London, according to his biography on the Imdb website.

He returned to California in the 1970s, to study music in two universities and received a doctorate in Music Composition and Theory from the University of California in Los Angeles.

Horner got his first big break with ‘Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan’ (1982) and went on to work with George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Oliver Stone and Ron Howard, among others.