Oh, golly. I knew somebody famous had died the other day, but I didn’t know it was James Horner, the composer of over a dozen movies that have sunk deep into the popular consciousness.
Rats. Gone way before his time, but Horner still leaves behind a most impressive legacy of music. My favorite–the score that made me sit up in the theater and ask, “Who is this guy?”–is the score he did for Aliens in 1986, but I second Paul Buckley’s nomination of Horner’s work on Searching For Bobby Fischer as an utterly-beautiful composition. See that movie if you’ve not done so. It’s an underrated gem.
I also suspect that if you watch once again Titanic or Glory or Apollo 13 or Star Trek II in the near future, you won’t watch them, or listen to them, in quite the same way as you did before.