The Oscar-winning composer James Horner – whose most famous film scores include Titanic, Avatar, Braveheart and Apollo 13 – has died in a plane crash in Southern California at the age of 61.

Born in Los Angeles, Horner spent much of his childhood in London where he studied at the Royal College of Music. His first film score was The Watcher in 1978, and his most recent was for The 33, a film based on the dramatic rescue of the Chilean miners in 2010, which is due for release in November this year. 

Horner won two Oscars in 1998 for Titanic (Best Score and Best Original Song for 'My Heart Will Go On'), he also won a Gramophone Award in the same year for the Titanic recording. 

Gramophone interviewed Horner in 1998, and he spoke candidly about the joys and trials of life as a film composer:

'When James Cameron and I first discussed Titanic I told him that what attracted me to the project was the love story set in the milieu of the overall tragedy. Anybody could score the ship sinking - that's just a big action sequence and whether you even have music in it or play it documentary-style with just sound effects won't make or break anything - but the music is needed for the more sensitive aspects of the movie which aren't conveyed so clearly. And he agreed it was very important to bring out the inner story - the big spectacular sequences could take care of themselves.

'Titanic is different from Jim's other more action-orientated films (The Terminator, True Lies for example) and that's what attracted me to it - this is very much a vehicle for a moving, emotive score. Like it or not, Jim was going to have to deal with the music in a way I knew he hadn't dealt with before. He approached me after seeing Braveheart - he had loved the music in that movie. Working for Mel Gibson was such a different experience than working for Jim, but we got to the same place in the end on Titanic although it was by a very different route.

'Because this is such a complicated movie the film was not fully edited when I worked on it, so from the beginning I knew the music was going to have to be fixed-up as scenes changed or solidified. This made the job more difficult because not only did I have to keep altering things, but the concept of individual scenes could change, and on a larger scale this affected how scenes worked in the broader context. Sometimes only a tiny thing was altered, but the whole musical impression of the sequence had to be addressed again. I sometimes liken what I do to making a quilt: I begin with primary patterns and colours, but at a certain point I have to get the whole picture of the quilt before I can start knitting it together. When something changes it can be quite a chore - in order to readdress just a tiny piece of the quilt I have to unweave a whole section and weave it back up again. 

'Orchestral colouring is very important in my scores. I don't see the traditional Hollywood orchestra as being the answer for everything. While a big conventional orchestra is a very powerful means of conveying emotion to the audience, I constantly look for colours to augment it so that, for example, I don't have to rely on just an oboe selling something - I can find some primitive or more personal instrument, like the Shakuhachi or Uillean pipes, that for me is much more of an expression of how I feel about the movie. I find these colours add a personality that prevents it from becoming a generic movie score.

'I always try and find something unique that will make the music stand out and be different. For Titanic I used the voice of Sissel Kyrkjebø, whose singing sounds very Irish to me; I wanted to convey something personal with the voice, and the choir is an amplification of that - it doesn't have any particular meaning, nor do the Uillean pipes for that matter they're just very emotional, timeless, wistful colours. I try to find expressive instruments that with minimal use, even without playing a whole theme, enable me to state an emotional idea in the brief amount of time available on screen. 

'From the point of view of record companies the world of serious contemporary concert music is dwindling - certainly in terms of concerts that audiences attend. The days of audiences sitting in a dark hall listening to three or four dreary contemporary pieces have gone. For me composition in film is the next logical stage. Multimedia is obviously where current interests are, and multimedia is a logical extension of opera, ballet and dance. To write a film score and put your all into it is the contemporary version of writing an opera or an oratorio - the downside is you have an employer and you have to make changes on his whim. But I think that has always been the case: Mozart, Haydn and Bach had to change things when writing a commission. I'm writing a commission for a contemporary art form that will (hopefully) appreciate it if I do a good job - I think film is as close to the perfect outlet for music as a serious contemporary composer could find.'