But why is this stuff public? Of course, a famous A-List composer's passing is going to be news, but is it really necessary that the media tell the rest of us what is happening with his trust? Why is that anyone's business?
I share your ambivalence about that, and I probably shouldn’t have been curious, but alas… I certainly did not expect to find such horrible news.
Seeing Apollo 13 (when I was eight!) was one of the first times I can remember understanding the magic that music adds to movies. Fantastic composer, a really sad loss.
I recall being totally knocked over by Land Before Time and Cocoon, probably in early 90s - it was the kind of music that seemed to speak to childhood dreams in everyone; sentimental but with not an ounce of artifice or insincerity. That led to discovery of Star Trek, Aliens and many of his other great scores of the 80s.
I can still watch the opening of the Land Before Time and, despite being aware as I now am of its heavy debts to several major classical composers, just marvel at his ability to cast that sequence as one long, majestic, unfurling balletic overture. His ability to seamlessly score long-form sequences like that was, from the very beginning, hugely impressive, and he elevated that film beyond measure, as he did many others.
Then there was a period in early 90s that was incredibly fertile for him, where just seemed to go from strength to strength, producing dozens of model scores in hugely divergent genres and styles: Rocketeer, Sneakers, Clear And Present Danger, Spitfire Grill etc. At that point, briefly, I was buying new Horner albums without seeing the films.
I part company with a lot of Horner fans in that 1995 is when my interest in him waned a bit. The Celtic stuff (which, like many of his signature styles, originated in his hugely inventive late 80s/early 90s period) was never my favourite, his invention slowed down and he increasingly began repeating himself to a fault (I'd have been more impressed by Apollo 13 if I hadn't heard much of it in Sneakers), and the films became bigger, more conventional and less varied, which typically drew less interesting results. But he could still knock them out the park like nobody else when the right film came along— Beautiful Mind, Iris etc.