At 2:20 a.m. on this date in 1912, the luxury liner S.S. Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Of the 2201 people of on board, only 711 reached their intended destination in New York. Eight British musicians, members of the ship’s band stayed on board, reportedly playing a hymn-tune as the ship went down.

In 1969, British composer Gavin Bryars, prepared a multi-media musical work titled “The Sinking of the Titanic,” which incorporated spoken interviews by Titanic survivors with a set of variations on the hymn tune played by the ship’s band. In 1985, the sunken wreck of the Titanic was rediscovered, and renewed interest led to a 1990 revival performance and recording of Gavin Bryars’s score.

A few years later, composer James Horner wrote an Oscar-winning film score for director James Cameron’s Titanic–an incredibly successful cinematic dramatization of the story.

Horner has written other famous film scores like those for “Aliens” and “Braveheart”—but none quite as successful as “Titanic.” That film grossed more than $600 million at the domestic box office and more than $1.8 billion worldwide. Ironically, considering this “titanic” success, the first film for which Horner composed a score was entitled “The Drought.”