Aaron Fruchtman is an American composer, conductor, and musicologist.
Fruchtman was born in Los Angeles, California and began piano lessons at the age of three. After graduating from Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica, California, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Berklee College of Music and was awarded the Symphony Hall Composer Award. He received an Advanced Studies Certificate in Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television from the USC Thornton School of Music, where he studied with renowned composers David Raksin, Christopher Young, Joe Harnell, Jack Smalley and David Spear. Fruchtman earned a Master of Music degree in composition from University of California, Riverside. Fruchtman earned his Ph.D. studying musicology at the University of California, Riverside with Byron Adams and Walter Clark. His musicological research examines underscores of Jewish-themed films and their composers’ social and cultural world in the Golden Age of Hollywood. He has presented his research at numerous conferences including NYU’s Music and the Moving Image, Youngstown State University’s Jewish Music and Identity, UCLA’s Thinking Beyond the Canon, and at national meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society for American Music. Fruchtman’s essay titled, “Sounding the Shofar in Hollywood Film Scores” was included in the book Qol Tamid: The Shofar in Ritual, History, and Culture published by Claremont School of Theology Press in 2017. Fruchtman holds music history appointments at California State University, Long Beach and California Lutheran University.
Fruchtman composed scores for the first two feature films directed by Amber Benson, (best known from her role as Tara Maclay on Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Chance was the winner of the Audience Choice Award at the Sidewalk Film Festival and was followed by Lovers, Liars & Lunatics . Following their film collaborations, Fruchtman produced and arranged Benson’s vocal debut on the album You Are Light.
Fruchtman was commissioned to write The Journey, a four-movement piece for narrator, chorus, and orchestra. This epic piece, written expressly for the New York City Master Chorale, tells the historic tale of settlers migrating across the Oregon Trail to the Pacific Ocean. Under the direction of Artistic Director Thea Kano, the New York City Master Chorale premiered The Journey on May 31, 2009, at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Academy Award-nominated actor Bruce Dern performed the narrator role.
Elmer Bernstein was an American composer and conductor. In a career that spanned over five decades, he composed "some of the most recognizable and memorable themes in Hollywood history", including over 150 original film scores, as well as scores for nearly 80 television productions. For his work, he received an Academy Award for Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) and Primetime Emmy Award. He also received seven Golden Globe Awards, five Grammy Awards, and two Tony Award nominations.
James Newton Howard is an American film composer, orchestrator and music producer. He has scored over 100 films and is the recipient of a Grammy Award, an Emmy Award, and nine nominations for Academy Awards.
Morten Johannes Lauridsen III is an American composer and teacher. A National Medal of Arts recipient (2007), he was composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale from 1994 to 2001, and is professor emeritus of composition at the USC Thornton School of Music, where he taught for fifty-two years until his retirement in 2019.
The Los Angeles Master Chorale is a professional chorus in Los Angeles, California, and one of the resident companies of both The Music Center and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. It was founded in 1964 by Roger Wagner to be one of the three original resident companies of the Music Center of Los Angeles County. Grant Gershon has been its music director since 2001, replacing Paul Salamunovich.
Howard Pollack is an American pianist and musicologist, known for his biographies of American composers.
Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate is a Chickasaw classical composer and pianist. His compositions are inspired by North American Indian history, culture and ethos.
David Lang is an American composer living in New York City. Co-founder of the musical collective Bang on a Can, he was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Little Match Girl Passion, which went on to win a 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance by Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices. Lang was nominated for an Academy Award for "Simple Song #3" from the film Youth.
Joey Newman is an American film composer, orchestrator, arranger and conductor working in the fields of film and television.
Adam Oscar Stern is an American conductor. Born in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, United States, Stern was trained at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. He received his MFA in conducting in 1977 at the age of twenty-one, the youngest music student in CalArts' history to receive a master's degree.
Herbert Pope Stothart was an American songwriter, arranger, conductor, and composer. He was nominated for twelve Academy Awards and won Best Original Score for The Wizard of Oz. Stothart was widely acknowledged as a prominent member of the top tier of Hollywood composers during the 1930s and 1940s.
Nilo Alcala is a Filipino-American composer and 2019 The American Prize Winner in Composition. He is the first Philippine-born composer to be commissioned by Grammy winner Los Angeles Master Chorale, and also to receive the Aaron Copland House Residency Award.
Michael Jeffrey Shapiro is an American composer, conductor, and author.
Laurence Dreyfus, FBA is an American musicologist and player of the viola da gamba who was University Lecturer and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.
Paul Salamunovich KCSG was a Grammy-nominated, American conductor and educator.
The New York City Master Chorale (NYCMC) is a 60-person non-profit chorus, led by Artistic Director David Recca. NYCMC was founded in 2005 by Dr. Thea Kano, and directed by her until 2019. From 2019 to 2021, the Chorale's Artistic Director and conductor was Dusty Francis. In July 2021, the Chorale announced David Recca as the new Artistic Director with the mission “to connect people through chorale music by presenting high-quality concerts inspired by the distinct energy, diversity, and talent of New York City.”
Sharon Farber is an Israeli composer. She was born in Bat Yam, Israel.
Maria Louise Newman is an American composer of classical music, as well as a violinist and pianist. She is the youngest child of Alfred Newman, a prominent Hollywood film composer. Maria holds the Louis and Annette Kaufman Composition Chair and the Joachim Chassman Violin Chair at the Montgomery Arts House for Music and Architecture in Malibu, California. She is also a founder of the Malibu Friends of Music.
Tomasz Golka is a Polish-American conductor, composer and violinist. Golka is the son of pianist Anna Karczewska-Golka and trombonist George Golka. He is the great-grandson of Max Stern. His younger brother Adam Golka is a pianist.
Germaine Franco is an American film composer, conductor, songwriter, arranger, record producer, and percussionist. She is a Grammy-winning and Oscar-nominated composer. Her extensive resume, coupled with her curiosity, and inventiveness, has made her a trailblazer. Franco was the first Latina to win a Grammy for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media with her score for Encanto (2021), and the first to receive the Annie Award for Outstanding Achievement for Music in an Animated Feature with Coco in 2018. In addition, Encanto received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score, an SCL Award for Outstanding Original Score for a Studio Film, an Annie Award for Best Music in a Feature, a Billboard Music Award, and a World Soundtrack Awards nomination for Film Composer of the Year in 2022. She is also the first Latina to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score, as well as the first to join the music branch of the Academy. She recently completed work on the Netflix smash hit The Mother directed by Niki Caro. The film is one of Netflix's most successful releases to date, going No.1 in 82 countries.
Noreen Green is an American conductor and educator. She is Conductor and Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony, which she founded in 1994, and the Jewish Community Chorale, which she founded in 2020.