An American in Paris is a jazz-influenced symphonic poem for orchestra by American composer George Gershwin first performed in 1928. It was inspired by the time that Gershwin had spent in Paris and evokes the sights and energy of the French capital during the Années folles.
Gabriel Yared is a Lebanese-French composer, best known for his work in French and American cinema.
Adam Guettel is an American composer-lyricist of musical theater and opera. The grandson of musical theatre composer Richard Rodgers, he is best known for his musical The Light in the Piazza, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Original Score and the Tony Award for Best Orchestrations.
Howard Leslie Shore is a Canadian composer, conductor and orchestrator noted for his film scores. He has composed the scores for over 80 films, most notably the scores for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies. He won three Academy Awards for his work on The Lord of the Rings, with one being for the song "Into the West", an award he shared with Eurythmics lead vocalist Annie Lennox and writer/producer Fran Walsh, who wrote the lyrics. He is a consistent collaborator with director David Cronenberg, having scored all but one of his films since 1979, and collaborated with Martin Scorsese on six of his films.
The Guarneri Quartet was an American string quartet founded in 1964 at the Marlboro Music School and Festival. It was admired for its rich, warm, complex tone and its bold, dramatic interpretations of the quartet literature, with a particular affinity for the works of Beethoven and Bartók. Through teaching at Harpur College, University of Maryland, Curtis Institute of Music, and at Marlboro, the Guarneri players helped nurture interest in quartet playing for a generation of young musicians. The group's extensive touring and recording activities, coupled with its outreach efforts to engage audiences, contributed to the rapid growth in the popularity of chamber music during the 1970s and 1980s. The quartet is notable for its longevity: the group performed for 45 years with only one personnel change, when cellist David Soyer retired in 2001 and was replaced by his student Peter Wiley. The Guarneri Quartet disbanded in 2009.
James Newton Howard is an American film composer, music producer and keyboardist. He has scored over 100 films and is the recipient of a Grammy Award, an Emmy Award, and nine nominations for Academy Awards. His film scores include Pretty Woman (1990), The Fugitive (1993), Space Jam (1996), Dinosaur (2000), Peter Pan (2003), King Kong (2005), Batman Begins (2005) and its sequel The Dark Knight (2008) which he composed with Hans Zimmer, The Hunger Games franchise (2012–2023), Fantastic Beasts trilogy (2016–2022), and Jungle Cruise (2021). He has collaborated extensively with directors M. Night Shyamalan and Francis Lawrence, having scored eight of Shyamalan's films since The Sixth Sense (1999) and all of Lawrence's films since I Am Legend (2007). He even worked on other frequent scores for other directors Edward Zwick, Michael Hoffman, P.J. Hogan, Andrew Davis, Lawrence Kasdan, Joe Johnston, Taylor Hackford, Ivan Reitman, Joel Schumacher, and David Yates.
Concerto in F is a composition by George Gershwin for solo piano and orchestra which is closer in form to a traditional concerto than his earlier jazz-influenced Rhapsody in Blue. It was written in 1925 on a commission from the conductor and director Walter Damrosch. It is just over half an hour long.
Jacques Pépin is a French chef, author, culinary educator, television personality, and artist. After having been the personal chef of French President Charles de Gaulle, he moved to the US in 1959 and after working in New York's top French restaurants, refused the same job with President John F. Kennedy in the White House and instead took a culinary development job with Howard Johnson's. During his career, he has served in numerous prestigious restaurants, first, in Paris, and then in America. He has appeared on American television and has written for The New York Times, Food & Wine and other publications. He has authored more than 30 cookbooks, some of which have become best sellers. Pépin was a longtime friend of the American chef Julia Child, and their 1999 PBS series Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home won a Daytime Emmy Award. He also holds a BA and a MA from Columbia University in French literature.
Donald Romain Davis is an American composer, conductor, and orchestrator known for his film and television scores. He has also composed opera, concert and chamber music.
The New York UniversitySteinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development is the school of education of New York University. The school was founded as the School of Pedagogy in 1890. Prior to 2001, it was known as the NYU School of Education.
The music of The Lord of the Rings film series was composed, orchestrated, conducted and produced by Howard Shore between 2000 and 2004 to support Peter Jackson's film trilogy based on J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novel of the same name. It is notable in terms of length of the score, the size of the staged forces, the unusual instrumentation, the featured soloists, the multitude of musical styles and the number of recurring musical themes used.
James Ira Newborn is an American musician, actor, orchestrator and composer, best known for his work composing motion picture soundtracks.
Brian May was an Australian film composer and conductor who was a prominent figure during the Australian New Wave. He is perhaps best known for his scores to Mad Max and Mad Max 2.
Michael Carl Ruhlman is an American author, home cook and entrepreneur.
Don Walker was a prolific Broadway orchestrator, who also composed music for musicals and one film and worked as a conductor in television.
Philip J. Lang was an American musical arranger, orchestrator and composer of band music, as well as a musical educator. He is credited for writing the orchestral arrangements (orchestrations) for over 50 Broadway theatre shows, including many landmark productions, such as Li'l Abner (1956), Hello, Dolly! (1964), Mame (1966), George M (1968), Annie (1977) and 42nd Street (1980). Together with Robert Russell Bennett, he orchestrated the record-breaking productions of Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady (1956) and Camelot (1960). Russell Bennett, the dean of musical orchestrators, remarked that the original arrangements Lang had prepared for Annie Get Your Gun (1946), which utilized a modern technique of orchestral scoring, were beautifully done.
Tony Blondal is a film and television orchestrator and conductor, and record arranger. He started out his musical career playing live (guitar) and doing studio recording sessions. He also pursued his other interests, which were writing orchestral and band arrangements for singers, and big band writing and arranging. Through this early work he met a group of TV composers who were busy and needed someone to help orchestrate and copy their music for weekly recording sessions. That experience led to other opportunities and started him on a new path, and he soon transitioned to film orchestration. To this day he still works in film primarily, but also occasionally in television and video games.
The music of The Hobbit film series is composed, orchestrated, and produced by Howard Shore, who scored all three The Lord of the Rings films, to which The Hobbit film trilogy is a prequel series. It continues the style of The Lord of the Rings score, using a vast ensemble, multiple musical forms and styles, many leitmotifs, and unusual instruments.
Joseph Church is an American music director, composer, pianist, arranger, orchestrator, and author. He is best known for his music direction of the musicals The Who's Tommy and The Lion King on Broadway.
Daniel Clive McCallum is a film composer, conductor, and orchestrator. He is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music in London.
