PROFILE

ORIGINAL FILM SCORES

Chad Cannon is a composer interested in the intersection of cultures, history, and human stories. His score to the Academy Award- winning Netflix documentary American Factory has been called “stirring” (NY Times) and “graceful” (Washington Post) and was nominated for a Cinema Eye Honors Award for Outstanding Original Score. The film is the first release by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions. Chad’s debut soundtracks also received global recognition: in 2017, Paper Lanterns, lauded as “haunting, mystical” by The Japan Times, received two IFMCA (International Film Music Critics Awards) nominations for Best Original Score for a Documentary and Breakthrough Composer of the Year, while Cairo Declaration, co-composed with Xiaogang Ye, received China’s highest film prize, the Golden Rooster Award for Best Music. The PBS documentary CyberWork and the American Dream, with a symphonic Americana score by Chad, also aired nationally in 2019, reaching an estimated 90 million households and garnering him another IFMCA nomination in 2020.

Upcoming/recent releases include: the PBS special Harbor from the Holocaust, featuring performances by violinist Niv Ashkenazi, rabbi Avram Mlotek, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma; Deirdre Fishel’s Women in Blue, which documents the experiences of women police officers in Minneapolis (IndieWire’s David Ehrlich called the score “lush and powerful”); Singing in the Wilderness, which follows a Miao village Christian Choir in China’s Yunnan Province as they become a national sensation (HotDocs Premiere delayed due to COVID-19); Hello Future, a Chinese-language docuseries that explores technology & education in 6 countries (Hello Future has logged more than 37,000,000 views on Tencent); Qinghai: Our National Park, a 3-part TV series exploring the grandeur and wonder of China’s first and biggest national park; and Exposing Muybridge, a feature documentary starring Gary Oldman that examines the life of 19th century photographer, Eadweard Muybridge.

ARRANGEMENTS & ORCHESTRATIONS

Chad has worked with several of the world’s best-loved film composers as arranger and orchestrator. As chief arranger for Studio Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi since 2017, Chad has created large symphonic suites for Kiki’s Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, and Spirited Away, with dozens of performances by the New Japan Philharmonic throughout Japan and East Asia. He also created the arrangements for the traveling show Joe Hisaishi Symphonic Concert: Music from the Studio Ghibli Films of Hayao Miyazaki, which has been performed on four continents to continually sold-out audiences, including in Carnegie Hall. Chad’s arrangements also comprise more than half of the score to Hisaishi’s August 2019 animation release, Ni no Kuni (Warner Bros. Japan). In Hollywood, Chad has worked under Conrad Pope on scores by Oscar-winning composers Alexandre Desplat (Secret Life of Pets 1 & 2, Godzilla) and Howard Shore (The Hobbit trilogy). He is also credited under Tim Williams on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, both by composer Tyler Bates. Most recently, he worked with Harry Gregson-Williams to produce the Chinese portions of the score to the 2020 live-action Diseny re-make, Mulan, while working as arranger & additional composer for Japanese composer Shigeru Umebayashi on Ghost of Tsushima, a major Sony PlayStation release set in 13th century feudal Japan at the time of the Mongol Invasions.

CULTURAL DIPLOMACY

Fluent in Japanese, Chad is the founder of the Asia / America New Music Institute (AANMI), which promotes cultural diplomacy through contemporary concert music. With AANMI, Chad has produced chamber music concerts throughout Japan (including Okinawa), Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and the United States, featuring some of the world’s most impressive young classical talent, including Matthew Aucoin, Ryu Goto, Davóne Tines, Rachel Lee Priday, Kahchun Wong, Yuga Cohler, Kojiro Umezaki, Narong Prangcharoen, Takaoki Onishi, Jun Hong Loh, and Angel Lam, among nearly 200 other performing artists and composers. AANMI’s 2018 Japan Tour saw performances in Suntory Hall and several UNESCO World Heritage Sites and National Cultural Treasure sites, including Nijojo Castle in Kyoto and Dazaifu Tenmangu in Fukuoka. AANMI’s debut recording, Transcendent, produced by Chad alongside Grammy-winning engineer Matthew Snyder, was released on Delos Records in 2018 to critical acclaim. AANMI’s mission and impact continues to grow, with an upcoming concert tour of Japan sponsored by the US Embassy in Tokyo called Passing the Torch scheduled for June 2020 (postponed to June 2021 because of COVID-19). In addition, Chad has produced charity concerts for violinist Midori and the United Nations in Japan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Nepal. Together they visited more than 20,000 individuals in hospitals, schools, prisons, refugee camps, community centers, and diplomatic venues on eight separate tours from 2012-2017.

CLASSICAL CONCERT WORKS

Praised by The New York Times as “subtle, agile," and with “vividness of emotion”, Chad’s concert compositions tend to explore human emotion through the lens of cultural history, and often include visual or literary elements. In September 2019 conductor Kahchun Wong and the Nuremberg Symphony premiered Chad’s newest concert work, Himmelserscheinungen (Sky Visions), inspired by photographs of Antarctica by Christopher Michel. The Dreams of a Sleeping World, an hour-long symphony with woodwind soloist and choir, is based on 10 paintings by Japanese-Brazilian painter Oscar Oiwa, and features poems from around the world by individuals who have experienced large-scale calamities firsthand. The symphony premiered in 2017 by Mate Bekavac with the Slovenia Philharmonic and Choir, and was recorded by Vladimir Kulenovic and the Hollywood Studio Symphony in 2018. The recording and “symphonic film” were also featured as part of Journey to the Light, a summer-long solo exhibition by Oiwa at the 21st Century Museum of Art in Kanazawa, Japan, one of the country’s premier art institutions. Other commissions and collaborations include: Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, Hub New Music, Julia Bullock & Davóne Tines, Farallon Quintet, The Bridge Piano Quartet, Kyoshin-An Arts, Nuo An Spiritual Dance & Art Foundation, Hollywood Chamber Orchestra, Qingdao Symphony Orchestra, Beijing Modern Music Festival, Thailand International Composition Festival, and Chamber Music Connects the World (Kronberg Academy).

EDUCATION

Chad is a cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where he studied music and Japanese, and Juilliard, where he studied composition. He is also an alumnus of the Sundance Composer Labs - Documentary (2016). He lives in Los Angeles.