I'm a musician living in North Carolina, USA. I love music... it's what gets me up in the morning, and keeps me up when I SHOULD be going to bed :)

I recently co-founded a company called Embertone, we make virtual instruments for Kontakt!

www.embertone.com

Composer, conductor, performer, producer in the performing arts.  

Chris Heckman, composer of music for film, television, video games, theatre, sacred music, and concert music, is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and holds an M.F.A. in Film Music Composition from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and a B.M. in Music Composition from Florida State University.

Chris grew up in a family of musicians, and started playing piano and singing from the age of six.  Apart from piano and voice, he also plays clarinet, saxophones, flute, guitar, bass guitar, organ, and accordion.  He has worked for many years as choir director/pianist/organist for numerous churches, often writing and arranging for weekly services, and currently is the Organist / Accompanist at Guilford College United Methodist Church in Greensboro, NC.

While at FSU, Chris studied composition with Mark Wingate, Clifton Callender, and renowned Czech composer, Ladislav Kubik.  He also participated in numerous master classes with composers such as Krzystof Penderecki, Martin Bresnick, Chen Yi, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

While at UNCSA, Chris studied film scoring with David McHugh.  He wrote original music for five student films, two drama productions, a television commercial produced by the film school, arranged, created, and performed electronic music for a musical production, and wrote a piece for the UNCSA jazz ensemble.

Also while at UNCSA, Chris worked closely with UNCSA Chancellor and Founding Director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, John Mauceri.  In 2007, he assisted Mauceri in Vienna, Austria, for the concert “Hollywood in Vienna”, featuring an evening of film music performed by the Radio Symphony of Vienna, and the Viennese premiere of many works by composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold.  Then in 2008, he again assisted Mauceri in arranging the score for a world premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s film score Hamlet with the North Carolina Symphony, performed simultaneously with actors dramatizing the Shakespeare play.  Then in 2009, he assisted in arranging music for  “The Walt Disney Symphonic Legacy” concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, featuring the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.  Chris assisted in arranging new orchestral suites from Pirates of the Caribbean, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and The Nightmare Before Christmas, for which he composed a new overture finale under the supervision of Danny Elfman.

In the summer of 2009, Chris was awarded the ASCAP Fellowship for Composition & Film Scoring at the Aspen Music Festival.  While in Aspen, he studied film scoring with Marco Beltrami, Jack Smalley, Jeff Rona, and Thomas Haines.

Chris is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Music Composition for Visual Media at the University of California, Los Angeles.  While at UCLA, he has studied composition with Roger Bourland, David Lefkowitz, Ian Krouse, and Paul Chihara.

He is currently the Chair of Film Music Composition at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.  There he teaches Graduate students film scoring, film music history, music technology, conducting and music business.


Ola Gjeilo was born in Norway in 1978 and moved to the United States in 2001 to begin his composition studies at the Juilliard School in New York City.

Ola is an exclusive Decca Classics artist, and his Decca choral albums include “Ola Gjeilo”, “Winter Songs” & “Dreamweaver”, featuring Tenebrae, Voces8 and the Choir of Royal Holloway, as well as the solo piano albums “Night” & “Dawn”. His global streams have now surpassed 250 million.

For more information, please visit olagjeilo.com, or find Ola on his social media profiles.

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