Featured Guests

Sara Andon

Flutist

Sara Andon is an international soloist and recording artist known for her captivating tone and deeply engaging musical interpretations. She has performed globally with top-tier orchestras and frequently records with the Hollywood Studio Symphony, performing on numerous TV, video game, and film scores including Avatar: The Way of Water, The Super Mario Brothers Movie, The Color Purple, and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. As a Varèse Sarabande concert soloist, Andon was featured in a series of international concerts performing the music of iconic composers, including John Williams, Henry Mancini, John Corigliano, Alan Menken, and Ennio Morricone. These imaginative interpretations through live performances and recordings, continue in Los Angeles and around the world for Robert Townson Productions. Recent solo recording include "Cinema Morricone — An Intimate Celebration" and "Return to Life” for flute and piano on Sony Classical and honoring legendary composer Ennio Morricone. The newest album release is “John Williams Reimagined” for classical trio (flute, cello and piano), celebrating John Williams’s historic career on the Warner Classics label.

Jeff Beal

Composer & Conductor

Five-time Emmy® winner Jeff Beal’s improvisatory method and sense of timing have made him a favorite of directors, including Ed Harris, David Fincher, Oliver Stone, and Rob Reiner. His compositions for screen include Pollock, Door to Door, An Inconvenient Sequel, and Appaloosa. His celebrated television credits include ABC’s Ugly Betty, USA’s Monk, NBC’s Peggy & Dorothy, the Stephen King miniseries Nightmares and Dreamscapes, HBO's Rome and The Newsroom, and Netflix’s House of Cards. A 1985 graduate of the Eastman School of Music, Beal’s career as an award-winning jazz trumpeter shifted to composing works for symphonies and film and television. He and his wife Joan Sapiro Beal, a soprano and also an Eastman alum, donated the funds to create The Beal Institute for Film Music and Contemporary Media at Eastman.

Terence Blanchard

Composer

Boundary-breaking and genre-defying, Terence Blanchard is recognized globally as a dazzling trumpet soloist and a prolific composer for film, television, opera, Broadway, orchestras, and his own ensembles. He is an eight-time GRAMMY® Winner and twice Oscar®-nominated film composer — and in 2022 became only the second African-American composer to be nominated twice for an Academy Award in the original score category. Among the more than 75 scoring credits to his name are Red Tails, One Night in Miami, Harriet, and several Spike Lee films, including Mo Better Blues, Jungle Fever, 25th Hour, 4 Little Girls, and BlacKKKlansman. He also stands tall as one of jazz’s most-esteemed trumpeters and defies expectations by creating a spectrum of artistic pursuits.

Andrew Borman

Digital Games

Curator/Preservationist

Andrew Borman is the Director of Digital Preservation at The Strong National Museum of Play, previously serving for several years as Curator of Digital Games. He works with the World Video Game Hall of Fame and the International Center for the History of Electronic — the world’s most comprehensive collection dedicated to the history of video games — both of which are housed at The Strong. Borman coordinates the museum's digital-preservation efforts for electronic games, including retail games and the unique behind-the-scenes materials created during the development process. His work ensures that digital artifacts of play are accessible to future generations of researchers, creators, and players.

Jon Burlingame

Moderator

Jon Burlingame is an award-winning journalist and author who is considered the nation’s leading writer on the subject of music for film and television. He writes for Variety and has been published in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The Hollywood Reporter. Burlingame teaches film-music history at the University of Southern California and hosts the monthly “Dolby Creator” podcasts with film composers. He formerly hosted the Webby-nominated “For Scores” podcast for the Disney Company. He has written the liner notes for dozens of albums and has produced a series of CDs of classic TV spy music from the 1960s (among them The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible, and The Wild Wild West). He also is the author of seven books, including Music for Prime Time and the best-selling The Music of James Bond.

Carter Burwell

Composer

Carter Burwell has composed the music for numerous feature films and has received Academy Award® nominations for Best Original Score for the films The Banshees Of Inisherin, Carol, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. He has been nominated four times for the Golden Globe Award® for Best Original Score and is known for his frequent collaborations with the Coen Brothers, scoring most of their films. Burwell’s extensive list of film scores includes Fargo, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Where the Wild Things Are, Gods and Monsters, Being John Malkovich, Before Night Falls, Adaptation, In Bruges, Rob Roy, Blood Simple, Twilight, True Grit, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Honey Don’t, and Good Fortune. He also composed the music for the award-winning Apple TV+ series The Morning Show. Burwell has been named Film Composer of the Year by the World Soundtrack Awards and is a recipient of the ASCAP Henry Mancini Award.

John Corigliano

Composer

John Corigliano is the only composer to have been awarded both an Academy Award® and Pulitzer Prize — for Best Original Score and music, respectively. His celebrated body of work features more than 100 original compositions, including the Oscar®-winning score for The Red Violin and the Oscar®-nominated scores Altered States and Revolution. He also has won five GRAMMY® Awards and a Grawemeyer Award. Corigliano's scores have been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world. Attentive listening to this music reveals an unconfined imagination, one which has taken traditional notions like "symphony" or "concerto" and redefined them in a uniquely transparent idiom. At age 87, Coigliano continues to create music, with his creative composition work now spanning seven decades.

YooJin Jang

Violinist

Violinist YooJin Jang has been praised by The Strad magazine for her “fiery virtuosity” and “consummate performances. She is a winner of the Concert Artists Guild and Sendai International competitions, with appearances at Carnegie Hall, the Marlboro, and Ravinia Festivals, and with orchestras including the Budapest Festival Orchestra, KBS Symphony, and Tokyo Symphony. Boston Musical Intelligencer described Jang as  “a performer without fear or technical limitation.” Also a dedicated chamber musician and educator, she is an assistant professor of violin at the Eastman School of Music. She is presently performing on the 1714 “May-Jacquet” Stradivari Violin on generous loan from the Eastman School of Music.

Bambi Moé

Music Producer

Bambi Moé spearheaded music for Disney productions for 20 years and held the title of Vice President of Music for Walt Disney Television Animation. She produced the music for well-known animated film and TV series, including A Goofy Movie, Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas, Aladdin: Return of Jafar, Hercules, and The Little Mermaid TV series. She also has worked with Rhino Records and Video and founded and co-owned Courgette Records, a multi-GRAMMY® nominated independent record label. Moé also created and hosted a series called Composers on Composing; developed music-centric programming for LA’s PBS station; and author of the book Part of the Magic: A Collection of Disney-Inspired Brushes with Greatness.

Simone Pedroni

Pianist

Simone Pedroni is a pianist, conductor, and arranger whose international engagements have included the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic, I Musici of Montreal, Prague Chamber Orchestra, Belgium National Orchestra, and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Italian-born Pedroni was a pupil of Piero Rattalino at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi of Milan and of Lazar Berman and Franco Scala at the Academy “Incontri col Maestro” of Imol. In 1993, at age 24, Pedroni was named the Gold Medalist of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. He presently is an artist in residence at the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano G. Verdi.

Conrad Pope

Composer & Orchestrator

Conrad Pope is an award-winning American composer and orchestrator who is one of the most respected musicians working in Hollywood today, with scores that span the entire cinematic spectrum. Variety has described his work as “fresh and top flight” and The Hollywood Reporter said his music is “emotionally evocative” with “sub-textural punch.” Among his film credits are orchestrations for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, The Polar Express, The Matrix Reloaded, and Jurassic Park. Pope has created original compositions for numerous films, including Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Star Trek: Nemesis, Patriot Games, Home Alone 3, Stuart Little, The Matrix, and My Week with Marilyn.

Bruno Price

Co-owner of Rare Violins

of New York

Bruno Price has been a dealer of fine instruments for decades. He has established many important and trusting relationships with the world’s foremost musicians, collectors and instrument dealers. Born in Great Britain to a musical family, Price trained as a cellist at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester (UK), and later earned his graduate degree in Cello Performance at Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, where he studied with Marc Johnson of the Vermeer Quartet. Price moved into instrument dealing in 1986 when he joined Bein & Fushi in Chicago. He later moved to the East Coast, establishing Rare Violins of New York in 2002 with business partner Ziv Arazi.

Roger Sayer

Organist

Roger Sayer’s most notable performance work is that of organ soloist for Hans Zimmer's Oscar-nominated score for the motion picture Interstellar. He has performed the work live many times, including alongside composer Zimmer for a screening of the film at London's Royal Albert Hall. Sayer is a winner of the St. Albans International Organ Competition and today is at the forefront of British choral and organ music. For 10 years he was an accompanist and deputy chorus director with the London Symphony Chorus and Sayer served as organist and director of music at Temple Church from 2013 to 2023. Examples of Sayer’s versatility include collaborations with jazz saxophonist Mark Lockheart and composer John Ashton Thomas, plus a recorded soundtrack for a Sony video game.

Nan Schwartz

Composer & Orchestrator

GRAMMY® winner Nan Schwartz is heralded as a pioneer for women composers. She has scored and orchestrated music for film and TV, including Jurassic World Rebirth, The Life of Pi, Julie and Julia, Pinocchio, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Godzilla, and Harry Potter and the Death Hollows Part 1, as well as television series In the Heat of the Night and Argo. She has been recognized with seven Emmy® nominations and five GRAMMY® nominations. Among her Emmy® nominations is the song “All the Days,” a collaboration with lyricist Paul Williams. She also scored a CD series for Warner Bros. Discovery Records titled “Jazz at the Movies.”

Garry Schyman

Video Game

Music Composer

Garry Schyman is one of the world’s most celebrated voices in video game music. His scores for the critically and commercially acclaimed BioShock video game series have earned him the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA®) award and two DICE Awards for “Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition” from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. Schyman’s scores gave BioShock its musical identity, with a blend of haunting beauty and terrifying unease. For three games of Destroy All Humans! series, Schyman’s score paid playful homage to 1950s sci-fi; he gave a nod to Hitchcockian hypnotic style in the mystery game Voyeur; and his compositions accelerated the heartbeat in action games like Resistance: Retribution and Dante’s Inferno. He has dwelled in the fantasy world of Tolkien for the adventure game Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (earning him a BAFTA® nomination) and its sequel Middle-earth: Shadow of War. His expressionist score for the game Metamorphosis was honored by the Society of Composers and Lyricists with their Outstanding Achievement Award. Shyman has also composed for film and television, including the TV shows Magnum, P.I., The A-Team, and The Greatest American Hero.

Robert Townson

Music Producer

Robert Townson has shaped the legacy of film music — from Jerry Goldsmith to Michael Giacchino and from Georges Delerue to Alexandre Desplat. With nearly 1,500 albums to his name — from Jerry Goldsmith’s “The Final Conflict” to “John Williams Reimagined” — his discography is a living museum of movie music. Townson is more than a producer, however. He is a global curator of film music culture, staging concerts from Krakow and Tenerife to Vienna, Rome, and Los Angeles. He reimagined “Pictures at an Exhibition” at Walt Disney Concert Hall and has twice collaborated with the Abu Dhabi Festival on major international projects celebrating the power of music to unite across cultures. From founding Masters Film Music in 1985 to receiving lifetime achievement honors in six countries, Robert has built a career distinguished by passion and bold vision — celebrating the music we love and the composers who create it.

Cécilia Tsan

Cellist

French cellist Cécilia Tsan has been praised by The Los Angeles Times for “her virtuosity and charisma of her musical personality” and “uncompromising musical character and towering technique.” She is an international soloist and chamber musician and has performed on hundreds of film scores. Tsan has served as principal cello for the Academy Awards® and the Emmy® Awards television broadcasts, as well as American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. She serves as principal cello with Long Beach Symphony and the Los Angeles Master Chorale Orchestra; is artistic director of the music series at Mount Wilson Observatory; and has won international competitions in Barcelona, Florence, and Paris. Recent performances include John Williams’s Memoirs of a Geisha.

Mark Watters

Composer

Mark Watters is an Emmy® Award-winning composer/conductor and co-director of the Soundtrax Film Music Festival. He is in his ninth year as head of the media composition curriculum at the Eastman School of Music and director of Eastman’s Beal Institute of Film Music and Contemporary Media. His body of work includes music for motion pictures, television, video games, commercials, theme parks and special events. He co-conducted the Academy Awards® orchestra per invitation of John Williams, as well as three “Star Wars in Concert” tours, plus concerts for artists from Barry Manilow to Beyonce. Watters holds the distinction of serving as music director for two Olympics — the 1996 Centennial Games in Atlanta and the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City — which garnered him two of his six Emmys®. As a film composer, Watters wrote the scores for The Pebble and the Penguin, All Dogs Go to Heaven 2, Doug’s First Movie, and the Oscar®-nominated animated short Get a Horse, which accompanied the theatrical release of Frozen. Television credits include scoring Aladdin and The Little Mermaid  TV series and Steven Spielberg’s Tiny Toon Adventures. He has served several terms on the Television Academy’s Board of Governors and as co-chair of the Academy’s Creative Arts Emmy® Awards Committee.

Guy Whitmore

Video Game Music

Designer & Composer

Guy Whitmore has been a video game music designer and composer for 30 years, nominated for an AIAS/DICE award for his first game soundtrack in 1995. He is presently audio director for Polyarc and most recently was the studio head with Formosa, working with Xbox Game Studios, Epic Games, Mojang, Riot Games, and Marvel. For Monolith Productions he created innovative music scores for games such as Shogo, No One Lives Forever, and Tron 2.0. He served as Director of Audio at Microsoft Game Studios (now Xbox Game Studios) for six years, where he worked on major franchises, including Fable, Gears of War, Project Gotham Racing, Crackdown, and Halo. With PopCap Games/EA he oversaw classic franchises Bejeweled, Peggle, and Plants vs. Zombies, earning 4 G.A.N.G. awards. Whitmore also has provided sound and music services for Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Ironman VR, Overwatch, Alien Descent VR, Temple Run 2, and the Xbox One UI.

Seth Wright

Video Game Music

Designer & Composer

Seth Wright is a technical music designer, composer, and  project leader specializing in adaptive music for games. As founder of Wright Music Interactive, he partners with industry giants like Meta, Disney, Oculus, Four Seasons, and Activision-Blizzard to deliver high-impact scores under real-world constraints — uniting creative vision with rock-solid implementation. He is best known for his leadership on Meta’s Batman: Arkham Shadow, which won “Best VR/AR Game” at The Game Awards 2024 and the DICE Award 2025 for “Immersive Reality Game of the Year.” For that game Wright produced and designed a hybrid orchestral score that was recorded at Abbey Road Studios and deployed via first-in-VR interactive systems, ultimately shaping the user experience with the music adapting dynamically in-game. Wright is also a sought-after educator who lectures at top programs across the United States and Europe, including Birmingham City University, the Film Academy of Europe in Sofia, and the University of Rochester.