Chad Cannon is an American composer and multi-instrumentalist who was born and raised in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains in Salt Lake City and is a product of the American West. Recent credits include the Obama-produced, Oscar-winning documentary American Factory, the Oscar-shortlisted Hidden Letters (co-composed with vocalist Leona Lewis), HBO's genre-bending true crime series, Mind Over Murder (directed by Nanfu Wang), and Sony PlayStation's Ghost of Tsushima (Iki Island Expansion).

'Fluent in Japanese, Cannon has a close working relationship with Joe Hisaishi, including doing arrangements for the globally-performed Joe Hisaishi Symphonic Concert: Music from the Studio Ghibli Films of Hayao Miyazaki. Chad got his start in film music working as an assistant orchestrator for Conrad Pope on scores by Howard Shore (The Hobbit trilogy) and Alexandre Desplat (Godzilla and The Secret Life of Pets franchise).

He is a graduate of Harvard and Juilliard, was a 2016 Sundance Composing Labs Fellow, and is a current delegate for the US-Japan Leadership Program (USJLP).

Official self-written bio:

Born and raised in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains in Salt Lake City, Utah, I am a product of the American West.

My recent work includes the score to the Oscar-winning Netflix documentary American Factory, HBO’s Mind Over Murder (directed by Nanfu Wang), and Sony PlayStation’s Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut (Iki Island Expansion, co-scored with Bill Hemstapat). Other collaborations include two films by Violet Du Feng, Harbor from the Holocaust (featuring special guest artist Yo-Yo Ma) and the Oscars-shortlisted Hidden Letters (co-composed with Leona Lewis), as well as the recent Hulu docuseries, Algiers, America (aired April 2023) and Join or Die, which recently premiered at SXSW. This year I received my first Emmy nomination (News and Documentary) for Marc Shaffer’s Exposing Muybridge, which features Gary Oldman.

Since 2017 I have moonlighted as an arranger for Joe Hisaishi, the genius behind the music of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli animated films. He has been an incredible mentor, allowing me to go deep into the fantastical world of his unforgettable compositions. My musical palette has been forever altered by this experience. I am excited to share that I am currently scoring a new film adaptation of the popular Fuji TV anime series Chibi Maruko-chan, with a main theme by Hisaishi.

My music is often rooted in classical precision & counterpoint, but I love nothing more than a multi-genre/cross-cultural collaboration that produces a fresh, freeing soundscape that nobody planned for. My composer ethos is based on the importance of thoroughly understanding specific times and places, musical styles and traditions, and I feel that only with this knowledge is one able to ethically and creatively reference or draw upon external sources to create new art.

I did my formal studies at Harvard (music and Japanese), Juilliard (composition), and was a Sundance Composer Lab fellow in 2016, but I view every new project as another education. Each new story we tell deserves a score that carries its own narrative and stylistic logic, and I love playing the role of a storytelling associate, helping storytellers find their protagonists’ inner emotional worlds and uncovering the human truths that lie therein.

“The clearest reason for music, for culture, is it gives us meaning.” Yo-Yo Ma (from Morgan Neville’s The Music of Strangers). Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.