Yoko Shimomura

Yoko Shimomura (下村 陽子, Shimomura Yōko, born October 19, 1967) is a Japanese video game composer. She has been described as "the most famous female video game music composer in the world". She has worked in the video game music industry since graduating from Osaka College of Music in 1988. From then until 1993, she worked for Capcom, where she composed wholly or in part the scores for 17 games, including Final Fight and Street Fighter II.
From 1993 to 2002 Shimomura worked for Square (now Square Enix), where she composed for a further eight games, including the popular Super Mario RPG, Legend of Mana, and Kingdom Hearts games. Since then she has worked as a freelance composer, writing for over a dozen titles. Her works have gained a great deal of popularity, and have been performed in multiple video game music concerts, including one, Sinfonia Drammatica, that was focused half on her "greatest hits" album, Drammatica: The Very Best of Yoko Shimomura, and half on the music of a previous concert. Music from several of her games has been published as arranged albums and as piano scores.

Source: Wikipedia.

My favourite songs made by this fabulous musician are:


Yoko Shimomura - Kingdom Hearts Theme


Yoko Shimomura - Live a Live


Yoko Shimomura - Dearly Beloved


Kingdom Hearts medley part 1/2


Kingdom Hearts medley part 2/2

Wim Mertens

Wim Mertens (born 14 May 1953) is a Flemish Belgian composer, countertenor vocalist, pianist, guitarist, and musicologist.

Mertens was born in Neerpelt, Belgium. He studied social and political science at the University of Leuven (graduating in 1975) and musicology at Ghent University; he also studied music theory and piano at the Ghent Conservatory and the Royal Conservatory of Brussels.

In 1978, he became a producer at the then BRT (Belgian Radio and Television, now called Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroep). For Radio 2 (Radio Brabant) he produced concerts by Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, Urban Sax and others, and hosted a program called Funky Town together with Gust de Meyer.

Known primarily as a composer since the early 1980s, Mertens is best known for his opus "Struggle for Pleasure". He is also well known for his piece "Maximizing the Audience", which was composed for Jan Fabre's play The Power of Theatrical Madness, which premiered in 1984 in Venice, Italy.

Source: Wikipedia.

Wim Mertens - Struggle for Pleasure:


Wim Mertents - Close Cover:


Wim Mertens - We are the thieves :


Wim Mertens - Maximicing:


Wim Mertens - 4 mains:


Wim Mertens - Struggle for Pleasure:

Michael Nyman

Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE (born in Stratford, London 23 March 1944) is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for the many film scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano. His operas include The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Letters, Riddles and Writs, Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs, Facing Goya, Man and Boy: Dada, Love Counts, and Sparkie: Cage and Beyond, and he has written six concerti, four string quartets, and many other chamber works, many for his Michael Nyman Band, with and without whom he tours as a performing pianist. Nyman has stated his preference for writing opera to other sorts of music.

Source: Wikipedia.

Michael Nyman - El piano.

Michael Nyman - El Piano (Official Video)

Michael Nyman - Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds

Bill Conti

William "Bill" Conti (born April 13, 1942) is an American film music composer who is frequently the conductor at the Academy Awards ceremony.
Conti, an Italian American, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the son of Lucetta and William Conti.He is a graduate of Louisiana State University, and also studied at the Juilliard School of Music. He is a past winner of the Silver Knight Award presented by the Miami Herald.
Bill Conti has received many award nominations for his work. He received a Best Song nomination for "Gonna Fly Now." He won an Oscar for the largely symphonic score for The Right Stuff. On April 22, 2008 before a packed house at the LSU Union Theatre at Louisiana State University, Bill Conti was inducted into The Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.

Source: Wikipedia.

Bill Conti - Rocky's Reward


Bill Conti - Philadelphia Morning


Bill Conti - Going The Distance


Bill Conti - Interview and Solo Rocky Perfomance on piano


Bill Conti - Lock Up

John Williams

John Towner Williams (born February 8, 1932) is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. In a career spanning almost six decades, he has composed some of the most recognizable film scores in the history of motion pictures, including the Star Wars saga, Jaws, Superman, the Indiana Jones films, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Hook, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, Home Alone and the first three Harry Potter films. He has had a long association with director Steven Spielberg, composing the music for all but two of Spielberg's feature films.
Other notable works by Williams include theme music for four Olympic Games, NBC Sunday Night Football, the NBC Nightly News, the rededication of the Statue of Liberty, the DreamWorks Pictures production logo, and the television series Lost in Space. Williams has also composed numerous classical concerti, and he served as the principal conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra from 1980 to 1993; he is now the orchestra's conductor laureate.
Williams has won five Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, seven BAFTA Awards, and 21 Grammy Awards.With 45 Academy Award nominations, Williams is, together with composer Alfred Newman, the second most nominated person, after Walt Disney.John Williams was honored with the prestigious Richard Kirk award at the 1999 BMI Film and TV Awards. The award is given annually to a composer who has made significant contributions to film and television music.Williams was inducted into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame in 2000, and was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004.

Source: Wikipedia.

Here you can listen to some of his most famous scores:

John Williams - Schindler's List


John Williams - Main Theme From Star Wars



John Williams - Duel Of The Fates



John Williams - Superman



John Williams - Jurassic Park



John Williams - Indiana Jones



Schindler's List

Vangelis

Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou (Greek: Ευάγγελος Οδυσσέας Παπαθανασίου [evˈaɲɟelos oðiˈseas papaθanaˈsiu]) (born 29 March 1943) is a Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz, pop rock and orchestral music, under the artist name Vangelis (English pronunciation: /væŋˈɡɛlɨs/). He is best known for his Academy Award-winning score for the film Chariots of Fire, and scores for the films Blade Runner, 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Alexander.
Vangelis began his professional musical career working with several popular bands of the 1960s such as The Forminx and Aphrodite's Child, with the latter's album 666 going on to be recognized as a psychedelic "classic". Throughout the 1970s, Vangelis composed music scores for several animal documentaries, including L'Apocalypse Des Animaux, La Fête sauvage and Opéra sauvage; the success of these scores brought him into the film scoring mainstream. In the early 1980s, Vangelis formed a musical partnership with Jon Anderson, the lead singer of progressive rock band Yes, and the duo went on to release several albums together as Jon & Vangelis. In 1981, he composed the score for the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire. The soundtrack's single, "Titles", won Vangelis the Academy Award for Best Original Music Score and also reached the top of the American Billboard.
In a career spanning 50 years, writing and composing more than 52 albums, Vangelis is regarded by some music critics as one of the greatest composers of electronic music of all time.

Source: Wikipedia


List of some of his songs:

Vangelis - Conquest of the paradise



Vangelis - Chariots of fire



Vangelis - Anthem Fifa World Cup 2002



Vangelis - Heaven & Hell - Cosmos



Vangelis - Memories of blue



Vangelis - Alpha



Vangelis - Ask the mountains



Vangelis - Song of the seas.

David Oistrakh

David Fyodorovich Oistrakh (or Oistrach), Russian and Ukrainian: Дави́д Фёдорович (Фи́шелевич) О́йстрах, David Fiodorović (Fišelević) Ojstrakh, Russian pronunciation: [dɐˌvʲid fʲodəˌrovʲɪʨ ˈojstrɐx]; September 30 [O.S. September 17] 1908 – October 24, 1974, was a Soviet violinist.
Oistrakh collaborated with major orchestras and musicians from many parts of the world, including the Soviet Union, Europe, and the United States, and was the dedicatee of numerous violin works, including both of Dmitri Shostakovich's violin concerti, and the violin concerto by Aram Khachaturian. He is considered one of the preeminent violinists of the 20th century.

Source: Wikipedia.

David Oistrakh, Debussy - Clair de lune

Ennio Morricone

Ennio Morricone, Grand Officer OMRI, Italian pronunciation: [ˈɛnnjo moɾiˈkoːne], (born November 10, 1928) is an Italian composer and conductor, who wrote music to more than 500 motion pictures and television series, in a career lasting over 50 years.His scores have been included in over 20 award-winning film's as well as several symphonic and choral pieces. Morricone is most famous for his work in the Spaghetti Westerns directed by his friend Sergio Leone, including A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

Born in Rome, Italy Morricone took up the trumpet as a child and attended the National Academy of Santa Cecilia to take lessons on the instrument at the age of nine. He formally entered a conservatory at the age of 12, enrolling in a four-year harmony programme. He received his trumpet diploma in 1946 and started working professionally, composing the music to "Il Mattino" ("The Morning"). Morricone soon gained popularity by writing his first background music for radio dramas and quickly moved into film.

In the 1950s he received the "Diploma in Instrumentation for Band" (fanfare) where he won a diploma in Composition under the composer Goffredo Petrassi. In 1955, Morricone started to ghost write and arrange music for other, already established film composers. Morricone soon came to the attention of his former school friend Sergio Leone, who hired Morricone,to compose the music to some of his best known films. Together they created a distinctive score to accompany Leone's different version of the Western, A Fistful of Dollars.

In the 80s and 90s, Morricone continued to write the music for Leone's later films, including Once Upon a Time in America (1984) He also composed the music to Joffé's The Mission (1986), De Palma's The Untouchables (1987) and Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1988). His more recent compositions include the scores for Malèna (2000), Fateless (2005), and Baaria - La porta del vento (2009).

Morricone has received two Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, five BAFTAs during 1979–1992, seven David di Donatello, eight Nastro d'Argento, and the Polar Music Prize in 2010. In 2007, he received the Academy Honorary Award "for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music" and has been nominated for a further five Oscars in the category of Best Original Score during 1979–2001, but has never won competitively.

Source: Wikipedia.

Some of his songs:

Ennio Morricone - Cinema Paradiso



Ennio Morricone - Ecstasy of Gold



Ennio Morricone - The Mission Main Theme



Ennio Morricone - On Earth as It Is In Heaven



Ennio Morricone - Gabriel's Oboe

Nobuo Uematsu

Nobuo Uematsu (植松 伸夫, Uematsu Nobuo^?) (March 21, 1959) is a Japanese video game composer, best known for scoring the majority of titles in the Final Fantasy series. He is considered as one of the most famous and respected composers in the video game community.Uematsu, a self-taught musician, began playing the piano at the age of eleven or twelve, with Emerson, Lake & Palmer as his biggest influence.

Uematsu joined Square (later Square Enix) in 1986, where he met Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. They have worked together on many video game titles, most notably the games in the Final Fantasy series. After nearly 20 years in the company, he left Square Enix in 2004 to found his own company called Smile Please, and the music production company Dog Ear Records. He has since composed music as a freelancer for video games primarily developed by Square Enix and Sakaguchi's development studio Mistwalker.

Soundtracks and arranged albums of Uematsu's game scores have been released. Pieces from his video game works have been performed in Final Fantasy concerts. He has worked with Grammy Award-winning conductor Arnie Roth on several of these concerts. From 2002 to 2010, he was in a rock band with colleagues Kenichiro Fukui and Tsuyoshi Sekito called The Black Mages, in which he played the keyboard. The band played arranged rock versions of Uematsu's Final Fantasy compositions.

Source: Wikipedia.

Here you can listen to some of his songs:

Final Fantasy X - Suteki Da Ne - Piano



Nobuo Uematsu - Aerith (Orchestral)



Nobuo Uematsu - At Zanarkand (Orchestral)




Nobuo Uematsu - At Zanarkand (piano)



Nobuo Uematsu - Tifa's Theme




Nobuo Uematsu - Final Fantasy




Nobuo Uematsu - Prelude Final Fantasy




Nobuo Uematsu - Waltz for the Moon




Not Alone from Final Fantasy IX

Shunga Jung

Seongha Jeong (정성하) (colloquially: Sungha Jung) (born 2 September 1996) is a South Korean professional acoustic finger-style guitarist who has risen to fame on YouTube and other sites, mainly through the South Korean audience. As of 2011, his channel had over 14 million views, with his videos getting a total of over 356 million views, and also over 500,000 subscribers.
Seongha typically takes three days to learn and practice a new pice, and video-record it for upload onto Youtube. His genre selection is rather broad, as he learns and plays many pieces that are playable on guitar, therefore consequently spread numerous genres.
Seongha has won 13 awards on YouTube, including 6 "#1" awards. Also on YouTube, Seongha has 38 videos with over one million views. Seongha's video with the most views is the shows him playing the theme from "Pirates Of The Caribbean", at 24,732,880 views as of November 11th 2011.
Seongha has composed 18 pieces as of February 2011, two of which are featured in his debut album, "Perfect Blue". He released his second album, "Irony", on 21 September 2011.
In 2011, he performed in the US with Trace Bundy, as well as touring in Scandinavia and Japan.

Source: Wikipedia

Here you can listen to some of his amazing pieces:

Shunga Jung - Mission Impossible



Shunga Jung - River flows in you (by Yiruma)



Shunga Jung - Titanic



Shunga Jung - Pirates of the Caribbean



Shunga Jung - More than words



Shunga Jung - Tears in Heaven



Shunga Jung - With or Without you

Howard Shore

Howard Leslie Shore (born October 18, 1946) is a Canadian composer, notable for his film scores. He has composed the scores for over 80 films, most notably the scores for The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, for which he won three Academy Awards. He is also a consistent collaborator with director David Cronenberg, having scored all but one of his films since 1979. Shore has also worked with Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, David Fincher and many other filmmakers.

He has also composed a few concert works including one opera, The Fly, based on the plot (though not his score) of Cronenberg's 1986 film premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on 2 July 2008., a short piece Fanfare for the Wanamaker Organ and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and a short overture for the Swiss 21st Century Symphony Orchestra.

Shore is a three-time winner of the Academy Award, and has also won two Golden Globe Awards and four Grammy Awards. He is the uncle of film composer Ryan Shore.

Source: Wikipedia.

Most famous songs:

Howard Shore - Concerning Hobbits


Howard Shore - The Silence of the Lambs


Howard Shore - Roham


Howard Shore - The Lord of the Rings Symphony Full length

Hans Zimmer

Hans Florian Zimmer (born 12 September 1957) is a German film composer and music producer. He has composed music for over 100 films, including critically acclaimed film scores for The Thin Red Line (1999), The Lion King (1994), Gladiator (2000), and The Dark Knight (2008).

Zimmer spent the early part of his career in the United Kingdom before moving to the United States. He is the head of the film music division at DreamWorks studios, and works with other composers through the company which he founded, Remote Control Productions.

Zimmer's works are notable for integrating electronic music sounds with traditional orchestral arrangements. He has received four Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, a Classical BRIT Award, and an Academy Award. He was also named on the list of Top 100 Living Geniuses, published by The Daily Telegraph.

Source: Wikipedia.

Although there are hundreds of good songs from Hans Zimmer, I have linked here some of my favourite ones:

Hans Zimmer - The Rock - Main Theme


Hans Zimmer - Maestro



Hans Zimmer - Pearl harbor soundtrack


Hans Zimmer - Madagascar


Hans Zimmer live @ Pirates At World's End Premiere


Hans Zimmer - Black Hawk Down


Hans Zimmer - King Arthur


Hans Zimmer - A way of life


Hans Zimmer - Rain Man


Hans Zimmer - Gladiator (The Battle)


Hans Zimmer - Time


Hans Zimmer - Tears Of the Sun



Batman The Dark Knight - LIVE Performance



Inception Concert part 1/2



Inception Concert part 2/2

Yiruma

Yiruma is the stage name of I Ru-ma (born February 15, 1978), a popular internationally known pianist and composer from South Korea. The name "Yiruma" means "I shall achieve" in Korean.

Yiruma frequently performs at sold-out concerts in Asia, Europe and North America. His Alma Mater King's College in England helped him gain European popularity and recognition. Several of his most popular pieces include, "River Flows in You", "Kiss the Rain", and "May Be". His most popular album First Love was released in 2001.

He began playing the piano at the age of five, and moved to London when he was 11, in 1988, to study at The Purcell School of Music. He possessed dual citizenship of South Korea and England until 2006, when he gave up his UK citizenship to serve in the Navy of South Korea.

Source: Wikipedia

Most famous songs:

Yiruma - Kiss the Rain



Yiruma - Moonlight



Yiruma - River flows in you



Yiruma - Love me



Yiruma - Maybe



Yiruma - Tears On Love



Yiruma - Kiss the rain (with piano and violins)



Yiruma - Sometimes... Someone

Yann Tiersen

Yann Tiersen (born 23 June 1970) is a musician from France. His musical career is split between studio albums, collaborations and film soundtracks with a distinctive sound that is always involved. It can be recognized by its use of a large variety of instruments; primarily the guitar, synthesizer or violin together with instruments like the melodica, xylophone, toy piano, harpsichord, accordion and typewriter. Tiersen is often mistaken as a composer of soundtracks, himself saying "I'm not a composer and I really don't have a classical background," but his real focus is on touring and studio albums which just happen to often be suitable for film; his most famous soundtrack for the film Amélie was primarily made up of tracks taken from his first studio albums.

Source: Wikipedia.

My favourite songs from this musician are:

Yann Tiersen - J'y Suis Jamais Allé



Yann Tiersen - The Piano



Yann Tiersen - L'absente



Yann Tiersen - Le Banquet



Yann Tiersen - La Valse d'Amelie



Yann Tiersen - La plage



Yann Tiersen - rue de cascades



Yann Tiersen - La Noyee (on piano)



Yann Tiersen - La Noyee (original)

Ludovico Einaudi

Ludovico Einaudi OMRI (Italian pronunciation: [ludoˈviːko eiˈnaudi]) (born 23 November 1955 in Turin, Piedmont) is an Italian contemporary music composer and pianist.

Born in Turin, Italy, Einaudi's mother played to him on the piano as a child. He began his musical training at the Conservatorio Verdi in Milan, gaining a diploma in composition in 1982. That same year, he studied with Luciano Berio and gained a scholarship to the Tanglewood Music Festival.

After studying at the Conservatory in Milan, and subsequently with Berio, he spent several years composing in traditional forms. In the mid-1980s he began to search for a more personal expression in a series of works for dance and multimedia, and later for piano. His music is ambient, meditative and often introspective, drawing on minimalism, world music, and contemporary pop. He has made a significant impact in the film world, with four international awards to his name.

His father was Giulio Einaudi, a publisher, and his grandfather, Luigi Einaudi, was President of the Italian Republic between 1948 and 1955. He currently resides on a vineyard in the Italian region of Piedmont.

Although Einaudi would prefer not to be labeled as any particular type of genre, he is sometimes referred to as a Minimalist. However, Einaudi's style differs from those of the Minimalism movement, and this attribution is likely more due to his work's sparse orchestration and simple melodies.

Einaudi's own words on the matter reflect this viewpoint, with Einaudi referring to Minimalism as "elegance and openness", despite its more formal definition as a musical movement to which he arguably does not belong.

Source: Wikipedia.

Here you can listen to some of his songs:


Ludovico Einaudi - Divenire Live



Ludovico Einaudi - Nuvole Bianche



Ludovico Einaudi - Oltremare



Ludovico Einaudi - Primavera


Ludovico Einaudi - Fairytale



Ludovico Einaudi - I due fiumi



Ludovico Einaudi - In Principio, Indaco



Ludovico Einaudi - In un'altra vita



Ludovico Einaudi - Stella del mattino



Ludovico Einaudi - I Giorni



Ludovico Einaudi - Divenire