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The Most Famous

COMPOSERS from Canada

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This page contains a list of the greatest Canadian Composers. The pantheon dataset contains 1,216 Composers, 6 of which were born in Canada. This makes Canada the birth place of the 34th most number of Composers behind Mexico and Turkey.

Top 6

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Canadian Composers of all time. This list of famous Canadian Composers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

Photo of Howard Shore

1. Howard Shore (1946 - )

With an HPI of 63.49, Howard Shore is the most famous Canadian Composer.  His biography has been translated into 49 different languages on wikipedia.

Howard Leslie Shore (born October 18, 1946) is a Canadian composer, conductor and orchestrator noted for his film scores. He has composed the scores for over 80 films, most notably the scores for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies. He won three Academy Awards for his work on The Lord of the Rings, with one being for the song "Into the West", an award he shared with Eurythmics lead vocalist Annie Lennox and writer/producer Fran Walsh, who wrote the lyrics. He is a consistent collaborator with director David Cronenberg, having scored all but one of his films since 1979, and collaborated with Martin Scorsese on six of his films. Shore has also composed a few concert works including one opera, The Fly, based on the plot of Cronenberg's 1986 film, which premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris on July 2, 2008; a short piece named Fanfare for the Wanamaker Organ and the Philadelphia Orchestra; and a short overture for the Swiss 21st Century Symphony Orchestra. Shore has also composed for television, including serving as the original musical director for the American sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live from 1975 to 1980. In addition to his three Academy Awards, Shore has also won three Golden Globe Awards and four Grammy Awards.

Photo of Percy Faith

2. Percy Faith (1908 - 1976)

With an HPI of 50.03, Percy Faith is the 2nd most famous Canadian Composer.  Her biography has been translated into 20 different languages.

Percy Faith (April 7, 1908 – February 9, 1976) was a Canadian–American bandleader, orchestrator, composer and conductor, known for his lush arrangements of instrumental ballads and Christmas standards. He is often credited with popularizing the "easy listening" or "mood music" format. He became a staple of American popular music in the 1950s and continued well into the 1960s. Although his professional orchestra-leading career began at the height of the swing era, he refined and rethought orchestration techniques, including use of large string sections, to soften and fill out the brass-dominated popular music of the 1940s.

Photo of Mychael Danna

3. Mychael Danna (1958 - )

With an HPI of 42.16, Mychael Danna is the 3rd most famous Canadian Composer.  His biography has been translated into 26 different languages.

Mychael Danna (born 1958 or 1959) is a Canadian composer of film and television scores. He won both the Golden Globe and Oscar for Best Original Score for Life of Pi. He has also won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition for a Miniseries, Movie or a Special (Original Dramatic Score) in his work on the miniseries World Without End.

Photo of Christophe Beck

4. Christophe Beck (1972 - )

With an HPI of 39.08, Christophe Beck is the 4th most famous Canadian Composer.  His biography has been translated into 26 different languages.

Jean-Christophe Beck (born in 1968 in Montreal) is a Canadian television and film score composer and conductor. He is best known for his collaborations with Disney and its subsidiaries, which include composing the soundtracks of The Muppets (2011) and Muppets Most Wanted (2014), Frozen (2013) and its 2019 sequel, the Marvel Cinematic Universe films Ant-Man (2015), Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018), and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) as well as the TV miniseries WandaVision (2021) and Hawkeye (2021) for Marvel Studios, and Free Guy (2021) for 20th Century Studios, as well as Disney’s 100th anniversary logo. He composed the scores for several of Shawn Levy's films, including Big Fat Liar (2002), Just Married (2003), Cheaper by the Dozen (2003), The Pink Panther (2006), The Internship (2013), and Free Guy (2021). Notably, he won an Emmy Award in 1998 for his work on the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He is also known for composing the scores of the film series The Hangover (2009-2013). He is the older brother of composer, pianist and rapper Chilly Gonzales.

Photo of Erik Mongrain

5. Erik Mongrain (1980 - )

With an HPI of 35.78, Erik Mongrain is the 5th most famous Canadian Composer.  His biography has been translated into 35 different languages.

Erik Mongrain (born April 12, 1980) is a Canadian composer and guitarist. He has a unique and dark acoustic style, with a wide array of different techniques, approaches and textures reminiscent of Michael Hedges. Widely considered to be one of the best acoustic guitarists of the 2000s.

Photo of Venetian Snares

6. Venetian Snares (1975 - )

With an HPI of 31.46, Venetian Snares is the 6th most famous Canadian Composer.  His biography has been translated into 18 different languages.

Aaron Funk (born January 11, 1975), known as Venetian Snares, is a Canadian electronic musician based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is widely known for innovating and popularising the breakcore genre, and is one of the most recognisable artists to be signed to Planet Mu, an experimental electronic music label. His signature style involves meticulously complex drums, eclectic use of samples, and odd time signatures, in particular, 74.His 2005 release Rossz Csillag Alatt Született combined breakbeats with orchestral samples, and was released to critical acclaim, helping bring the artist and genre into popularity within the experimental electronic music community. Funk is a very prolific musician, often releasing several records each year, sometimes on several different record labels, including Planet Mu, Hymen, Sublight, and his own imprint Timesig, and also under different aliases, including Last Step, Snares Man!, Snares, and Speed Dealer Moms. He has also explored other electronic genres such as glitch, IDM, modern classical and acid techno.

Pantheon has 6 people classified as composers born between 1908 and 1980. Of these 6, 5 (83.33%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living composers include Howard Shore, Mychael Danna, and Christophe Beck. The most famous deceased composers include Percy Faith.

Living Composers

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Deceased Composers

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