J. A. C. Redford

Redford has written the scores for more than three dozen feature films, TV movies, and miniseries, including The Trip to Bountiful, One Night with the King, What the Deaf Man Heard, Mama Flora’s Family, as well as Disney's Oliver & Company, Newsies, The Mighty Ducks II, and The Mighty Ducks III. He has composed the music for nearly 500 episodes of series television, including multiple seasons of Coach and St. Elsewhere (for which he received Emmy® nominations in 1984 and 1985).

According to Image Journal, "the thread running through all [of Redford’s] music is an exuberant, melodic energy." David Vernier called Redford "a composer who knows how to write good tunes, engaging rhythms that capture the energy implied in the texts, and who knows how to pull the essential dramatic moments from a story and orchestrate them."

By setting four poems for an Easter Symphony, A Paschal Feast, Redford created a work at once "engaging . . . forceful and joyous . . . well-balanced and strong". William Goodfellow wrote of Redford's cantata Welcome All Wonders, "throughout the scoring is imaginative [and] the counterpoint ingenious." NPR’s Gene Parrish wrote of the same piece that his "careful selection and interpretation of his texts are matched by profound musical inspirations, and executed by well-crafted orchestrations and genuinely masterful choral writing."

His music has been called evocative, intensely expressive, epic, beautifully orchestrated with an almost palpable sense of tenderness, and tuneful and lyric. His oratorio The Martyrdom of St. Polycarp reflects "a mix of styles—sometimes tonal, sometimes polytonal, with rich choral textures and superb orchestrations bringing depth of emotion and fine musical results." Redford's range makes his music at times "emotionally powerful, convey[ing] feelings of pain, anguish and sorrow" and at others "delightful and witty." When Redford worked alongside premier violinist Joshua Bell, CNN reported that Redford created "shimmering" arrangements for Bell's album, Voice of the Violin.

From 1976 to the present, Redford has been concurrently writing music for film and television, the concert hall, chamber artists, choral ensembles, and the theater. In a 2009 article, Jérémie Noyer wrote, "It is that rich experience that makes Redford’s music unique, drawing from an incredible array of influences . . . J.A.C. Redford distinguishes himself from other film music composers by an incredible versatility, feeling as comfortable in pop music or jazz as in concert music."

After moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, Redford began to write scores for television, beginning as a co-composer for Starsky & Hutch. In the 1980s, when the American Federation of Musicians called a strike that caused a virtual shutdown of U.S. film and television recording, Redford used the opportunity to continue his musical education. He studied composition with Hal Johnson and conducting with Frederick Zweig, and he took a master class in film composition with Walter Scharf through the UCLA extension program. During this period, Redford wrote concert and chamber music as well. Some years later, Redford studied composition and counterpoint with operatic composer and film orchestrator Thomas Pasatieri.

Jonathan Alfred Clawson Redford (born July 14, 1953) is an American composer, arranger, orchestrator, and conductor. He is also the author of Welcome All Wonders: A Composer's Journey.