Mychael Danna Biography (2)
Mychael Danna has been scoring films since his 1987 feature debut for Atom Egoyan's Family Viewing, a score which earned Danna the first of his nine Canadian film award nominations. His work with Egoyan continues through six features, including Exotica (1994), where Danna was able to incorporate his interest in Middle Eastern and South Asian music. His fascination with combining non-Western sound sources with electronics, minimalism and manipulation is pushed to a further limit in Mira Nair's Kama Sutra (1997). Danna's work with Ang Lee on The Ice Storm (1997), used native American flute player Dan Cecil Hill in concert with The Evergreen Gamelan Ensemble to portray the forces of nature at play under the suburban 70's of Connecticut. A very different sonic world was explored in John Greyson's feature Lilies (1996), where Danna wrote a Latin vocal mass with Gregorian and other early music influences; performed by England's premier male choir The Hilliard Ensemble. Danna also scored Regeneration (1997), a film by Britain's Gillies MacKinnon based on the Pat Barker novel of the Great War, as well as Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1997), which portrays the parallel story of the Pied Piper with the playing of Hossein ‘Omoumi and early music ensemble The Toronto Consort. For Joel Schumacher's 8mm (1999), Danna combined percussion, woodwind and vocal music he recorded in Morocco with western orchestra. Other collaborations include Ang Lee's American Civil War film Ride with the Devil, Atom Egoyan's Felicia's Journey, and James Mangold's Girl Interrupted, which features the glass percussion and woodwinds of The Glass Orchestra. Among Danna's most recent projects is the score for the Miramax film Bounce, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck and directed by Don Roos.
Mychael Danna also served for five years as composer-in-residence at the McLaughlin Planetarium in Toronto. Before that, he completed an undergraduate degree in music composition at the University of Toronto, winning the Glenn Gould Composition Scholarship. This year, Mychael has completed work on a ballet score for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, based on the 1000 year old classical Indian erotic poem The Gita Govinda with choreographer Nina Menon., as well as his second Mira Nair collaboration Monsoon Wedding, a project that Mychael recorded in Mumbai, India.
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