Jeff Beal is an American composer with a genre-defying musical fluidity. His work has been nominated for nineteen, and won five Primetime Emmy awards for scores for House of Cards (Netflix), Rome (HBO), Carnivale (HBO) Nightmares and Dreamscapes (TNT), Monk (USA) and Oliver Stone’s The Putin Interviews (Showtime). Noted film scores include the documentaries The Biggest Little Farm and Blackfish, and dramas Pollock (dir. Ed Harris) and Shock and Awe (dir. Rob Reiner), and Raymond & Ray (dir. Rodrigo Garcia) on Apple TV+.
Beal composes, orchestrates, conducts, mixes and often performs on his own scores. An accomplished and recorded jazz musician, Beal uses his improvisational skills to read the emotional tone of a scene. “This process allows me to envision a world where anything can happen,” says Beal.
Jeff has begun conducting his own music in recent years leading National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in the premiere of House of Cards in Concert, a live to picture event, with further performances in Miami, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Jerusalem. In March of 2019 he led the Qatar National Symphony in the world premiere of his work The Radiant Pearl, commissioned for the opening of the Qatar Museum in Doha.
Recent premieres include a Flute Concerto for soloist Sharon Bezaly and the Minnesota Orchestras, and the first two installments of his German Expressionist Silent Film Trilogy: F.W. Muranu’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans commissioned by the Los Angeles Master Chorale; Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligary commissioned by the Bundesjazzorchestra; The Paper Lined Shack, an album on Supertrain Records with three chamber arrangement live performances at Fotografiska (NYC), Arts at the Armory (Somerville), and Zipper Concert Hall (Los Angeles); a co-commission from the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and Eastman School of Music celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Kodak Hall; and, We Breathless Stand commissioned for and performed by the US Army Field Band. He is currently completing a violin concerto, to be premiered by the St. Louis Symphony in 2024, for soloist Kelly Hall-Tompkins, with Leonard Slatkin conducting.
Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Beal’s grandmother was a pianist and accompanist for silent movies. An avid jazz fan, she gave him Miles Davis’/Gil Evans’ Sketches of Spain album when he was beginning his trumpet studies. In addition to studying both classical and jazz trumpet, Jeff was a self-taught pianist and spent countless hours in the library learning music theory and composition on his own. Encouraged by conductor Kent Nagano, Jeff composed a trumpet concerto at age 17, which he performed with the Oakland Youth Symphony, as well as a number of large ensemble jazz charts that are still in publication today.
It would be across the country at the Eastman School of Music that Jeff would discover both his musical voice, as a student of Christopher Rouse and Rayburn Wright, and the love of his life, soprano Joan Sapiro Beal, who frequently performs his music. In 2015, the couple donated funds for the creation of The Beal Institute for Film Music and Contemporary Media at Eastman. The Beals have also donated to fund the collaborative Music and Medicine initiative at the University of Rochester, having experienced the impact of music on health in their own lives.