Canada has produced composers in almost every corner of music, from Hollywood film scores and chart-topping pop to church choirs, electronic studios and operas staged on wilderness lakes. Some were born there, some arrived as adults, and a few hold more than one passport, but all of them left a mark on Canadian music.
Here are 10 of the greatest Canadian composers, each with one piece to start with so you can hear why they made the list.
The short version
If you only explore three, start with Howard Shore for The Lord of the Rings, R. Murray Schafer for music built around the natural world, and Ann Southam for her hypnotic piano cycle Glass Houses.
1. Howard Shore
Born 1946 · Canadian
Start with: “Concerning Hobbits (The Lord of the Rings)”🏆 Three Oscars
Born in Toronto, Howard Shore was the original musical director of Saturday Night Live from 1975 to 1980 before turning to film. His first film score was a low-budget thriller in 1978, and he has since scored more than 80 films, including The Silence of the Lambs, Seven and The Departed.
His longest partnership is with David Cronenberg, whose films he has scored since The Brood in 1979, and he later turned The Fly into an opera that premiered in Paris in 2008. The Lord of the Rings brought him three Oscars and is the score most people know, with the gentle Shire theme as its emotional center.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 15 Of The Greatest Film Composers Of All Time
2. Rufus Wainwright
Born 1973 · Canadian and American
Start with: “Going to a Town”
Rufus Wainwright was born in Rhinebeck, New York, to the folk singers Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III, and grew up mostly in Montreal with his mother. At 14 he sang his own song in the film Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller, which earned a Genie Award nomination. His lush, orchestral style is often called baroque pop.
His debut album came out in 1998 and won a Juno, as did Poses in 2002. He is also a serious opera composer. His first opera, Prima Donna, with a French libretto, premiered at the Manchester International Festival in 2009, and his second, Hadrian, opened the Canadian Opera Company season in Toronto in 2018.
3. David Foster
Born 1949 · Canadian
Start with: “Winter Games”🏆 16 Grammys
Born in Victoria, British Columbia, David Foster became one of the most successful producers and songwriters in pop. He has won 16 Grammy Awards and worked on songs such as “I Will Always Love You” for Whitney Houston, “The Prayer” for Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli, and “Hard to Say I’m Sorry” for Chicago.
His sound is easy to spot: big singable melodies, layered strings and piano, and a slow build to a huge final chorus. He also wrote “Winter Games”, the instrumental theme for the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. He was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1998 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010.
4. Ann Southam
1937–2010 · Canadian
Start with: “Glass Houses No. 5”Member of the Order of Canada
Ann Southam began composing at 15 after a summer music camp at the Banff School. She built a home electronic studio in the 1960s, at a time when very few women worked in the field, and wrote around 30 scores for the New Dance Group of Canada. In 1981 she co-founded the Association of Canadian Women Composers and became its first president.
Her piano cycle Glass Houses (1981) is built from short tonal patterns that repeat and shift, influenced by Terry Riley and Steve Reich. She linked that repetition to the everyday, life-sustaining work traditionally done by women. She was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 2010 and left $14 million to the Canadian Women’s Foundation.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 25 Of The Greatest Female Composers Of All Time
5. Healey Willan
1880–1968 · English-born Canadian
Start with: “Rise Up, My Love, My Fair One”More than 800 works
Healey Willan was born in England and moved to Toronto in 1913 to become organist and choirmaster of St. Paul’s, Bloor Street. He wrote more than 800 works, including operas, symphonies, a piano concerto and organ music, but he is best known for his church music, shaped by his love of plainsong and Renaissance polyphony.
From 1921 until shortly before his death he led the choir at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Toronto, which became famous for unaccompanied singing. He wrote an anthem for the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, was among the first Canadian musicians to appear on a postage stamp, and was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1967.
6. Alexina Louie
Born 1949 · Canadian
Start with: “Take the Dog Sled”🏆 Two Juno Awards
Vancouver-born Alexina Louie writes contemporary concert music that draws on her Chinese heritage as well as Western traditions. Her piano suite Scenes from a Jade Terrace is widely played by students and professionals, and she won the Juno for Best Classical Composition twice, for Songs of Paradise in 1989 and Shattered Night, Shivering Stars in 2000.
For the Montreal Symphony Orchestra’s first tour to Nunavik she wrote Take the Dog Sled, an eight-movement suite for ensemble and Inuit throat singers, first performed in 2008. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada and won the Canada Council’s Molson Prize in 2019.
7. Adnan Sami
Born 1971 · Formerly Canadian, Indian citizen since 2016
Start with: “Lift Karadey”Padma Shri
Adnan Sami was born in London and educated in the UK. He held Canadian citizenship before becoming a naturalized Indian citizen in 2016. A singer, composer and pianist, he works in both Indian and Western music, and has been credited as the first musician to play santoor music and Indian classical music on the piano.
As a teenager he wrote and recorded a song for famine relief in Ethiopia, which earned him a special award from UNICEF. He went on to huge success in Indian pop and Bollywood with albums such as Kabhi To Nazar Milao and Tera Chehra, and India awarded him the Padma Shri in 2020.
8. R. Murray Schafer
1933–2021 · Canadian
Start with: “Snowforms”First Jules Léger Prize
R. Murray Schafer was a composer, teacher and environmentalist who founded the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University. His 1977 book The Tuning of the World made the idea of the soundscape famous, asking people to listen to their surroundings as carefully as they would to music. He won the first Jules Léger Prize in 1978.
His music often leaves the concert hall. The Princess of the Stars is performed at dawn on a wilderness lake, with singers and dancers in canoes, and Music for Wilderness Lake is written for 12 trombones around a small lake. His giant Apocalypsis needed about 500 performers in 1980 and over 1,000 when it was revived in Toronto in 2015.
9. Christos Hatzis
Born 1953 · Greek-born Canadian
Start with: “Constantinople”🏆 Juno Award winner
Born in Volos, Greece, Christos Hatzis studied at the Eastman School of Music and in Buffalo before moving to Canada in 1982. He teaches at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music. His music often returns to Christian spirituality, his Byzantine heritage and the culture of Canada’s Inuit.
Constantinople, written for the Gryphon Trio, mixes classical, jazz and Eastern music with video, and won a Juno in 2008. His String Quartet No. 1 (The Awakening) won a Juno in 2006, and his score for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Going Home Star added another in 2017. He also won the Jules Léger Prize and the Jean A. Chalmers National Music Award.
Listen on SpotifyApple MusicRelated: 10 Of The Greatest Greek Composers You Should Know
10. Jocelyn Morlock
1969–2023 · Canadian
Start with: “My Name Is Amanda Todd”🏆 Juno Award winner
Jocelyn Morlock was born in Saint Boniface, Manitoba, and spent her career in Vancouver. From 2014 to 2019 she was composer-in-residence with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the first woman to hold the post, after serving as the first composer-in-residence of the city’s Music on Main.
Her best-known piece, My Name Is Amanda Todd, was commissioned by the NAC Orchestra in Ottawa as a reflection on the life of the Canadian teenager, and won the 2018 Juno for Classical Composition of the Year. She also wrote Amore as the set piece for the 2005 Montreal International Music Competition.
Which Canadian composer is your favorite?
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Summing up
Canadian music covers a lot of ground. Shore and Foster shaped the sound of Hollywood and pop radio, Willan built a choral tradition in Toronto’s churches, and Southam, Schafer, Louie, Hatzis and Morlock pushed concert music into new places, from electronic studios to wilderness lakes.
Which Canadian composer would you add to the list?
