Jeff Atmajian is a highly sought after arranger and orchestrator for films. His steady clientele are well-known and highly successful composers such as James Newton Howard, Marc Shaiman, Rachel Portman and Gabriel Yared. In the past two years Jeff has been pursuing a more high profile composing career. Recently he scored the 90-minute documentary about the Armenian Genocide called Screamers which to date has enjoyed these awards:

  • Audience Award: AFI Film Festival;
  • Public Award: Montreal Human Rights Festival
  • Ecumenical Jury Award: Golden Apricot Festival (Yerevan)
  • Golden Apricot Award: Golden Apricot Festival (Yerevan).

In 2005 he composed, music directed and produced all the music for the large scale production Creation which features a 76 piece orchestra, ethnic world music and songs for Soloists or choir. Over the years he has also composed large and small scale library music for Megatrax and KPM.

Jeff was born and raised in Fresno, CA in 1960. He began private classical piano lessons at the age of 8 and at the age of 15 he began additional private study of traditional jazz piano then later added studies in progressive (modern) jazz piano (3 teachers simultaneously!). At the age of 14, he began composing as he gained an interest in popular music. In addition to studies in mathematics and computers, Jeff received a composition degree at the California State University of Fresno. It was at this point that his love for symphonic and chamber music began to flourish, and he played piano for vocal groups and ballet classes, local theatre productions and the University Jazz band.

In 1984 he moved to Los Angeles after being accepted into the special studies for film music program at USC. After graduating he supported himself by doing music copying, arranging, playing for dance classes and as pianist for two churches in Orange county. In 1986 he met English orchestrator Christopher Palmer at a film scoring session in Los Angeles and that began the start of what would be a dual life of living and working in Los Angeles and London.

As an orchestrator, Jeff has worked on all or nearly all of the films of directors Rob Reiner and M. Night Shyamalan. He has had the pleasure of being on many other types of projects through which he has worked for Elmer Bernstein, Andre Previn, Sir Neville Marriner, Sir Christopher Plummer, Jose Carreras, Lord Richard Attenborough, Al Pacino, Nora Ephron, Geena Davis, Barbra Streisand and many other noted names in the classical and film world. He has worked with all the London orchestras on classical, popular and film recordings, as well as doing film recording with the excellent studio orchestras in Los Angeles and New York. He recently performed piano and arranged the strings for a track on the soon to be released second album by the artist Jem.

Jeff works primarily at the piano for compositional ideas then sequences in Digital Performer with Gigastudio and many plug-ins as his main sound sources. He works with Finale for all of his notation. He spends his time living in Los Angeles and London.

For more credits, visit his Internet Movie Database listing.

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