Award-winning composer and music producer Simon Franglen traverses the world of film, classical, and contemporary music and other visual mediums.
He has spent a large portion of the last three years composing the three-hour score to Avatar: The Way of Water, traveling to New Zealand to collaborate with James Cameron. He also composed the score to Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 2022 film, Nôtre-Dame On Fire, the dramatic re-enactment of the saving of the cathedral. Upcoming work includes Avatar 3 to be released in 2024, a multi-year immersive and installation project in the USA, and a new orchestral work to follow up his 2019 90-minute oratorio The Birth of Skies and Earth which featured 176 musicians and singers.
Simon Franglen has received tremendous accolades and recognition for his work. He recently won the International Film Music Critics Award for Best Drama Score (2021) for The Curse of Turandot. His credits include four of the top grossing films of all time and six of the top selling albums. His other achievements include being nominated for a Golden Globe for his work on Avatar and being awarded the Record of the Year Grammy® as a producer on “My Heart Will Go On,” sung by Celine Dion for the film Titanic.
Franglen’s many music contributions include being a top line session musician and record producer in Los Angeles for several years, with dozens of multi-platinum albums and singles, including Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Toni Braxton, Quincy Jones, and Celine Dion. He created the gritty electronica for Howard Shore’s score to David Fincher’s Se7en and David Cronenberg’s Crash, produced the vocals for Moulin Rouge, and programmed for the Bodyguard soundtrack. He is well-known for his long-time collaboration with James Horner as arranger and score producer on films such as Avatar, The Amazing Spider-Man, Titanic, and others. After Horner’s tragic death in 2016, Franglen completed the score for The Magnificent Seven for which he received an ASCAP award. He was also responsible for the production and further composition of the music throughout Pandora–The World of Avatar which opened at Walt Disney World in Florida in May 2017, taking over duties from James Horner in 2015.
He also has major 3D music installations currently on exhibit around the world. Pink Floyd commissioned him to produce 3D audio mixes for Their Mortal Remains, which premiered at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London before touring worldwide. Shanghai Tower commissioned him to compose a permanent installation for “the highest art space in the world,” which required recording four interlocking 60-piece orchestras to give a true 3D experience within an array of 240 loudspeakers – 2000ft up on the 126th floor.