About
David is an Emmy Award winning composer. His career has spanned over 40 years and seen him work on numerous projects to commercial and critical acclaim.
He won the Emmy for Outstanding Music Direction and Composition with Stephen Gallagher for Secrets at Red Rocks in 2026. He won best TV score at the 2020 APRA Awards for the BBC drama, The Luminaries and and the 2022 NZTV Awards for another BBC drama, Mystic (Mystic was co-composed with Stephen Gallagher). He has composed scores for over twenty feature films including McLaren for which he won the APRA Silver Scroll award for Best Original Music, The Ground We Won, Gardening with Soul, Beyond the Edge, and additional score for Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones. He wrote music and created musical sound design for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong (with Plan 9 Music). His recent scores include The Moon is Upside Down, Mysterious Ways and Punch. He released solo albums Ash and Bone in 2022 and I’ll Hum the First Few Bars in March 2023, both through Rattle Records. He released All Things, Will Stay, Silent in late 2024.
He was a founding member of The Mutton Birds and plays in the easy listening noise band, Teeth.
David teaches two courses in film score composition at Te Herenga Waka (Victoria University of Wellington).
In his own words he likes to ‘mash shit up’, creating orchestral scores that utilise ‘not only classical instruments but all sorts of things’.
He works in Owhiro Bay, Poneke, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.
A full biography can be found on AudioCulture and NZOnScreen.
For a full list of credits please visit IMDB.
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