Biography
Jamie Thierman is a composer, orchestrator, a lover of music from around the world, and a born and bred Alaskan. She ventured south to study music composition first at the University of Oregon for her undergraduate degree, and then at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she completed her master’s and Ph.D. degrees by 2015. Disguising her love of travel and world music as an academic study, she attended a three-week intensive African music and dance workshop by This World Music in Ghana, and was selected twice to have her music played by the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble in Russia. She continues this hobby by teaching herself to play the bodhrán and playing in an amateur Irish ensemble in Los Angeles.
Currently Jamie is working in Los Angeles as a composer and orchestrator. She writes music for both concert and film, and orchestrates music for major movies and TV shows as part of the Tutti Music Partners team, working on pictures such as Agents of Shield, Us, Outlander, Creed II, Happy Death Day I and II, Venom, Green Book, and many more. When not immersed in music Jamie can be found hiking, running, or attending lectures on space exploration.
Please visit Jamie’s IMDB page for a comprehensive list of the films and TV shows she’s worked on.
Getting To Know My Music
I love gorgeous sounds. In fact, my musician colleagues joke that it’s not a Thierman Original until there’s a sweeping melody somewhere. My affinity toward beautiful sonorities is most likely based in my work as an orchestrator and composer of film music. My inner concert composer gets a little jealous of the blank permission film music has to be beautiful, and I find myself working all sorts of film elements into my concert music.
I also love lively groove. This probably stems from the fact that I grew up dancing, playing, and singing in contra and folk ensembles and musicals. When I studied African drumming, I witnessed firsthand the idea that there is no music without movement. Once again I get frustrated that groove is expected from jazz, samba, Irish bands, and more, but suddenly faux pas if you’re sitting down in a concert hall listening to an orchestra.
Beauty and groove are my go-tos in my writing, but I also want to do new things with them. I don’t want to just add a samba rhythm to an orchestra or write film music for a wind ensemble. I want to create a groove that hasn’t been heard before, and find a symbiosis between film and concert where it’s neither one nor the other.
