Bear McCreary

Bear McCreary is an American composer and multi-instrumentalist based in Los Angeles, whose career focuses on music for film, television series and video games, often dominated by orchestral writing, percussion and influences from traditional musics. Born in 1979 in Fort Lauderdale and raised in the state of Washington, McCreary studied composition at the University of Southern California and trained with Elmer Bernstein before scoring his first projects for the screen in the early 2000s. His work on the series Battlestar Galactica marked a turning point, featuring a compositional approach that blends recurring melodic motifs, dense orchestral textures and solo instruments from diverse origins. McCreary went on to score television productions such as The Walking Dead, Outlander, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Black Sails, and expanded into film—most notably 10 Cloverfield Lane and Godzilla: King of the Monsters—and into video games with the soundtracks for God of War and God of War Ragnarök. His music alternates broad orchestral swaths, pronounced rhythms, solo voices and choirs, with a strong emphasis on thematic characterization of narrative worlds. Frequently appearing as a keyboardist or accordionist in his own concert ensembles, McCreary maintains a stage practice that extends his work as a screen composer.