Andy Hill

Andy Hill (born 1951) is an American music supervisor, record producer, and music educator. Under the name A.W. Hill, Hill has written three novels, Nowhere-Land, The Last Days of Madame Rey, and Enoch's Portal, and a screenplay based on the life of Nikola Tesla. Andy Hill was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States, and educated at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. From 1987 to 1996, during the period now referred to as the Disney Renaissance, he served as vice-president of music production for The Walt Disney Studios (division), overseeing music production on a roster of films which included The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Sister Act, and working closely with composers and songwriters such as Alan Menken and Hans Zimmer. Films for which Hill supervised music under the aegis of the Disney music department and its music chief, Chris Montan, earned nine Academy Awards in the categories of Best Original Score and Best Original Song for a Motion Picture. Subsequent to his term at Disney, Hill opened Andy Hill Film + Music under the auspices of Modern Music and supervised projects which included Message In A Bottle, Ed Wood, James and the Giant Peach and Happy Feet, winning a Grammy Award in 2000 as producer of the Best Musical Album for Children for Elmo In Grouchland.From 2006 to 2011, Hill directed the graduate program in Music Composition for the Screen at Columbia College Chicago. His students have earned music credits on films such as Life of Pi, How To Train Your Dragon, and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and found work with such notable composers as John Powell, Mychael Danna, Jeff Danna, Johnny Klimek, and Javier Navarrete. In the fall of 2011, Hill was engaged to prepare and oversee the launch of graduate composition programs at Berklee Valencia, the international extension of the Berklee College of Music, including film scoring and electronic music production, with classes commencing in September 2012. The campus is located in the Palau de les Arts, part of the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciencies designed by visionary architect Santiago Calatrava in Valencia, Spain. Following matriculation of the first class of Berklee degree candidates and a pilot semester, he spent an additional six months in Spain and Morocco working on a portfolio of songs with an enigmatic producer known only as The Old Guitarist. In September 2013, Hill relocated to Belgium to take a post as executive soundtrack producer and director of international business development for Galaxy Studios and the Scoring Flanders initiative, with the goal of bringing more high-level film scoring to the Flanders region and the musical stewardship of the Brussels Philharmonic. Concurrently, he launched Cinemuse VOF as a company under Belgian law, for music supervision and scoring services within the EU. In late 2015, Cinemuse, and Hill, relocated to Nashville, Tennessee, where his principal activities were teaching, lecturing, and mentoring aspiring film composers through his Cinemuse Composer Coaching service. In 2019, he relocated to Sofia, Bulgaria, where he currently serves as dean of the Film Scoring Academy of Europe, a constituent college of the Irish American University in Dublin, and as director of its M.F.A. program in Music for Motion Pictures & Contemporary Media.

Hill was from 2015 to 2018 a visiting lecturer and industry advisor to the Masters Program in Scoring for Film and Visual Media at Pulse College Dublin, a division of Windmill Lane Studios, and a member of the advisory board for Pingtrax (Musimap), a Belgian music search engine utilized by scholars, archivists, media producers and music supervisors. His comprehensive study of landmark film scores, Scoring the Screen: The Secret Language of Film Music, was published in August 2017 by the Hal Leonard Corporation. About the book, Conrad Pope, celebrated orchestrator for John Williams, Alexandre Desplat, and Howard Shore, among others said, "If you have any interest in what music means in film, you must read this book." The book has been selected as a core text by Leeds College and other institutions. In 2020, Hill received his PhD in Film Musicology from the University of South Wales. His dissertation was entitled BARDS OF THE SILVER SCREEN: Music and Meaning In Cinema.