Jon Hegel

Jon Hegel is a film composer and saxophonist from Denver, Colorado. He studied studio music and jazz at the University of Miami and holds a degree in film studies from the University of Colorado.

He has composed scores for several narrative and documentary films including 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene, Memory: The Origins Of Alien, The People Vs George Lucas, Independence and No Bigger Than A Minute (a part of the “P.O.V.” P.B.S. television documentary series). He was nominated for a Heartland Emmy Award for composition in 2009 and was twice nominated for the “Leo” Award for music at the Braunschweig Film Festival.

Jon has incorporated various styles of music in soundtracks throughout his career, composing for string quartets, orchestra, vocals, electronic scores, pure synthesizer, solo instruments and jazz ensembles.

In recent years he has collaborated with documentarian Alexandre Philippe on a series of films about film itself. Writing for these “films-about-films” often takes soundtracks to a variety of places musically: an all-strings score for a documentary about Psycho, an all electronic-soundscape for a documentary about Alien, and a solo cello score for an intimate interview with William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist.

In the PBS documentary, No Bigger Than A Minute— an autobiographical film about one man’s experience with his own dwarfism— he used the director/subject’s own DNA as a basis of the score. The director’s genetic code was translated to musical notes and Hegel wrote the entire score based on the melody those notes formed.

Jon Hegel’s most recent soundtrack for the documentary Leap of Faith: William Friedkin On The Exorcist, premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.