Henryk Iwan is a young composer based in Shanghai (China), scoring for film, video games, TV and other.
His musical education began already at an elementary school level, where he learned to play the piano at first. With his outstanding hearing perception and an ease of learning to play different instruments, it was clear that it would be a waste to stop at that. So after a few years, he switched to the double bass as a main instrument and it stayed that way through high school, as well as the Academy of Music in Katowice (Poland), from which he graduated in 2007. At the same time, throughout the years, he's been self-teaching to play the electric guitar, which always was his favorite instrument to play and which he studied further at the Jazz Department of the Academy. But still, he never really liked the idea of being "focused" on just one particular instrument, or even a genre. For him, it was always about the music itself, music as a whole. That is probably why, at some point, he started to get more and more interested in composing. It emerged from the will to not just re-create, but actually create what he considers to be the most beautiful of all the arts...
Although he was born and raised in Poland, he prefers the American approach to scoring for motion picture, developed over decades of their rich cinematography, rather than the European minimalist philosophy. His exceptional ability to "feel" the scene drives him to come up with interesting ideas of how to derive inner emotions, or create a specific mood and make the movie really come to life. Add to that his long time love for the far-eastern music (mostly Japanese), and you get a really elegant mixture of what's best in eastern and western world.
Another side that surely helps him compose and orchestrate, is his many years experience in a live orchestra (as an instrumentalist). He creates music of much versatility and variety of styles, but always standing up to today's highest standards. And knowing the fact that he's also one of just a few people on the globe being invited to work with some of the leading music software developers (like Native Instruments, Best Service or even Vienna Symphonic Library), it's no surprise that his music is so very well produced.
Regardless of his young age and the fact that his career is just starting, he's already working for people from all around the world, successively gaining more and more recognition. And although his credits list is naturally not yet that long, those who've trusted him to score their projects, have only ended up satisfied (and often surprised) with the quality of his music and - which is even more important - how well it served the picture.
In 2008 - just a year after his graduation - he has already won in an big international music contest, held by Spectrasonics (USA) and received his first major award, for the
Best Video Game Score, proving to be one of the more promising young up-and-coming composers today...
After working on numerous projects in Poland, he decided to move to Shanghai, where he currently works for one of the greatest and fastest growing studios in China -
Simply Sound.
