Five-time Emmy winner Jeff Beal’s improvisatory method, sense of timing, and sophistication have made him a favorite of directors including Ed Harris (Pollock and Appaloosa), David Fincher (House of Cards), Oliver Stone (JFK Revisited, The Putin Interviews), Lauren Greenfeld (The Queen of Versailles, Generation Wealth) and Rob Reiner (Shock and Awe). His work on documentaries Blackfish, The Biggest Little Farm, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Sequel, Athlete A, Frank Marshall’s Rather and dramatic scores for HBO’s Rome, Carnivàle, The Newsroom, USA’s Monk, Netflix's House of Cards, and AppleTV+’s Raymond and Ray have shown him to be one of the most distinctive and recognizable composers working today.

In addition to his distinguished scoring career, Beal is a prolific composer of concert music. Recent commissioned works include The Paper-Lined Shack for Leonard Slatkin, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, and soprano Hila Plitmann; Sunrise for the Los Angeles Master Chorale; a flute concerto for Sharon Bezaly and the Minnesota Orchestra; and Body in Motion, a violin concerto for Kelly Hall-Tompkins.  

Beal’s performing, conducting, and composing worlds converged in 2016 when he led the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in the premiere of House of Cards in Concert, with further performances in Miami, Denmark, The Netherlands (Concertgebouw),  and Jerusalem. This symphonic work was recorded by BIS Records on the double SACD “House of Cards Symphony,” which includes Beal’s flute and guitar concerti and was all conducted by the composer.  

Beal has also conducted the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in his original score for Keaton’s silent film The General, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the film score of Boston as well as the Boston Pops Esplanade for the live-to-picture premiere of Boston. In March of 2019, he led the Qatar National Symphony in the world premiere of his work The Radiant Pearl, commissioned for the opening of the Qatar Museum in Doha. He also led the Rochester Philharmonic and Eastman Philharmonia in the world premiere of an antiphonal orchestral work “The Cathedral," in honor of the centennial of the Eastman Theater.  Beal will give his Carnegie Hall debut in June leading the Silver Nitrate Big Band and Fourth Wall in a concert of his score to The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, presented as a part of Carnegie Hall’s 2024 Weimar Festival.

Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Beal’s grandmother was a pianist and accompanist for silent movies. An avid jazz fan, she gave him Miles Davis and Gil Evans’s Sketches of Spain album that would influence his development as a jazz trumpet player and composer.  In addition to studying both classical and jazz trumpet, Jeff was a self-taught pianist and spent countless hours in the library learning music theory and composition on his own. Encouraged by conductor Kent Nagano, Jeff composed a trumpet concerto at age 17, which he performed with the Oakland Youth Symphony, as well as a number of large ensemble jazz charts that are still in publication today. 

It would be across the country at the Eastman School of Music that Jeff would discover both his musical voice, as a student of Christopher Rouse and Rayburn Wright, and the love of his life, soprano Joan Sapiro Beal, who frequently performs his music. In 2015, the couple donated funds for the creation of The Beal Institute for Film Music and Contemporary Media at Eastman.  The Beals have also donated to fund the collaborative Music and Medicine initiative at the University of Rochester, having experienced the impact of music on health in their own lives. Beal was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2006, and his recent recording of solo piano etudes, New York Etudes, focuses on the connection of music making and mindfulness. He lives in New York City.