Gary Fry

Emmy Award-winning composer Gary Fry has achieved notable success in the fields of both commercial music and symphonic music. As composer/arranger for the popular Welcome, Yule! Christmas concerts of the renowned Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 19 years, Fry has become the most-performed living composer by the CSO. He has written nearly a hundred works for them, as well as for the Dallas and Colorado symphony orchestras, the Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas, and New York pops orchestras, the American Jazz Philharmonic, and other regional orchestras. Some of America’s most prominent churches have also commissioned sacred music for chorus and orchestra from Fry.

Long active in commercial music, Fry has composed for film, television, live theater, ballet, and more than 2500 radio and television commercials for McDonald’s, Sears, Kellogg’s, and hundreds of other major national advertisers. He received a 2006 Emmy Award for his work for Chicago’s CBS affiliate WBBM-TV. Air travelers hear Fry’s electronic version of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue when passing through the United Airlines terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare airport.

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Music education and music for children are other areas in which Fry is active. He has arranged and produced albums of children’s music for Warner Brothers and Kid Rhino records. His teaching resumé includes positions on the faculties of the University of Miami, Northwestern University, and the Midwest Young Artists Conservatory, and he has conducted workshops and seminars at many other educational institutions. Children’s choirs under Fry’s direction have performed at the White House, the United Nations, and Carnegie Hall. His extensive background in choral music has led to commissions from academic and professional vocal ensembles around the country, including the Chicago Symphony Singers, the Colorado Children’s Chorale, the Cincinnati Children’s Choir, and the University of Southern California.

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Fry has also served as artistic director and composer-in-residence for the Rhythms of One World multinational choral festival at the United Nations in New York City and Geneva, Switzerland, and has produced two recordings featuring actual Ambassadors to the United Nations as instrumentalists and vocalists.