Emily Bear

He presented Bear at the 45th Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland and the Festival Castell at the Peralada Castle in Spain, where she performed her original song, "Peralada", and a trio with Esperanza Spalding and Andrea Motis.

Emily Jordan Bear (born August 30, 2001) is an American composer, pianist, songwriter and singer.

After beginning to play the piano and compose music as a small child, Bear made her professional piano debut at the Ravinia Festival at the age of five, the youngest performer ever to play there.

She gained wider notice from a series of appearances on The Ellen DeGeneres Show beginning at the age of six.

She has since played her own compositions and other works with orchestras and ensembles in North America, Europe and Asia, including appearances at Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, the Montreux Jazz Festival and Jazz Open Stuttgart.

She won two Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, the youngest person ever to win the award, and also won two Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composers Awards.

By the age of eight, Bear had composed more than 350 pieces, and between 2007 and 2010, she released five albums of her piano music.

From the age of six, Bear studied classical piano with the former principal keyboardist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Mary Sauer, and later with Veda Kaplinsky, head of the piano department at the Juilliard School.

She studied jazz improvisation with Frank Kimbrough and composing with Ron Sadoff, head of NYU Steinhardt film scoring department.

At age six, in 2008, she won her first ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award for her piece "Northern Lights", the youngest composer ever to win the award.

She also won the Rockford Area Music Industry Outstanding Achievement Award (RAMI) that year.

As a small child, Bear made six appearances on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

She played in 2008 at the White House for President George W. Bush, at the age of six, and performed Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 with the Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra at the age of seven.

She performed the same piece later in 2008 with the Rockford Symphony Orchestra.

She also participated that year at the McDonald's Thanksgiving Parade in Chicago and performed the next year on Good Morning America.

In 2010, Bear made her Carnegie Hall debut at the age of 9, playing her own piece for orchestra and chorus, "Peace: We Are the Future".

The same year, she performed on the television show Dancing with the Stars.

In 2011, at the 3rd PTTOW!

Youth Media and Innovation Summit in California addressed by The Dalai Lama, Bear performed her song "Diversity", which she had written in honor of The Dalai Lama.

The same year, she began working with Quincy Jones.

In 2013, Bear released an album of her own jazz compositions, Diversity, produced by her mentor, Quincy Jones.

She expressed a strong interest in film scoring, and in 2013 she was the youngest composer in history to attend the NYU Steinhardt Film Scoring Workshop.

She composes and plays classical, jazz and pop music, film and TV scores, and is heard on the 2015 Broadway cast recording of the musical Doctor Zhivago.

After being home-schooled for a few years, Bear enrolled in Guilford High School in Rockford in 2015, graduating at age 15 in 2017.

When Bear was two years old, her grandmother Merle Langs Greenberg, a piano teacher, recognized her talent at the piano.

By age three, she had composed her first song, "Crystal Ice".

The next year, Bear began to study with Emilio del Rosario at the Music Institute of Chicago.

Hal Leonard Music has been publishing Bear's original compositions since she was 4 years old.

She made her professional piano debut at the Ravinia Festival at age five, the youngest performer to play there.

Soon she was enrolled at the Winnetka campus to study classical music.

With her own jazz trio, she released an EP, Into the Blue, in 2017.

She was the youngest performer in the history of the Night of the Proms tour (2017).

Her 2019 EP Emotions was her first to feature Bear singing her own songs.

In 2021, she and Abigail Barlow co-wrote and released an album inspired by the Netflix series Bridgerton, titled The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical, which won the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album, making Bear the youngest Grammy nominee and winner ever in the musical theater category.

She was listed on Forbes' 2022 30 Under 30.

With the 2023 release of Dog Gone, she became the youngest person to score a feature film for release on a streaming platform".

In mid-2023, Bear toured as the featured pianist for Beyoncé's Renaissance World Tour.

Barlow and Bear wrote the songs for the upcoming film Moana 2.

Bear was born and raised in Rockford, Illinois, the youngest of three children of Brian, an orthopedic surgeon, and Andrea Bear.

Her mother has sung professionally and has a music education degree.