Chris Letcher is a film composer and songwriter. He received his DMus from the Royal College of Music in 2014 and his research interests include an interest in the history, practice and theory of composing music for the moving image, collaborative processes in screen music creation, and issues of representation in African and ‘world’ cinema.
Letcher has published in Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, Journal of Film Music, and Ethnomusicology Forum, and has contributed a chapter to the Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound. His music for film and television has been widely screened around the world and he has won a number of awards. Highlights of Letcher’s film music work include scores for Ntshavheni wa Luruli’s Elelwani (2013), Zee Ntuli’s Hard to Get (2014), and the BBC film The Challenger Disaster (2013), starring William Hurt. His score for acclaimed Malaysian director Bradley Liew’s Motel Acacia (2019) played in competition at the Tokyo Film Festival and he has scored the box-office smash the Kandasamys films (2016, 2019, 2021). Letcher’s score for Matthys Boshoff’s The Story of Racheltjie De Beer (2019) won Best Feature Film Score at the South African Film and Television Awards, an award he had previously won with a score for Sink/Rachel Weeping (2016).
