Stephen Barton

Stephen Barton (born 17 September 1982) is a British film and video game composer who has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 2001. He has composed the music for dozens of major film, television and video game projects, including Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Titanfall, Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away (with James Cameron), and Disney's Motorcity.

Early life
As a child, Barton was a chorister in Winchester Cathedral Choir, later winning a prestigious DfE specialist music scholarship to study piano and composition at Wells Cathedral School, one of the oldest extant schools in the world.

Film and television
Barton's film work include scores for Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away, Jennifer's Body, Tom Dolby and Tom Williams' debut feature Last Weekend, Line of Fire, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont and the BAFTA nominated thriller Exam. He also contributed music for the Narnia and Shrek franchises (including the "Fairy Godmother Song" from Shrek 2) as well as Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, Tony Scott's Man On Fire and Ben Affleck's "Gone, Baby Gone".

Chris Prynoski, the animator behind the hallucination scene in Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, heard Barton's score for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and asked him to score Titmouse's animated series G.I. Joe: Resolute, which led to a further collaboration on a series for Disney, Motorcity. In addition to those he also co-wrote the music for MTV's Disco Destroyer, a project conceived by Scott Mosier, Jim Mahfood and Joe Casey and animated by Titmouse, composing the score with Chevy Metal and My Ruin guitarist Mick Murphy.

Video games
In 2007, Barton wrote the score for the highly regarded first person shooter Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (with Harry Gregson-Williams). He teamed up with the same developers at their new company Respawn Entertainment to work on the music for Titanfall, an online-only multiplayer shooter. Barton also created the music for the 2016 sequel, Titanfall 2. His other game work includes additional music for two of the Metal Gear Solid games as well as the game score for Dreamworks Animation's How To Train Your Dragon.

Other work
Barton has collaborated frequently with Sir Anthony Hopkins since producing the soundtrack for the film Slipstream in 2006. He produced the Decca album "Composer", which topped the UK Classical charts for a month in 2012, as well as collaborating with Hopkins on the production of "And The Waltz Goes On" with André Rieu, which won the Classic FM "Album Of The Year" award in the Classic Brit Awards 2012. As a pianist he has performed extensively as a soloist with numerous orchestras including the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Colorado Symphony, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and the Brussels Philharmonic, as well as on numerous movie soundtracks and diverse albums including Hybrid's I Choose Noise and playing the mellotron on a cover of Snowblind for Fireball Ministry's eponymously titled album in 2010.

His company Afterlight Inc. is based in Hollywood. Barton is a voting member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.