Before establishing himself as a film composer, John Van Tongeren had his roots in rock 'n roll. In the early 1980s he was an in-demand arranger and keyboard player, and went on to write and produce hit records for a number of successful artists including Chicago, The Pointer Sister, Robbie Nevil, John Parr, Starship and Al Jarreau. He worked on first film score in 1990, performing keyboard for Hans Zimmer on his score "Days of Thunder". This subsequently led to a long and fruitful collaboration with Zimmer and the Media Ventures stable, in which Van Tongeren worked with composers such as John Frizzell, Mark Mancina, Steve Porcaro, Trevor Rabin and contributed uncredited "additional selected cues" to films including "Armageddon", "Dante's Peak", "Moll Flanders", "Twister", "Drop Zone", "Speed", "True Romance" and "Thelma and Louise". Van Tongeren's most prominent solo assignments came in the mid-1990s when he was asked to compose original music for the TV series "The Outer Limits" (1995) and "Poltergeist: The Legacy" (1996), and the mini-series "Creature" (1998) based on the novel by Peter Benchley, and has recently scored the popular Disney Channel movie "The Cheetah Girls" (2003) and the feature film "Malibu's Most Wanted" (2003), the latter in collaboration with John Debney. Van Tongeren cites Bernard Herrmann, Dmitri Shostakovich, Bela Bartok and Toru Takemitsu among his musical influences - which, he says, allows him to create moods ranging from interstellar awe to supernatural terror. In addition to writing music, Van Tongeren is also the owner of The Blue Room, a state-of-the-art recording studio in Los Angeles.
