Ever since he started taking lessons at the Deborah Moench Studio in Salt Lake City when he was 4, the violin has taken Chad Cannon places. It’s how he got into Harvard and Juilliard. It’s why he was nominated for an Emmy. It’s the reason he was able to work on an Oscar-winning film.
And this week, it’s the reason he’s coming back to his hometown so he can raise awareness about the plight of shallow-water coral reefs around the planet.
His show, a multimedia concert called “Music for the Ocean,” featuring Cannon on violin and pianist Hui Wu, will be presented at the Waterford School in Sandy on Thursday, Nov. 13, at 7 p.m. The public is invited.
The entire production was scored and composed by Chad last spring when he and his neighbors in Pasadena, California, were recovering from the Eaton fire that erupted next door in Altadena, destroying 7,000 structures and causing $27.5 billion in damages.
The fire stopped just two blocks from Chad’s and his wife Sarah’s house. They had to vacate for a few days for ash remediation, but “we were the lucky ones,” says Chad.
“I’d never lived through a disaster on that level before. It totally shifted my mindset about what things are really important in life.”
As it happened, one of the places where he found solace was the ocean.
“Diving into the water after the fire was really healing,” he says.
For the first time in his life, he learned to scuba dive, which led to two discoveries: one, that there’s a fascinating other world just below the water’s surface; two, that coral reefs, due to global warming and pollution, are in serious trouble.
He read a book that spells out just how much trouble: “Life on the Rocks,” by marine biologist Juli Berwald. He then reached out to the nonprofit organization Berwald co-founded, Tela Coral, to see if there was any way he could help.
His violin is how.
Cannon, 40, agrees that ocean activism isn’t the first cause you’d expect a kid who grew up in landlocked Utah to dive into.
“But I did go to Newport Beach in the summers growing up,” he says in his defense, “and I remember the excitement when I would arrive and smell the salt water. The air changes noticeably when you get near the ocean.”
Born and raised near Parleys Canyon, Chad played violin and toured with the prestigious Rocky Mountain Strings in his youth, learning from the late Jack Ashton. He graduated from Highland High School in 2004, winning the Deseret News Sterling Scholar Award for music, and after a Latter-day Saint mission to Japan, he was accepted into Harvard to study violin and Japanese.
After Harvard, he was accepted into The Juilliard School in New York City to study composition.
He moved to Los Angeles to begin his career, where he worked with, among others, the celebrated orchestrator Conrad Pope. “The Hobbit” trilogy, “Jurassic Park” and some “Star Wars” episodes are among the many movies he’s contributed to.
It was a fellowship back in Utah with the Sundance Institute in 2016 that led to him working on “American Factory,” a documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019 and was picked up by Higher Ground Productions, the company founded by Barack and Michelle Obama. At the 2020 Academy Awards, “American Factory” won the Oscar for best documentary.
Chad’s Emmy nomination came in 2022 for his work as the composer on the movie “Exposing Muybridge,” starring Gary Oldman.
These days, he is a freelancer, working out of his home studio in Pasadena, doing work on films, television shows and video games.
“That’s my real job,” he says.
But his passion is doing what he can to help preserve the coral reefs. They provide habitat for a quarter of all sea life — and they are under attack.
He recounts three dives he did this summer in Honduras. “Two (of the reefs) were really healthy and amazing,” he says, “but the third one was a completely dead reef. Everything was gone but one or two sponges. I thought, Whoa! This is happening so fast, and it’s happening everywhere on the planet where there are these shallow reefs. There’s some real urgency here.”
For details about “Music for the Ocean,” go to: musicfortheocean.ticketspice.com/chad-cannon-music-for-the-ocean-waterford
In addition to the Waterford show, there will also be a performance the next night, Friday, Nov. 14, in the Sanpete County town of Spring City.