MONUMENTAL TALKS 2026 – Composer
Charles-Henri Avelange
Charles-Henri Avelange is an award-winning French composer of music for film and television, based in Los Angeles, California.
Born and raised in the French Côte d’Azur near the Cannes Film Festival, he is the son of a French army colonel/diplomat and grew up in various places (including Riyadh during the Gulf War) and later in a 12th-century Templar castle near Carcassonne. He began making music as a child on keyboards, later blending analog synthesizers (inspired by Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre) with large-scale orchestral writing. He trained at ESRA Nice Côte d’Azur and earned a master’s in sound engineering, sound design, music, and film production from the Institut Supérieur des Techniques du Son, graduating in 2004.
After moving to the United States in 2005, he built his career in Seattle as a full-time film/TV composer and has served as the official composer of the Seattle International Film Festival since 2009 (creating the SIFF Orchestra for live Opening Night performances). His credits include Hallmark animated specials (Jingle All the Way, Jingle and Bell’s Christmas Star), the sci-fi pilot Renegades: Ominara (directed by Tim Russ and starring Nichelle Nichols in her final screen role), the series Nobility, features such as Simple Creature and Six Gun Savior, the official Make-A-Wish Foundation theme “One Wish,” the award-winning album The Oeuvre of Leon Oury (inspired by his painter ancestor), and other film, TV, and media work.
He is known for epic, cinematic orchestral scores and has supported various nonprofits with his music.
His latest major project is The Fireman’s Prayer (also referred to as The Fireman’s Prayer: A Musical Homage), the first full musical setting of the traditional poem written in 1957 by Wichita firefighter Alvin William “Smokey” Linn after a tragic apartment fire. Avelange first encountered the prayer on a firehouse wall during a 2006 ride-along in Washington state (shortly after arriving in the U.S.) and composed a melody almost immediately, intuitively including bagpipes—an instrument central to firefighter ceremonies and funerals, though he did not know that at the time. He had long wanted to create a large-scale anthem for firefighters (inspired in part by 9/11), envisioning orchestra, adult and children’s choirs, and pipes and drums, with proceeds benefiting firefighters.
The January 2025 Los Angeles fires (Palisades and Eaton/Altadena), which came close to his neighborhood, provided the final impetus. Recording sessions began in 2026 at Sony Pictures’ Barbra Streisand Scoring Stage, involving the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Los Angeles Children’s Chorus (May), a 90-piece Hollywood orchestra under Grammy-winning conductor Grant Gershon (July 14, Bastille Day), and the California Professional Firefighters Pipes & Drums Corps (planned for October 29, 2026). The project is supported by the Los Angeles County Fire Museum; all proceeds are intended to go to firefighters and related causes. Firefighters involved have described it as potentially becoming a lasting cultural anthem.