Emily Bear

Rockford, and a professional debut at five

Emily Jordan Bear was born on 30 August 2001 in Rockford, Illinois, to an orthopaedic surgeon and a music educator. Her grandmother, a piano teacher, spotted what she was doing at the keyboard when she was two, and she wrote her first piece, 'Crystal Ice', at three. At five she made her professional debut at the Ravinia Festival, the youngest performer the festival had booked. At six she won the ASCAP Foundation's Morton Gould Young Composer Award for 'Northern Lights' — again the youngest — and started lessons with Mary Sauer, then keyboardist of the Chicago Symphony.

Then came the prodigy circuit: six appearances on The Ellen DeGeneres Show between the ages of six and twelve, a White House performance for George W. Bush in 2008, and a Carnegie Hall debut at nine playing her own orchestral piece, 'Peace: We Are the Future'. She went on to study with Veda Kaplinsky, head of the piano department at Juilliard, took jazz improvisation with Frank Kimbrough and film scoring with Ron Sadoff at NYU Steinhardt. That last strand turned out to be the decisive one. She is a Steinway Artist, and by six had already played the Hollywood Bowl, Lincoln Center and Montreux.

Quincy Jones, and the records that came first

Her first album as a leader was Diversity, released on Concord in 2013 and produced by Quincy Jones, who had taken her on as a mentee. It reached No. 5 on Billboard's Jazz Albums chart. The EP Into the Blue followed in 2017 and entered the same chart at No. 7. Emotions, in 2019, was the first record on which she sang.

After that the solo catalogue stops, and the screen and theatre work takes over almost completely. When Sony announced her signing in 2026 it described the album she was then recording as her first release in eight years — a fair measure of how long she had gone without putting out music under her own name alone.

A TikTok musical, a Grammy, and a lawsuit

In January 2021 the songwriter Abigail Barlow posted a TikTok asking what Bridgerton would sound like as a musical. Bear joined her, and the two wrote the thing in public — livestreamed sessions from Los Angeles in which viewers suggested lines and the pair used them. By September the account had passed 200 million views. The concept album, The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical, came out on 10 September 2021 and entered the Heatseekers chart at No. 3. On 1 October 2021 they played 'Ocean Away' with Darren Criss at the Kennedy Center's 50th anniversary concert.

In April 2022 the album won the Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album, beating Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cinderella and the cast recording of Girl from the North Country. It was the first Grammy won by a project developed on TikTok, and Barlow and Bear, at 23 and 20, were the youngest winners the category had produced.

The sequel to that was less comfortable. They staged a live concert version at the Kennedy Center with the National Symphony Orchestra in July 2022; Netflix filed a copyright infringement suit later that month, seeking to stop further live performances, and a planned Royal Albert Hall date in August was cancelled. Netflix discontinued the action in September 2022 following a reported settlement. The episode drew the line between fan work and commercial staging about as sharply as it has been drawn, and Bear has kept working inside studio systems since.

Moana 2, and a year as Beyoncé's pianist

Bear scored the Netflix film Dog Gone in 2023, which made her the youngest person to score a feature released on a streaming platform, and she also has credits on K-Pops! and Our Little Secret from 2024. Her 2022 Los Angeles Area Emmy came from a smaller job: the score for the documentary Life Centered: The Helen Jean Taylor Story.

In the middle of 2023 she was the featured pianist on Beyoncé's Renaissance World Tour, playing arena stages nightly and appearing in the concert film Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé. It is an unusual credit for someone whose other work that year was orchestral and cinematic, and it is the part of the CV that most obviously feeds the way she performs now.

Then Moana 2, released in November 2024, with Barlow. The two wrote the songs — among them 'Beyond', 'Can I Get a Chee Hoo?', 'We're Back' and 'Get Lost' — making them the first all-woman team to lead the songwriting on a Disney animated feature, and Bear, at 23, the youngest composer to do it. The film passed a billion dollars worldwide. They performed 'Beyond' on Good Morning America in December 2024; on CBS Mornings the same month Bear said her aim was to have a project on Broadway before she turned 30.

Where she is now

Recent work has been spread thin across formats. She was featured pianist on Symphony & Sensibility: The Music of Jane Austen in Film in October 2025, and is credited as a songwriter and producer on Meghan Trainor's 2026 album Toy with Me. In February 2026 she played a solo set at the ASCAP Music Café at the Sundance Film Festival and talked there about Broadway projects she and Barlow have in development.

On 1 July 2026 Sony Music Masterworks announced her signing. Mark Cavell, the label's president, and Sarah Thwaites, its SVP of artist strategy, both framed the deal around range rather than any one genre; Bear's own statement was more pointed about what has been missing. 'I've spent the better part of the last decade of my life immersed in TV, film, and theater,' she said, 'and those forms of storytelling have shaped me immeasurably, but this artist project is different. It's the first time in a long time that I'm inviting people into my own world and stories.' She was in the studio at the time of the announcement, with new music due in the autumn of 2026. In July she posted a solo performance of 'Being Alive' from Company to TikTok — the same channel that made the Bridgerton album, used now for a standard.

On stage in 2026

The live plan attached to the signing is deliberately small: three dates, all in jazz clubs rather than concert halls. She played Blue Note in New York on 14 September 2026, and returns at Blue Note Los Angeles on 10 and 11 November, two houses a night at 7pm and 9.30pm, doors at 5pm and 9pm. Minimum spend is twenty dollars a head, seating is first-come, table seating is all ages and the bar area is over-21s only.

No support act is listed on any of the dates, and the venue does not publish a programme in advance, which is normal for the room and consistent with a musician whose material currently spans a jazz-trio catalogue from 2013, two Disney soundtracks, a Grammy-winning theatre album she cannot freely stage, and an unreleased record. Songkick has around 3,000 people tracking her for alerts. The September night in New York has not drawn a published review.