About Our Music Director - Chris Suzuki
Chris Suzuki is a composer, arranger, and music director who was born and raised in Hawai‘i. He demonstrated an avid interest in music at a young age and began composing and arranging for Hawai‘i’s diverse music community. He studied music seriously in his high school years and despite the lack of a music
program, Chris was able to study music independently until he graduated. He further pursued formal training and a college education in music in 2000. By 2007, Chris received a Bachelor of Music degree at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.
While attending the University of Hawai‘i, Chris studied composition with Professors Donald Reid Womack, E. Takeo Kudo, Byron Yasui, Peter Askim, Daniel Kessner, and band arranging with Daniel Kalantarian. He also studied composition independently with Hawai‘i-based composers Jerré Tanner, Jon Magnussen, and John Starr Alexander. His composition interests lie greatly with the fusion of “Classical” and “Popular” music styles through large ensemble mediums (band, orchestra, chorus), piano music, and vocal music.
Chris’s stellar talent is transparent in projects that have been performed and read by the Honolulu Symphony, Royal Hawaiian Band, Honolulu Chorale, Hawai‘i Youth Opera Chorus, ensembles from University of Hawai‘i, Hawai‘i Pacific University, students of the Ernest Chang Piano Studio and more. He also worked on arrangements and transcriptions for individual clients, while managing ongoing projects for local church music groups, high school ensembles, and various community ensembles in Hawai‘i.
During the 2020 pandemic, Chris found ways to remain musically active by participating in various virtual ensemble projects as both as a singer and a video/audio editor, and engaged other local singers/musicians to participate.
He also founded and created the Hitbox Music Ensemble in 2016; an ensemble of instrumentalists and chorus singers dedicated to the performance and preservation of live video game music. and is currently the music director of the Holy Nativity Episcopal Church since 2019, and recently, the Honolulu Chorale in 2023.
As a vocalist trained in Classical and Popular genres, Chris has sung with over a dozen of other Hawai‘i choral groups which include the O‘ahu Choral Society, Lutheran Church of Honolulu, and Windward Choral Society.