Oregon’s own Disney composer

Dave Metzger recording and conducting a short film released for Disney's 100th anniversary. Photo courtesy of Laura Metzger.

While it’s not Los Angeles, Oregon has a rich history in film. A plethora of classic films have been filmed in the state, including “The Goonies,” which was famously filmed in Astoria, and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which was filmed at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem. 

Adding to this history is Dave Metzger, who has worked as a composer, orchestrator, and arranger on over 50 films, many of them with Disney. Metzger currently lives in Bend, but he was born in Corvallis and lived in Salem for over 30 years, giving him personal and professional connections to Willamette University.

“My in-laws were Willamette graduates back in the — man, I guess that would have been the early 1950s,” Metzger said. “I have a lot of friends that are or were professors and staff members at Willamette University, so I've always had a deep appreciation and love of that school.”

Throughout his career, he traveled back and forth between Salem and Los Angeles for his work, much of which has been with Disney. He received his first credit for the company as an orchestrator on “The Lion King” in 1994. 

Since then, he’s worked with Disney on many more films, including orchestrating the music for both “Frozen” films and “Moana.” He also composed the scores for the 2023 short “Once Upon a Studio,” the 2023 film “Wish” and the 2024 film “Mufasa: The Lion King,” among many other credits.

Though Metzger has worked in all aspects of film music, there are differences between composing and orchestrating for films.

“A lot of times, the composer is just going to write the melody in a very basic way, so an arranger then will write counter melodies and things like that. … If [the other parts of the score] weren't there, you would kind of think that the song was fairly spare and not much going on,” Metzger said. 

Some composers work by writing the melody of the song, leaving other work up to the arrangers and orchestrators, but Metzger tends to add more to his work, often composing for the full orchestra.

Metzger’s journey to film started early in his life with a mentor who encouraged his love for film and a spark of inspiration from a legendary composer.

“I was really lucky to be in a choir class in junior high with a really great director who also was a composer, and so she was sort of my mentor … so I just wrote a ton, starting at age 12, all the way through junior high,” Metzger said. 

He continued this composition work all the way through middle and high school, writing music for school bands. 

He was 16 when the first “Star Wars” movie came out, which displayed the legendary film compositions of John Williams. “That's when I really caught the bug of film music, and I knew that that's what I really wanted to do for a career,” Metzger said.

As an orchestrator or arranger, when working with other composers, Metzger said he has to ensure he maintains the work of the original composers while turning it into a full score. 

 “I don't want to write something that [Lin-Manuel Miranda, whom Metzger worked with on “Moana”] is not going to respond to or do something really weird to his songs,” Metzger said. “Part of it is actually trying to figure out what they're looking for. … There's a narrative arc for the whole movie, and so … I'm trying to tie in all of the songs in the movie in some way so that there's some kind of consistency to it.”

A recent project that Metzger composed was “Once Upon a Studio,” a 2023 short film featuring Disney animated characters spanning the company’s over 100 years of storytelling. The film is a love letter to Disney’s rich animation history, and Metzger worked that history into the film’s score.

“I would use themes from some of the classic films, but most of the time, I would actually write in the style of the era,” Metzger said. “It was really a blast. That was a hugely fun project for me because I'm a Disney nerd.”

Early in Metzger’s career, he arranged the version of the Disney classic “When You Wish Upon a Star” that played alongside the Disney logo with longtime collaborator Mark Mancina. Metzger had a full circle when he conducted the recording of “Once Upon a Studio,” with every Disney animated character performing the song in a group shot.

“I'd worked with that song before, but there was something really cool … in the context of “Once Upon a Studio” to be able to do that,” Metzger said. “I don't usually conduct, but that was kind of fun.”

Metzger continues to work with Disney and in Hollywood to this day, recently composing 2024’s “Mufasa: The Lion King” and arranging and orchestrating the 2025 remake of “Snow White.”

“There's just always something about Disney animation, and I love the people there,” Metzger said. “I've been there, working with them for so long that they're really kind of family.”