This Victoria composers agency is singing a successful Hollywood tune
Former composer turned agent Ari Wise says key to successful relationships with artists comes from years of doing the same job. Plus: His five favourite movie scores

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Core Music Agency founder and director Ari Wise is in a unique position for an agent — he has done the job that his clients do.
For 18 years, the Victoria resident, who says a good score is “the backbone” to a movie, was a busy composer for film and TV before he opened Core in 2007.
Citing a need to spend more time with family and lower his stress level, Wise decided he needed to change his tune.
“Being a composer is unlike anything else. It’s not like a job. It’s a calling,” said Wise, who has over 200 film and TV credits to his name. “I realized I was missing out on my kids’ lives. I was getting up long before they got up and came home long after they went to bed. It was stressful on my family. It was stressful on me.”
The decision paid off as Core now represents 61 film/TV/games composers and is the largest agency of its type in Canada today. At the writing of this story, Core composers had 19 nominations for the 2025 Canadian Screen Music Awards.

Wise, who studied music composition at UBC and USC, says as a former composer he knows the stressors of the demanding workload. And he aims to make things “a little bit more reasonable,” for his clients.
“I know the process that every composer goes through when they start a new film or when they start working for different people, and all the worries that they have,” said Wise, who moved from Vancouver to Victoria years ago. “So, when they go through those things, they can call me, and I talk to them. I can talk them down off the ledge. I’m a bit of a composer psychiatrist. I think they appreciate that more than anything.”
Toronto-based composer Mark Korven, whose credits include Robert Eggers’ films The Witch and The Lighthouse and Sam Raimi’s Don’t Move among many other bold-type titles, has been with Core since almost the beginning of the agency. He is a true believer in the benefits of having an agent who has done his job before.
“It absolutely makes a difference, because you know you’re dealing with someone who can relate to the situations that composers find themselves in,” said Korven, who just wrapped the third and final season of Billy the Kid for MGM+ and will soon be starting on a Netflix series he can’t name as of yet. “When you talk to him, it’s a composer-to-composer sort of thing, which is really great.”
Korven, who was named Billboard Canada’s Screen Composer of the Year back in June, says what keeps him at Core is not just the crossing of the t’s and dotting of i’s.
“If I’m bothered about something, anything at all, I can phone him up and we’ll have a nice long chat,” said Korven, who is the co-creator of the Apprehension Engine, a sort of foley machine/instrument that delivers all the spooky and sinister sounds that help put the creepy in horror. “He’s a real good dealmaker and psychologist, and he can sort of calm any situation down.”
For Suad Bushnaq, whose resume includes the Berlinale film Yunan, the second film in Fakher Eldin’s planned Homeland trilogy, Wise’s previous background makes him a valued sounding board.
“He knows exactly what composers go through. He knows exactly how many hours it takes me to compose one minute of music. He knows the ins and outs, and you cannot put a pricetag on that,” said the award-winning Bushnaq, who moved to Canada from Jordan two decades ago and calls Toronto home. “Ari has saved my life and my sanity on so many occasions … he’s almost like a big brother figure to me.”

A pianist who loves Bach and the Gabriel Yared score for 1999’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, Bushnaq found her way to Core after listening to Korven lecture at the Canadian Film Centre. Korven encouraged her to reach out to the agency.
“I thought that the meeting was just to get to know me. But as it turns out, they had researched me and they wanted me. So the rest is history, as they say,” said Bushnaq, who signed with Core in 2019. “Since then, the North American side of my career has really had momentum. I was being pigeonholed before that as the Middle Eastern person, although my education is in orchestral Western music.”
Multi-instrumentalist Jesse Zubot has been with Core for five years. A longtime touring musician (he was in the Juno Award-winning band Zubot and Dawson and toured for years with many artists including Tanya Tagaq and Dan Mangan), Zubot was in search of more financial stability when he turned his focus to scoring about a decade ago.

“I really like what Core is doing and has done by bringing composers together and creating a force in the biz. It’s really starting to do some big things and I think the future is bright up ahead,” said Zubot, whose credits include the feature films Bones Of Crows and Monkey Beach.
Having support close to home is paramount for Zubot as the idea of moving from Bowser on the East Coast of Vancouver Island does not strike a good chord for him.
“I didn’t want to move to L.A. for my career, or hunt down people down there to help me,” said Zubot. “I like the idea of supporting a B.C. company and us sticking together up here and creating a scene together. Rather than following what the majority of people do, which is to migrate down to L.A.”
When Wise first opened his agency, he called it the Canadian Composers Agency. But he changed it to Core as a signifier of how he looks at the act of musical composition.
“I gave it the name Core because when I was a composer. I always looked at the film and asked myself, ‘What is the core idea of this film?’” said Wise. “What is at the heart of this film? (What’s the) central idea from which everything radiates from. I think every composer needs to know that before they start any film. And I think that the most successful scores are from composers who understand that.”
Ari Wise picks his five favourite movie scores
1. Schindler’s List
Director: Steven Spielberg | Score: John Williams
John Williams is a name that has to appear of everyone’s “top film score” list, and it should probably appear multiple times. If you ask any film composer between the age of 35 and 65 “Who or what inspired you to become a film composer?” odds are, they’ll answer “John Williams”. From Raiders to Star Wars to the example in every film school textbook — Jaws — “Johnny” Williams may have single-handedly re-invigorated the concept of the thematic score post-1970. So, picking his most inspirational thematic score is nearly an impossible task. Nearly. I choose Schindler’s List out of the worthy dozens because of his extraordinarily long and venerated career, I’m guessing that Schindler’s List was John Williams’ toughest assignment. The main violin theme (played by Itzhak Perlman), puts the audience into the perspective of an elderly person looking back at a time of unfathomable suffering and loss — not only the loss of millions of human beings, or of a single little girl in a red dress, but the loss of culture itself. That violin melody says everything about a people, a continent, a world that will never be again. The essence of what was lost is only a memory now, and that memory is encapsulated perfectly in that melody.
2. Inception
Director: Christopher Nolan | Score: Hans Zimmer
I don’t think you can really make a contemporary “top film score” list that doesn’t include one of Hans Zimmer’s scores. So my pick of his is Inception. I think the score is both very clever in its construction and very effective in its execution, and perfectly mirrors the concept of living in, and out, of “time”. The score is deconstructed from Édith Piaf’s song “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” and reconstructed combining repeating ostinato patterns slowed down in levels matching the different time-realities expressed in the film. I have to admit that I don’t fully understand the film, but I know a brilliant marriage of story and sound when I hear one.
3. Chinatown
Director: Roman Polanski | Score: Jerry Goldsmith
You could easily make a “top 5 film score list” with 5 titles scored by Jerry Goldsmith alone. So if I have to pull just one card out of that fully loaded deck, it would be Jerry Goldsmith’s masterpiece, Chinatown. Jerry used progressive 20th century compositional techniques to accompany a film-noir, languid-trumpet detective/love story. Set against the blossom era of corrupt Art Deco Los Angeles, Jake Gittes never had a chance. His compulsion (and the score) unpeel a mystery that cuts him in the face at every turn. I had the good fortune to meet Goldsmith. He came and did a couple of masterclasses with us at USC, and he critiqued some our work. He gave me an, “Okay. That’s … okay”, which I will take to my grave, clutched to my chest, as my most precious possession.
4. The Piano
Director: Jane Campion | Score: Michael Nyman
I think The Piano wins my award for best composer “casting”. Michael Nyman is a highly venerated contemporary concert composer, known for (among many things) his “minimalist” style, and he marries this technique in the score to a haunting 19th century thematic melody. At the time, I remember thinking, “How bold and anachronistic. It doesn’t sound anything like what would have been a part of the time and place of the story.” And that’s where the magic lives, underscoring the story of a woman trapped in the wrong time and place.
5. The Witch
Director: Rob Eggers | Score: Mark Korven
I’d be a bad agent if I didn’t mention a score by somebody I represent, but Mark Korven’s score for The Witch genuinely deserves to makes the cherry-picked long list. There are very few (if any?) jump scares in this haunting period tale. Instead, Korven creates a steady building uneasy tone and tension to underscore the story of a 17th-century New England devout settler family and their gradual descent into madness and death. He combines 21st-century techniques with period instruments and aleatoric wild female choral guttural shrieks in the final transformation (or liberation?) of the main character (played by Anya Taylor-Joy). The movie is brilliant in every respect. The audience is fully immersed into the darkest fears of 17thcentury Puritans.
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