We are very pleased to announce the following individuals as new members of the IFMCA for 2025
Erica Acuña is a psychologist, cultural promoter, cinephile, and music lover from Colombia. She fell in love with film music as a young girl when she first watched Ben Hur with an original score by Miklos Rozsa. From her youth, she began collecting CDs and vinyl records. In 2012, she created www.musikamia.com, the only site in Colombia dedicated to the promotion of film music. She conducts interviews, shares composer profiles, and writes reviews, focusing on global film music. Aware of her influential role in the region, she ensures that the Latin American scene receives special attention. In 2024 she launched a new podcast with a Colombian writer titled ‘As de Guía’ about cinema, where she explores how the music contributes to building the film’s narrative. Since 2014, she has established herself as a leading expert on the history and evolution of film music in Colombia, delivering keynote addresses, workshops, and presentations at film festivals, film clubs, university courses, and other independent venues. Her forthcoming publication on the history of film music in Colombia, to be featured in the esteemed journal A Contratiempo by the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia, is a testament to her rigorous research and dedication to the field. She leads SONORIDADES, the academic component focusing on film music and sound at the Cinemancia Festival Metropolitano de Cine in Medellín, Colombia.
Jeff Commings has always loved the art of film music, and his ears were opened to the wider scope of music for movies at an opening weekend screening of Jurassic Park in 1993. He reviewed a few movies in his years as a full-time journalist, including Road to Perdition and its “perfect” score by Thomas Newman. Jeff finally learned to play piano in 2012, and spends time learning to play music from his favorite film scores. In 2019, Jeff started The Baton: A John Williams Musical Journey, a deep dive into all film scores written by John Williams, with each episode covering one film score. The show featured guest co-hosts such as IFMCA members Yavar Moradi and Erik Woods. In 2023, Jeff started another podcast, called The Best Song Podcast. The show offers an oral history of all 474 songs nominated for the Academy Award from 1934 to 2023.
Brian McVickar is the producer and host of “A Score To Settle”, a podcast that began in 2017, which itself spun off from his blog of the same name. He has been a lifelong fan of film & TV music since the early 1980’s and became a member and sometime contributor to Film Score Monthly during its initial launch around 1990. He graduated from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill with a degree in Film & Television and has lived in Los Angeles since 2007, working in the media buying industry. He finds difficult to ever select a favorite of anything, be it movie, TV show or soundtrack, but typically remains firm on his top 5 composers – Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams, John Barry, Elmer Bernstein and Bernard Herrmann.
Reba Wissner is Associate Professor of Musicology and coordinator of the Public Musicology Certificate at The Joyce and Henry Schwob School of Music at Columbus State University. Primarily a television and film music historian, she has also published and presented on seventeenth-century Venetian opera, Italian American immigrant musical theater, and video game music and music history pedagogy. She is the author of A Dimension of Sound: Music in The Twilight Zone (Pendragon Press, 2013), We Will Control All That You Hear: The Outer Limits and the Aural Imagination (Pendragon Press, 2016, which will be going into a second expanded edition published by Cimarron Street Books within the next two years), Music and the Atomic Bomb on American Television, 1950-1969 (Peter Lang, 2020), and David Lynch: Sonic Style (Routledge, 2024). Her fifth book, Universal Design for Learning in Music History Classes: A Teacher’s Guide, is under contract with Routledge. With Katherine Reed, she co-edited Music in Twin Peaks: Listen to the Sounds (Routledge, 2021). She also has two edited collections under contract, Adaptation, Music, and Screen Media, co-edited with Katherine Reed and Kate Galloway (Routledge) and The Oxford Handbook of Public Musicology (Oxford University Press). In addition to her books, journal articles, and book chapters, her work can be found in places such as The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 25 Years Later Site, and Musicology Now, and she has appeared on various podcasts, as television DVD commentaries, and in film music documentaries.
Gabriel Yong is from Lima, Peru, and works in a laboratory in the health sector. Passionate for many years about film music, he has been the webmaster of the film website Oasis del Cine since 2018 and has written reviews in MundoBSO since 2019, also collaborating in the creation of some of the explanatory videos of the website. He is a specialist in music for Asian film, television, and video games.
Please visit our member’s section for more detailed biographies.