Jake (he/him) is a composer and music director.

Jake Schindler is a Toronto-based composer and music director whose work moves fluidly between large commercial theatre and the scrappier indie theatre. Across every project, he's drawn to music-forward storytelling.

Recent credits include two Dora-nominated productions (Mirvish, Mixtape Productions), three Toronto Fringe Patron's Pick musicals, and the recently released cast recording of his original show Ursa: A Folk Musical, co-written with Sam Boer, for which Jake wrote the music, lyrics, and book. He was Assistant to the Composer for the Stratford Festival's new adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, and is currently a music director with Second City Toronto.

Jake's path into theatre runs through an unusual door: a background in computer science, which continues to shape how he works — from building his own tools and apps to exploring the intersection of music and technology in education. He is currently completing a Master of Teaching at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, deepening a parallel career as a piano teacher and music educator.

Teaching runs alongside Jake's creative work in equal measure: he's spent almost a decade as a piano teacher and music educator, and is currently completing a Master of Teaching at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto.

Off the clock, Jake writes and performs original piano miniatures for Instagram and TikTok — small, deadpan character pieces for the everyday (recent titles include "Coke Zero on a Cloudy Day") — and is developing several new musicals, including an original youth musical and a fringe-y project told partly through the voice of an office printer.

Services

Music Direction
Orchestration
Audition Coaching
Composing
Music Assistant Work (arranging, copyist, transcription)
Audio Mixing/Producing