She Left IT to Pursue Film Music in the US. Now She’s Building a Global Career as a Composer

US-based Filipino composer Jaimie Pangan brings an intimate, emotionally driven sound to Ganito, Ganyan, Ganoon, the new Netflix Philippines Original directed by Cholo Laurel and starring Jodi Sta. Maria and Agot Isidro. The film, which explores the complicated relationship between an estranged mother and daughter, is currently streaming globally on Netflix.

For her, the film presented an opportunity to explore vulnerability through music while allowing the performances and silences to remain at the center of the story. “When I saw the footage, I got excited because I really enjoy working on dramas. There’s something about vulnerability and the film’s themes that excite me,” says Pangan, who also composed the score for Laurel’s  2021 TV show After Life starring Eula Valdez, Jett Pangan, and Julio Alberto De Leon. “I enjoyed picking references with Direk Cholo Laurel for the film. We both love A24 films that’s why I think we work together so well,” she adds.

The collaboration also focused on knowing when not to use music. For both Pangan and Laurel, silence was an important element in telling the story, allowing difficult conversations and emotional moments to unfold naturally before the score enters and heightens their impact.

Pangan composed the score for the entire film, while the sound team handled diegetic music, such as the karaoke sequences. She also collaborated with professional guitarist Anthony Pascuzzo on the guitar parts of the score. Pascuzzo’s credits include guitar work for HoYoFair animations associated with miHoYo/HoYoverse, developers of Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail.

Much of the score is driven by strings and piano, qualities that mirror the film’s emotional core. “At
first, I was thinking, ‘What is the Filipino sound?’ But then it shifted more toward, ‘How can music draw out the raw emotion the actors are portraying on screen?’ Strings do a really good job in creating a raw and vulnerable sound which the film really needed,” articulates the young composer who quit her job in the Philippines in 2018 to pursue higher studies in the US.

Pangan is now based in Nashville, Tennessee working as an independent composer for films, television, and games. She holds a Master of Music in Screen Scoring from the University of Southern California. 

“Ganito, Ganyan, Ganoon is relatable to me because I was also in the place of the main character, Jo, who dreams of moving to the US to pursue film but in my case, film music,” shares the 30-something composer who used to work as an Information Technology Specialist back in the Philippines. “Although I didn't have the same type of issue she had with her mom, I went through a lot of challenges before making it in the US and pursuing film music,” she adds.

The past seven years has seen Pangan work with some of the most-sought composers in Hollywood, with projects featured at Academy Award-qualifying film festivals and productions shown in Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+. 

She has worked with Emmy-winning composer Kris Bowers (Green Book and Dear White People) for his Netflix series When They See Us and with Emmy-nominated composer Nathan Matthew David (The Brothers Sun and Forgotten Island) for the Filipino documentary Nurse Unseen.  In 2019 and 2022, she received nominations for an original composition at the Hollywood in Music Media Awards. She also served as a juror for the 2024 and 2025 Annie Awards, considered the Oscars of animation, and is a voting member of the Recording Academy.

With Ganito, Ganyan, Ganoon, Pangan brings together her technical expertise, musical sensibility, and personal understanding of pursuing a dream to create a score that knows when to speak—and when silence says more.

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