Joe Kraemer has been scoring films since the age of 15, when he composed the soundtrack for his high school classmate's The Chiming Hour, a feature-length indie shot on Super 8 in 1986. It was during this time that he first met a young writer named Christopher McQuarrie, a meeting that would lead to three career-defining projects for Kramer: The Way Of The Gun, Jack Reacher, and Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation. Kraemer attended the renowned Berklee College of Music in Boston to study film composition. In the following years, Kraemer carved out an eclectic career scoring various genres. He has written music for over 100 films, with about 40 of those just for the Hallmark Channel/Larry Levinson Productions. Furthermore, he has scored for episodic television, television movies, documentaries, and short films, including his scores for John Putch's The Poseidon Adventure and A Time To Remember, as well as the Mystery Woman series, and westerns such as Hard Ground, Lone Rider, and The Trail To Hope Rose. Kraemer frequently does Masterclasses in composition for media for various colleges and organizations, including Columbia College Chicago, Media Sound Hamburg, and the Hollywood Music Workshop.
Born in New York State and raised in Albany, he grew up in a musical family. His dad and uncle often sang and played music non-professionally. Kraemer picked up an ear for music and began taking piano lessons.
While in junior high, he met filmmaker Scott Storm , who cast him in a Super 8 film project for which he also wrote the music. He later attended Berklee School of Music in Boston. Through Storm, he later met Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie and these meetings led to him getting work as a film music editor, then eventually as a film music composer.
