Composer

Geoffrey Grey

Geoffrey Grey was born in Gipsy Hill and lived on the edge of Dartmoor until the onset of the second world war, when he was sent to Scotland to live with his paternal grandparents.

A career as a concert violinist had been envisaged and encouraged by his parents as he had shown a precocious interest in the violin at a very early age. Edinburgh, however, was markedly unfriendly to the English in those days, and its indigenous juvenile population openly hostile to any child with artistic pretensions.

In spite of this he eventually went to the Royal Academy of Music and studied violin, composition, piano and conducting. His composition teachers were William Alwyn, Benjamin Frankel and later, in Paris, Nadia Boulanger.

In 1959 he went to New Zealand where he freelanced as a violinist for a time until he was appointed Tour Musical Director of the NZ Opera Company. He had a number of early pieces broadcast by the NZBS and returned to England in 1960.
He now had a family to provide for and took the job of Director of the Suffolk Rural Music School. This only lasted for a year and then he moved to London where he lived and freelanced as a violinist for the next forty years.

He held a number of principal positions over this period with some of the major orchestras and continued to compose for many different combinations of instruments. He was very active in London musical life and gave frequent recitals of contemporary music as well as his own compositions.

He played for the ballet, musicals and pop concerts and on a number of occasions toured with the Lindsay Kemp Theatre Company as violist, pianist & percussionist.

In 1992 he went to the Netherlands, working there for a year.

In 1996 he went to live first of all in Cornwall and afterwards Margate, where, having hung up his violin,  he has concentrated almost exclusively on composing.

In March, 2003, after his friend Edwin Carr died, he contacted the oboist Dominique Enon to make the piano transcription of the Oboe Concerto which the composer had dedicated to this oboist.  He also maintained contact with Dominique Enon for whom he dedicated a work for oboe and piano. Their meeting resulted in the publishing of some of his works in France by Gilles Manchec, publishing director of Armiane in Versailles. Recently Armiane linked up with Fortin publishers to become Armiane-Fortin who have published "Mouvements pour Hautbois & Piano/Orchestre", a twenty-minute concert piece also dedicated to Dominique Enon, which had a very favourable review in the British Double Reed Society magazine of Spring 2015.

Besides digitising many of his unpublished works, Grey has produced a number of new works in the last few years which will be found in the catalogue


He now lives in an artistic community near Dorchester in Dorset. Many of his works have been published by Lopès Edition which was originally formed to promote the works of Leonard Salzedo, John Mayer and his own. He is also published by J&W Chester, Nova Music, Hunt Editions & Armiane-Fortin.

---