Peter Gregson

Musician Peter Gregson is often described as a cellist and composer, but that description fails to convey the frequency with which he is both at the same time. Gregson’s career exemplifies a new model of development in which electronic sound and its institutions play an important part.
Gregson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on January 20, 1987. He began studying the cello at age four after seeing James Bond sled down a mountainside on a cello case in The Living Daylights. He enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music in London and went on for further training in music technology at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gregson has continued to collaborate with MIT and with advanced technology firms, including Microsoft Labs and United Visual Artists, in scores and performances. Another collaborator was the Bowers & Wilkins headphone firm, which commissioned Gregson’s debut album, Terminal; although Gregson was just 23 at the time, the recording gained wide attention. He followed it up with Lights in the Sky (2014) and Touch (2015).
Meanwhile, Gregson undertook collaborations with other artists. In 2012, he joined Daniel Jones and the Britten Sinfonia to create The Listening Machine, a work commissioned by the BBC experimental arts agency The Space. Cello Multitracks, from the same year, was a collaboration with producer/DJ Gabriel Prokofiev (grandson of Sergey). His film composing career began in 2014 with music for A Little Chaos, for which he garnered a Public Choice Award nomination at the World Soundtrack Awards. In 2017, he scored the Arran Shearing debut feature Forgotten Man.
Gregson has also been heard as a solo cellist in soundtrack music by others, notably in the BBC’s Sherlock series and in the 2018 film Mary Magdalene. He was heard on the album ÷ (Divide) by pop vocalist Ed Sheeran. His 2017 string quartet composition releases Quartets: One and Quartets: Two themselves inspired further creative activity in the form of a ballet called Eight Years of Silence. A major breakthrough for Gregson was his signing to the Deutsche Grammophon label as part of its Recomposed series, which invites contemporary composers to rework canonical works; his Bach Recomposed album was released in 2018, and he followed that up with Adolescence in 2019. Gregson composed music for a film, Blackbird (2020), and for a video game soundtrack, Boundless (2021). He returned on Deutsche Grammophon with the solo album Patina in 2021 and, with Richard Harwood and Warren Zielinski, Quartets: One-Four in 2022. ~ James Manheim