Bill Ives has spent his life in choral music—as a singer, conductor, teacher and composer (writing as Grayston Ives). He was a chorister at Ely Cathedral and studied music at Selwyn College, Cambridge, taking composition lessons with Richard Rodney Bennett. After Cambridge he sang in Guildford Cathedral Choir before joining the King’s Singers, with whom he recorded and performed worldwide.

For 18 years he directed the Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford. During his tenure the choir earned a Grammy nomination for a disc of music by Orlando Gibbons, and gave the première of Paul McCartney’s Ecce cor meum, which was written especially for them. They worked with film composer George Fenton on the soundtracks of Shadowlands (1993) and Blue Planet (2001). He has a special interest in composing and arranging. Many of his published works, both sacred and secular, are performed regularly in the UK and abroad.

In 2008 his work as a composer and conductor of church music was recognised with the award of a Lambeth DMus and a Fellowship of the Royal School of Church Music.