Peter Gregson

Musician Peter Gregson embodies the roles of cellist and composer so regularly that the usual labels scarcely capture how seamlessly they coexist in his practice. His path illustrates an emerging approach to artistic growth in which electronic resources and their associated networks figure centrally.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on January 20, 1987, Gregson first took up the cello at age four after watching James Bond slide down a mountainside inside a cello case in The Living Daylights. He trained at the Royal Academy of Music in London before pursuing additional studies in music technology at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has sustained ongoing ties with MIT and with technology organizations such as Microsoft Labs and United Visual Artists, contributing to both scores and live performances. The Bowers & Wilkins headphone company commissioned his first album, Terminal, when he was twenty-three; the release attracted considerable notice and was followed by Lights in the Sky in 2014 and Touch in 2015.

In parallel, Gregson pursued joint projects with fellow artists. During 2012 he worked with Daniel Jones and the Britten Sinfonia on The Listening Machine, a piece commissioned by the BBC experimental arts organization The Space. That same year he released Cello Multitracks, created together with producer and DJ Gabriel Prokofiev. His work for film began in 2014 with A Little Chaos, earning him a Public Choice Award nomination at the World Soundtrack Awards. In 2017 he supplied the score for Arran Shearing’s first feature, Forgotten Man.

Gregson has also appeared as solo cellist on soundtracks by other composers, including the BBC series Sherlock and the 2018 film Mary Magdalene, and he contributed to pop vocalist Ed Sheeran’s album ÷ (Divide). The 2017 releases of his string quartets Quartets: One and Quartets: Two prompted the creation of a ballet titled Eight Years of Silence. A decisive step came with his signing to Deutsche Grammophon for its Recomposed series, which asks contemporary composers to reinterpret established repertoire; Bach Recomposed appeared in 2018, followed by Adolescence in 2019. He later wrote music for the film Blackbird in 2020 and the video-game soundtrack Boundless in 2021. Returning to Deutsche Grammophon, he issued the solo album Patina in 2021 and, together with Richard Harwood and Warren Zielinski, Quartets: One-Four in 2022.