Bill has spent his life in choral music – as a singer, conductor, teacher and composer (writing as Grayston Ives).
A chorister at Ely Cathedral, he studied music at 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 eighteen years Bill directed Magdalen College Choir, Oxford. Highlights included a Grammy nomination for a disc of music by Orlando Gibbons, giving the première of Paul McCartney’s Ecce Cor Meum, working with film composer George Fenton on the soundtracks of Blue Planet and Richard Attenborough’s Shadowlands, and recording backing tracks for Josh Groban’s platinum Christmas album, Noël.
His Canterbury Te Deum (1991) for SATB and brass quintet was commissioned for the enthronement of George Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury. He was also commissioned to write the centre-piece anthem, The Gift of Grace, for the national commemoration service marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, held at Westminster Abbey in 2007. Westminster Abbey later commissioned three new arrangements of music by Hubert Parry (I was glad, Hear my words, ye people, and the Coronation Te Deum) for a recording released to wide critical acclaim in 2015. In 2024 he was commissioned by King’s College Cambridge to write the new carol for their Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. Other notable commissions include Intrada for solo organ, written in 1977 for the service of thanksgiving to mark the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.
Listen Sweet Dove, on the Harmonia Mundi label, features a selection of Bill’s compositions, performed by Magdalen College Choir under his direction. The Choirs of Jesus College, Cambridge and the Britten Sinfonia recorded his Requiem in 2021 for Signum Classics.
In 2008 he was awarded a Lambeth DMus and a Fellowship of the Royal School of Church Music.