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.

Listen Sweet Dove, on the Harmonia Mundi label, features a selection of Bill’s compositions, performed by Magdalen College Choir under his direction.

In 2008 he was awarded a Lambeth DMus and a Fellowship of the Royal School of Church Music.