Born in London in 1934, Anthony Gilbert took up composition seriously in the early 1960s after five years of study with Alexander Goehr. For ten years he was closely involved in the promotion and publication of new music in London and then moved to the North West of England, first as Granada Arts Fellow at the University of Lancaster and then to establish a new composition department at the Royal Northern College of Music, where he was Director of Composition Studies until his retirement in 1999. He has a close association with the musical life of Australia. Much of his later music owes its origin to the birdsong of this land and much, too, has its technical roots in the classical music of the Indian subcontinent, in which he has been interested for three decades.
His compositions cover a wide range of forces and forms. He has written for most of the major ensembles and soloists, including the Arditti Quartet, London Sinfonietta, Manchester Camerata, Hallé Orchestra and Lindsay Quartet, and received major commissions from the BBC and from the Cheltenham Festival and Staatstheater Kassel, to mention just a few.