Harry Gregson-Williams was born on December 13, 1961 in England. Harry’s hometown is hard to name, because his family lived in a rural home in the London area that was so far out in the country that they didn’t have electricity.
Harry’s was born to a musical family: both his parents and all of his siblings were constantly playing music and singing as he was growing up and so it was completely natural for him to follow in their footsteps. There was always a lot of music happening, different instruments being tried out and a lot of singing and playing together.
1966
At the age of four Harry began his piano studies but later showed his best results in singing.1968
At the age of six, due to his excellent vocal skills, he became a scholarship student in St. John’s College, Cambridge – a specialized music boarding-school. There among other subjects, several hours a day were spent on music. During the following years Harry tried playing different musical instruments, but he performed especially well as a chorister. With the college’s choir he participated in several tours in Europe, took part in several recordings for TV and radio programs and studio recordings. According to Harry, at this time there was a point where he could read music probably better than he could read English. While London was rocked by The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and The Who, he was singing mainly church music, with most of the lyrics written in Latin. So, before he was 12, he went through the Latin language. Most of this music was sung in a chapel in Cambridge built by Henry VIII – a landmark, which had a vast history to it. Those experiences would have strong influence in Gregson-Williams’ eventual film career, including splendid choir parts for Hans Zimmer’s “Crimson Tide” score as well as strong choral elements in his own “Chronicles of Narnia” and “Kingdom of Heaven” scores.1971
By the age of thirteen Harry possessed an impressive resume of over a dozen choral recordings as soloist. At that time biology interfered with his singing career. As his voice began to change, Harry focused on instrumental music for a while, until his “grown-up” voce settled, bringing back the interest in singing.1980
In 1980 Harry won a scholarship to the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama. It was rather strange for Harry to turn up at this school because it was fiercely difficult to enter it, especially at the age of 18. At this time, a skinny young lad who just started shaving, Harry thought that maybe he could become an opera singer. But after a while, looking at all the other students who were big and beefy men over six-foot tall and had beards, and repeatedly hearing a quite reasonable “You’re too young and your voice won’t be able to take it”, he started having doubts about his opera career.1984*
Harry graduated from Guildhall and like a lot of people coming out of music school, he wasn’t sure what direction he wanted to take. He still had a strong memory of how amazing his own musical education had been, not least because of the teachers he’d had. But he didn’t really want to go into a classroom on a regular job as a teacher. He wanted to put a slight twist on it. As Harry put it himself, it’s very like him to make life more difficult than it need be. Harry was reluctant to attend teaching college, earning the certificate necessary for state-run schools. He was fortunate to find a rather bizarre post in Alexandria, Egypt. The employers were impressed enough with his credentials and didn’t mind that he didn’t have any teaching experience. Harry absolutely loved it. The fact that he went to live in Alexandria, a place breathing with ancient history, and had to learn the language was just fascinating and was such a challenge. For several years spent in Africa’s Rift Valley, Gregson-Williams was occupied with teaching underprivileged children anything he knew, which would have to do with music, English or sports (rugby and soccer). During that time in Africa Harry made his first attempts in composing music, sometimes even having his unsuspecting students play it.1988*
After roaming around foreign countries, Harry came back to England and found another fascinating teaching task at an extraordinary school south of London. Gregson-Williams hit it off well with the school’s headmaster, even though music wasn’t the administrator’s foremost concern. He said: “My school has an absolutely terrible sporting reputation. We never win any of our games against rival schools. And of the 140 children in the school, eight play the recorder and that is our musical foundation.” Within five years Harry had completely transformed both the school’s sports and music programs. At the same time he also reached a difficult personal decision: he didn’t really want to make teaching his whole life, though it was pretty difficult to tear himself away.1993
As luck would have it, Harry finally decided to find out a little bit about film music. In 1993 he made his debut as film composer – writing a score to an extremely low-budget British thriller “White Angel”. Harry is still thankful to those beginner cinematographers who made it possible for him to start his composer career.1995
“White Angel” was opening the London Film Festival, and without any success went straight to video. Fortunately the same year Harry accidentally got acquainted with Stanley Myers. Stanley was an old school film composer who has written one or two beautiful romantic scores like his “Deer Hunter”. At that moment he needed a kind of “man about the house” – someone who could run down to the liquor store occasionally and orchestrate the odd cue. This “vacancy” appeared after Stanley’s previous assistant - Hans Zimmer, who already considered himself an independent composer, left for Los-Angeles to start on his own. But Harry’s and Stanley’s friendship didn’t last long: in about a year Myers died. But before that he’d scored a wonderful Nicolas Roeg movie (TNT’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). Stanley was quite chaotic towards the end of his life and that required Harry to orchestrate all his music and, in many instances, generate cues from thin air. He found himself recording cues with Stanley and Nic Roeg, who he’d always been in awe of, in Budapest. Oddly enough Myers’ death gave an unexpected boost to Harry’s composer career and taught him the value of the well-placed bluff. Shortly after Stanley died, he got a call from Nic saying: “Well, Stanley’s gone so I guess you’ll have to do – how’s your jazz?” Lying through his teeth, Harry answered: “Great, Nic, great!” - he knew nothing about jazz. But there are a lot of really great jazz musicians in London, so Harry wriggled through the short Hotel Paradise just fine and did another project - Full Body Massage with Roeg after. Later that year Harry’s good relations with Roeg paid off by crossing his path with Hans Zimmer, who played an enormous role in Gregson-Williams’s future work and evolution of his talent, bringing him closer to becoming a popular and world-known film composer. In that memorable 1995, following Roeg’s advice, Zimmer initially hired Gregson-Williams for arranging and conducting the choir parts for “Crimson Tide” in London, a task that paid incalculable dividends. Using his choir experience since childhood, Harry did an excellent job by adding a distinctive vocal flavor to Zimmer’s music. Hans was more than satisfied with Harry’s work and playing a hunch, he soon invited Gregson-Williams to his Media Ventures Inc. studio in Los-Angeles. Just like that Harry arrived in USA with hand luggage and a visitor’s visa, not really expecting to stay very long. In the 18 months that followed, Gregson-Williams was totally immersed into production of film music.1996
Among other work, Zimmer entrusted Harry with composing and conducting of additional music to the famous blockbusters “Broken Arrow” and “The Rock”. During this relatively short period Harry had opportunities to gain extensive professional experience and gradually began more and more interested in film music. And by the time of working on music for Muppet Treasure Island he realized that writing music for movies was what he wanted to do – it was incredibly fun and creative. Harry realized that he wasn’t going to leave Los-Angles anytime soon as he thought he would.Biography by M.A.X.