Garyʼs composing career spans more than 45 years, encompassing scores for the leading UK theatre companies, West End and Broadway productions, radio, television, film, dance and concert hall.
Gary was born in London in 1954. After graduating from Hull University, where he read Music and Drama, he worked as an actor-musician until 1991, when he gave up the limelight to focus primarily on composing. In 2019 he returned to live performance with his cabaret show, Once Upon a Song.
His theatre scores include many for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, West End (including the English-language premieres of Yasmina Reza’s plays Art, The Unexpected Man, Life x 3 and God of Carnage) and Broadway (2009 Drama Desk nomination for The Norman Conquests). His recent theatre work has been the score of Hansel and Gretel (2023) at Shakespeare’s Globe in collaboration with the poet laureate Simon Armitage; and The Promise (2024) ,a new play for Chichester Festival Theatre.
His best-known movie work has been for Mike Leigh. Their collaboration began with Topsy-Turvy (1999), on which Gary was musical director. Then came the scores for Happy-Go-Lucky (2008); Another Year (2010, gaining Gary a nomination as European Film Award Best Composer); the short film A Running Jump (2012); Mr Turner (2014), for which Gary was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award, an ASCAP Composer’s Choice award, and an Academy Award for Best Original Score;and Peterloo (2018). Their partnership continues with Hard Truths (2024). Other film scores include Brighton (2019, directed by Stephen Cookson) and 23 Walks (2020, directed by Paul Morrison).
Gary has written for BBC radio since 1979, beginning as a singer-songwriter for Radio 4’s Midweek. Since then he has composed for many plays, including The Odyssey, Gawain and the Green Knight, The Theban Plays, The Winter’s Tale, The Eve of St Agnes, Three Men in a Boat, as well as the 2002 Sony-award winning Autumn Journal, directed by long-time collaborator Susan Roberts. For Radio 3 he also translated and dramatised Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila, and has contributed to The Verb.
TV work ranges from detective drama (Trial and Retribution IX & X) to three children’s cartoon series (James the Cat, Painted Tails, Ebb and Flo) with the animator Kate Canning.
In May 2017 Northern Ballet premiered Gary’s score for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. In March 2019 his work for large orchestra, The Great Blueness, was premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican concert hall. His numerous compositions for smaller ensembles include the wind quintet Ready for Anything (2020); Lockdown Variations (2020) for solo flute; and The Antrios (2021) for mixed reeds.. Scores for electronic media include Fireface (2003) and Turn of the Screw (2013). His most recent works (2024) are Islands, a trio for horn, violin and piano composed for Trio Aristono and three settings of poems for the voices+viols duo Intesa.
Gary curated and presented Oscarⓒ Scores at the Barbican Arts Centre in London for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, of which he is a member. He hosts Q&As for the French Institute’s Ciné Lumière, and runs In the Works, conversations with filmmakers from across the industry, for the Garden Cinema.
Gary is an Associate Artist of both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Old Vic theatre companies, and he is an Associate Teacher at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He also works as a writer, translator, and musical director.
