William Lyons is a diverse and well-known musician, working in the fields of performance, composition and research. He has been at the forefront of the Early Music movement for many years, composes for theatre and other media and is active in research into matters of Historic Performance Practice and is a Professor at the Royal College of Music in London.
William is director of the acclaimed early music ensembles The City Musick and The Dufay Collective. He is also a regular performer with leading early music groups such as The Gabrieli Consort and I Fagiolini. Time is otherwise spent as a composer, arranger, music consultant and researcher.
As an expert performer on historic wind and reed instruments, William can be heard on the soundtracks of numerous films, including Robin Hood, Pride & Prejudice, The Hobbit, Les Miserables and Grand Budapest Hotel. He also recorded all the historic woodwind samples for the Cinesamples music software programme.
William has composed and arranged music for film and TV, including Pride and Prejudice and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. On Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban he was a performer and advisor to John Williams on scoring and historical soundscapes. In 2018 William wrote much of the incidental music for Mary, Queen of Scots, and was awarded the Crystal Pines Prize for Best Original Score for his work on Oscar winner The Favourite. He also arranged and played historic winds on the score of The Kid Who Would be King. William also was Music Consultant and Historic Arranger on the 2020 release of Jane Austen’s Emma.
He has a long association with the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre as a composer, performer, Musical Director and Historical Music Adviser. Previously for the Globe he has composed for ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘Richard II’, ‘Much Ado about Nothing’, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, ‘The Winter’s Tale’, ‘Coriolanus’, ‘Liberty’, ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’, ‘Blue Stockings’ and the acclaimed productions of Howard Brenton’s ‘In Extremis’ and ‘Anne Boleyn’, the latter winning the TMA Best Touring Production 2012. He composed for the new play by Brenton, ‘Dr Scroggy’s War’ that premiered to critical acclaim at the Globe in September 2014. In 2015 he composed the music for Helen Edmundson’s ‘The Heresy of Love’.
In 2015 William composed an eclectic score for the National Theatre’s acclaimed production of ‘Everyman’, directed by the new Artistic Director, Rufus Norris. He directed a Gabrieli Consort collaboration on extracts from ‘The Merchant of Venice’ in Washington DC and at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London.
In 2015 William also composed a soundscape for a wonderful wedding painting by the mid 16th century painter Martin van Cleve for the Frieze Masters Exhibition in Regents Park .He also composed music for the British Library 'Shakespeare in Ten Acts' Exhibition and wrote and presented the BBC Radio 3 Early Music Show on the legacy of David Munrow. He was also expert speaker on the BBC Composer of The Week series on the medieval composer Guillaume Dufay.