Gavin Luke is an American composer who makes music inspired by nostalgia, nature, and the human condition. His diverse and prolific body of work spans an astonishing range of styles and traditions—from neoclassical to ambient, pop to jazz, EDM to film scoring. His music has tallied 450 million streams and 23 billion plays via sync in YouTube videos.
Raised in Minneapolis, Gavin was born with what he describes as “an obsession with music.” At age 7, he enrolled in classical piano lessons, following in the footsteps of his parents and his grandmother. In his teens, he absorbed and experimented with the works of Brahms, Mozart, and George Winston. After studying music synthesis and scoring at the Berklee College of Music, he earned a degree in psychology and moved to LA to continue honing his craft as a composer for film.
The naturalism embedded in Gavin’s approach is inherited from the new age composers who influenced him, and who themselves drew inspiration from the natural world. It is also rooted in childhood memories of fishing and hiking in the lakes and woods his family frequented in Minnesota. In Gavin’s compositional process, sounds, objects, and moments—a thunderstorm, for example—often evoke nostalgic associations from his youth. These recollections intermingle with the sound of the keys as he plays on his grandmother’s fully restored 1925 Steinway grand piano, kindling a fresh musical idea.
