Born in 1935, Douglas Gunn was a boy chorister at St Patrick’s Cathedral and the Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin under Dr George Hewson, and later a lay Vicar Choral at St Patrick’s and Christ Church Cathedrals. In 1962 he joined RTÉ, working in Cork and Dublin. In Cork he founded the Locrian Consort and the Douglas Gunn Ensemble, an early music group in which he played recordders. He has conducted several choirs including the Lydian Singers, the RTÉ Singers, the Irish Pro Musica Chorale and Sequence Twenty in Dublin and the Cork Schola Cantorum. He taught recorder and baroque chamber music at the Cork School of Music and the Dublin Early Music Centre.
Much of his compositional output is for choir, although it also includes chamber music, particularly for voice with recorder and other instruments. He has been commissioned by, among others, University College Cork Choral Society, Madrigal ‘75, Cork Municipal School of Music, Westport Arts Festival and Cork Ivy Day Committee. His compositions, editions and arrangements have been widely performed, recorded and broadcast and have been published by J. and W. Chester, Ossian Publications and his own publishing companies, Poddle Press and Melrose Music MM.
