Gérard Geay was born in Paris in 1945. He studied at the Paris Conservatory, in the classes of Jean-Pierre Guézac and Olivier Messiaen for musical analysis, and of André Jolivet and Henri Dutilleux for composition.  He received the prize in composition in 1971, and is a laureate of the Lili Boulanger Foundation. In 1969 he embarked on a teaching career that led him to teach in many conservatories and universities.  He has also been invited as an educator to Germany , Belgium , Italy , Slovakia , and Switzerland . From 1974 to 1987, he was a producer at Radio-France, and from 1982 to 1984, he was chief inspector at the Ministry of Culture. From the outset of his teaching career, he began to develop an original method of teaching counterpoint and harmony that takes into account the historical development of musical notation and compositional techniques.  This approached the field we today call “early music”, and which he prefers to designate “the history of contemporary music through the ages”. Geay is the founder of the Department of Early Music at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Lyon, a department that he chaired from 1987-1992.  At Lyon , he teaches counterpoint, harmony, and the theory of basso continuo. From 1993 to 1997, he taught counterpoint of the 13th through the 15th centuries at the Centre de Musique Médiévale de Paris. From 1998 to 2000, he was Dean of the Early Music Center of Geneva, a professional division of the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève.  He has been a regular collaborator with the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, for which he has reconstructed missing orchestral parts in the music of Clérambault. In 1997, he was elected a member of their research board, and since September 2000, he has been a chercheur at the CMBV, where he is continuing his work in the area of reconstruction of missing orchestral parts with the Cardénio Symphonies of Michel-Richard de Lalande and Le Pouvoir de l’Amour by Pancrace Royer.