Giya Kancheli, born August 10 1935 in Tbilisi, is probably Georgia's most famous living composer and cultural export. Known for his deeply-spiritual, sometimes dissonant, large-scale works, Kancheli draws inspiration from Georgian folklore as well as from religion. Rodion Shchedrin speaks of Kancheli as "an ascetic with the temperament of a maximilist; a restrained Vesuvius".

Kancheli has written seven symphonies, and what he terms a liturgy for viola and orchestra, called Mourned by the Wind . His Fourth Symphony received its American premiere, with the Philadelphia Orchestra, under Yury Temirkanov , in January 1978, not long before the cultural freeze in the United States against Soviet culture. Glasnost allowed Kancheli to regain exposure, and he began to receive frequent commissions, as well as performances within Europe and America.

Championed internationally by the likes of Dennis Russell Davies , Jansug Kakhidze , Gidon Kremer, Yuri Bashmet , Kim Kashkashian, Mstislav Rostropovich, and the Kronos Quartet, Kancheli has seen world premeires of his works in Seattle, as well as with the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur.

In Georgia, Kancheli is well-known for his work in the theatre, from which he draws much of his musical composition. For two decades, he served as the music director of the Rustaveli Theatre in Tbilisi. His opera Music for the Living , written in collaboration with Rustaveli director Robert Sturua , has been praised within Europe and the former Soviet Union since its premiere in June 1984, and in December 1999, the opera was restaged for the Deutsches National Theater in Weimar.

As of April 2002, due to turmoil in his homeland, Giya Kancheli currently resides in Antwerp.