Clive Swansbourne was born and educated in England, studying at the Royal College of Music in London. Later he came to the United States and studied at Yale School of Music with Ward Davenny and Claude Frank, and received his doctorate there.

He has toured widely throughout the United States, and has performed to critical acclaim in most of the big cities and almost all the states. He has also performed frequently in Europe (Great Britain, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland) as well as Canada. He has gained a reputation for his interpretations of standard repertoire as well as twentieth century music.

His performances have been broadcast on NPR's "Performance Today" and on the BBC in England. He was a major prize-winner at the Maryland International Piano Competition, and in 1989 won the "Concerts Atlantique" International Music Competition.

One of the few pianists in the world who plays all four of Michael Tippett's monumental sonatas, he was invited by the composer to perform them at the Cheltenham International Festival in England in 1990.

He gave the complete cycle (in eight recitals) of the 32 Beethoven sonatas twice at Idaho State University as well as series pairing works by Mozart and Chopin, and also of Haydn and Schumann. 

During the Fall of 2005, he performed the Beethoven piano sonata cycle to packed houses at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, and in Fall 2008 he presented a series of five recitals encompassing all of Schubert’s late piano music, also at the Rothko Chapel. He has since recorded all of the Schubert series on six CDs for Swan Records.

In 2010, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of both Chopin’s and Schumann’s birth, Swansbourne performed a six-recital series to overflowing crowds at the Parish Hall of Christ the King Lutheran Church in Houston. Each performance included a selection of works by both Schumann and Chopin, with spoken introductions to help listeners compare the ways in which these two towering masters revolutionized piano writing.

He has also given highly praised accounts of Bach's Goldberg Variations at the Philadelphia Bach Society, and Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto at the Gala opening concert of California's Music in the Mountains Festival.

He is an active chamber music player, and in the summer of 1999 traversed, in three concerts, Beethoven's violin sonatas with violinist and assistant concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony, Samantha George.

A popular and inspiring teacher, he has been invited to give master classes and clinics at dozens of colleges and universities from coast to coast. In 1999 he inaugurated an on-going series of lecture-recitals on the piano repertoire, "Classical Piano Matters," designed for radio broadcast and cassette/CD distribution.

He made his first recital CD in 1999, comprising music by Scarlatti, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms and Rachmaninov. He has since recorded all of the Schubert series on six CDs for Swan Records.