Born in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, Russia, into a family of distant Tatar ancestry,[1] Rebikov began studying the piano with his mother.

He studied at the Moscow Conservatory with N. Klenovsky, a pupil of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and then for three years in Berlin and Vienna with K. Mayrberger (music theory), O. Jasch (instrumentation), and T. Müller (piano).

Rebikov taught and played in concerts in various parts of the Russian Empire: Moscow, Odessa, Kishinev, Yalta, as well as in Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Leipzig, Florence and Paris, where he met Claude Debussy, Oskar Nedbal, Zdeněk Nejedlý, and others.

His orchestral and stage works include more than ten operas, such as Yolka (Ёлка - The Christmas Tree), and two ballets.

He was bitter and disillusioned, convinced wrongly that composers such as Debussy, Scriabin, and Stravinsky had made their way into public prominence through stealing his ideas.