Gordon Crosse

Gordon Crosse (born 1 December 1937) is an English composer.

Crosse was born in Bury, Lancashire and in 1961 graduated from St Edmund Hall, Oxford with a first class honours degree in Music. He then undertook two years of postgraduate research on early fifteenth-century music before beginning an academic career at the University of Birmingham. Subsequent employment included posts at the Universities of Essex, Cambridge and California. He won the Worshipful Company of Musicians' Cobbett Medal for services to music in 1976. For two years after 1980 he taught part-time at the Royal Academy of Music in London but then retired to his Suffolk home to compose full-time.

Crosse first came to prominence at the 1964 Aldeburgh Festival with Meet My Folks! (Theme and Relations, op.10), a music theatre work for children and adults based on poems by Ted Hughes. Hughes would also provide the lyrics for five of Crosse's subsequent works: the "cantata" The Demon of Adachigahara (op.21, 1968); The New World for voice and piano (op.25); the opera The Story of Vasco (op.29, 1974); Wintersong for six singers and optional percussion (op.51); and Harvest Songs for two choirs and orchestra (op.56). The Demon of Adachigahara, another music theatre work for children and adults, is a retelling of a traditional Japanese folk-tale akin to a Brothers Grimm story; it warns of the dangers of curiosity. The Story of Vasco, premièred in 1974 by Sadler's Wells Opera at the Coliseum Theatre in London, is a setting of Hughes' translation and adaptation of Georges Schehadé's play Histoire de Vasco.

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