Composer Gordon Crosse wrote noted works in conventional media, influenced by sources as diverse as serialism and medieval music, and put them together into a distinct, individual voice.

Crosse was born in the mill town of Bury, near Manchester, on December 1, 1937. He attended orchestral concerts with his father but otherwise had only a sporadic musical education as a child. When he was 12, as a student at the Cheadle Hulme School, he began improvising on a piano in a public space at the school and decided to take lessons so that he could write down his improvisations. Soon, a friend was asking him to write a violin-and-piano piece, and Crosse had abandoned his planned science studies in favor of music. He once said: "I discovered I wanted to be a composer at exactly the same moment I discovered I wanted to be a musician." Discovering the score of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in a public library was another milestone. Crosse attended Oxford University, studying with Egon Wellesz and Bernard Rose. He later spent several years studying in Italy; returning to England, he taught at various universities, including King's College, Cambridge (1973 to 1975). Crosse was a visiting professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1975 to 1976.

Substantial Crosse works such as the Elegy for small orchestra, Op. 1, began to appear while he was still a student at Oxford. At first, he worked within serialist parameters, but as his musical language developed, he incorporated other procedures. His breakthrough came with Meet My Folks! (1964), a theatrical work for children and adults with a text by Ted Hughes. Crosse wrote several operas; one, The Story of Vasco (1973), also had a text by Hughes. Crosse wrote a number of orchestral works, including the major Violin Concerto No. 2, Op. 26, which was programmed on BBC Radio by conductor Colin Davis and the BBC Symphony.

Crosse wrote the music for the much-heralded 1983 television adaptation of King Lear, starring Sir Laurence Olivier. In 1990, he completed an orchestral piece, Sea Palms, for a festival in Glasgow, Scotland. Despite large commissions of this sort, he became disillusioned with composing and stopped altogether in 1990, devoting himself to computer programming. He returned to music at the urging of friends in 2007 and quickly became as prolific as before, producing three piano sonatas, four new string quartets, a solo cello sonata entitled Little Bu, and On the Shoreline, a "concertante" for sopranino recorder and string sextet. Crosse died in late 2021 after a brief illness. ~ James Manheim, Rovi