Scan 90
The New Grove Dictionary Of Music And Musicians 5 Ed. 2nd, 1904
34 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1style which occur on plates bearing Cross's name, particularly in the later part of his career. Important works engraved in the Cross workshop included Purcell's and John Eccles's A Collection of Songs (c1696), Daniel Purcell's Six Cantatas (1713), Handel's Radamisto (1720, for illustration see MEARS) and Benjamin Cooke's edition of Corelli's sonatas and concertos (1732), one of Cross's last known works.
3BIBLIOGRAPHY
4HawkinsH
5C Humphries and W C Smith Music Publishing in the British Isles (London, 1954, 2/1970)
6FRANK KIDSON/William SMITH PETER WARD IONES
8Cross-accent. The shift of a beat, or rhythmic pulsation, to a point ahead of or behind its normal position in a metric pattern (ex.1). When such shifting is maintained regularly for some time, it becomes either SYNCOPATION or CROSS-RHYTHM
10Ex 1 Beethoven Sonata in G major op 31 no 1 1st movt
12See also POLYRHYTHM, RHYTHM
14Crosse, Gordon (b Bury, 1 Dec 1937). English composer. He studied at Oxford University with Wellesz, graduating in 1961, after which he spent a further two years at Oxford doing research into early 15th-century music. In 1962 he studied briefly with Petrassi in Rome. He has combined his activities as a composer with a succession of academic posts. From 1964 he was senior music tutor in the extra-mural department of Birmingham University, and in 1966 became Haywood Fellow in Music, also at Birmingham. In 1969 he moved to East Anglia as Fellow in music at the University of Essex, and in 1973 was composer-in-residence at King's College, Cambridge.
16Crosse's earliest works, mostly for small chamber instrumental combinations, are serial in technique and rather fastidious in manner, influenced by Webern and, among British composers, Maxwell Davies. Crosse has related how his teacher, Petrassi, drew his attention to a certain expressive limitation in the style of the Concerto da camera (or Violin Concerto no 1), and encouraged Crosse to recompose the scherzo of that work in a more vigorous and trenchant manner. This exercise seems to have had a liberating effect on Crosse's subsequent music. In the song cycle For the Unfallen, composed the following year (1963), the solo voice is used for the first time in that energetic declamatory style, carefully moulded to the contour of the words, which is later also a feature of the operas Purgatory (1966) and The Story of Vasco (1968 73). From the same period date Crosse's first essays in music for children, of which he was to become an accomplished exponent. Meet my Folks and Rats Away! (both 1964) are a highly characteristic blend of crisp modernism with snappy, distinctive melody and piquant instrumental colouring. In Changes (1965 6), a large choral work passingly influenced by Britten, these same virtues invade Crosse's music for adults. The mellowing process continued in subsequent works, under the pressure of Crosse's interest in and flair for vocal declamation. Thus in the so-called 'monodrama' Memories of Morning Night (1971) the vocal writing is lyrical as well as dramatic, while in The Cool Web (1973-4) it is almost entirely lyrical and picturesque
18Crosse's instrumental and orchestral music is more uneven in quality, but advantageously reflects the individualized declamatory and lyrical style of his vocal works. This is most noticeable in the concertante works, Ceremony for cello and orchestra (1966), the Violin Concerto no.2 (1969), Ariadne for oboe and chamber ensemble (1971 2) and Wildboy (1978) for clarinet with cimbalom and seven players. Here a dramatic and expressive impulse is very pronounced. The concerto typically juxtaposes inert, reflective episodes with developmental passages of great virtuosity and expressive vigour. The transitions are handled, furthermore, with a skill and timing that partly conceal that the argument is rather over-extended (a fault to which the operas are also prone, except Purgatory). Crosse's symphonic works suffer, on the other hand, from the lack of any comparable individualized focus. In the Symphony no 2, for instance, his fertile invention and dazzling aural sense cannot make up for the lack of real tension or growth in the ideas themselves. It is also noticeable that, since leaving Rome, Crosse has written no significant chamber instrumental music, discounting the concerto-like Ariadne and Wildboy.
20As an opera composer Crosse has shown technical mastery and versatility in a genre to which British composers have been increasingly drawn since World War II but with variable success. In no sense is he an innovator. But in the one-act Purgatory, based directly on the late play of that name by Yeats, he showed himself immediately in command of the traditional materials of expressionistic melodrama, and not at all inhibited by the heavy Celtic gloom or the presence of only two characters engaged in a pre-eminently psychological struggle. The later operas, including the one-act comedy The Grace of Todd (1967-74), the three-act romance The Story of Vasco and the allegorical Potter Thompson (1972-3), all suffer from long-windedness and the composer's tendency to repeat himself, but are redeemed by their unfailing musical inventiveness, their apt and skillful writing for voices and instruments, and their underlying humanity of conception and feeling. The Story of Vasco is Crosse's only full-length proscenium opera, while Potter Thompson and Wheel of the World both adopt the morality-play style favoured by the avant garde, and lend themselves to performance in church or concert hall. It remains to be seen whether this is a real rather than modish tendency in Crosse's work, or whether his fairly traditional though eclectic idiom will again draw him back to the enclosed world of conventional opera
22WORKS
23STAGE
2418 Purgatory (opera, 1, Yeats), 1966, Cheltenham, Everyman, 7 July 1966
2520 The Grace of Todd (opera, 1, D Rudkin), 1967-8, Aldeburgh, Jubilee Hall, 7 June 1969, rev 1974
2629 The Story of Vasco (opera, 3, T Hughes, after Schehadé), 1968-73, London, Coliseum, 13 March 1974
2732 Wheel of the World (entertainment, 1, D Cowan, after Chaucer Canterbury Tales), 1969-72, Aldeburgh, 5 June 1972
2833 Potter Thompson (opera, 1, A Garner), 1972-3, London, St Mary Magdalene, Munster Square, 9 Jan 1975
30ORCHESTRAL
311 Elegy, small orch, 1959-61
326 Concerto da camera (Vn Conc no 1), vn, 10 wind, 2 perc, 1962
338 Concerto, chamber orch, 1962
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