Crotch, William (EN)

Crotch William, *5 July 1775 Norwich, †29 December 1847 Taunton, English composer, organist, music theorist, teacher and painter. At the age of two and a half, he appeared in public in Norwich, playing the organ; he then set off with his mother on a concert tour to Cambridge, London (in 1779 he played before the royal couple, earning the admiration of Ch. Burney, among others) and Scotland, where he gave concerts on the organ, piano and violin; at the same time, he began to compose and paint. Between 1786 and 1788, he was J. Randall’s assistant in Cambridge; from 1789 to 1804, he lived in Oxford, where he prepared for his studies and the priesthood, whilst also writing the oratorio The Captivity of Judah, performed in Cambridge in 1789. In 1790, Crotch became organist at Christ Church, Oxford; in 1794 he obtained a Bachelor’s degree, and in 1799 a Doctorate in music; he conducted concerts by the Oxford Music Club orchestra, and from 1797 was professor and organist at St John’s College. Between 1800 and 1804, he organised and delivered a series of lectures on music at the University of Oxford, and between 1804 and 1807 at the Royal Institution in London. At the same time, from 1807 onwards, he worked in London as an organist and teacher; in 1809 he organised a commemorative concert to mark the 50th anniversary of Handel’s death, and he also promoted the music of J.S. Bach. In 1812, he achieved considerable success with the performance of the oratorio Palestine. Between 1814 and 1819 and 1828 and 1832, he was a member of the Philharmonic Society; in 1820, he resumed lecturing at the Royal Institution, and from 1822 to 1832 he was director of the newly founded Royal Academy of Music in London. He continued to give concerts until 1834; in later years he withdrew from public life, devoting himself to composition, painting and writing his memoirs.

Works from the early years of Crotch’s career display elements of the Handelian tradition, combined with aspects of his native sacred music, in both form and musical language. In his organ concertos, alongside typically Baroque principles of musical phrasing and polyphonic texture, Crotch also employed a cantilena based on classical models, thereby approaching the approach found in Haydn’s organ concertos, whose influence, incidentally, he was not subject to. Crotch’s central works — the oratorios Palestine (featuring the immensely popular quartet Lo! star-led chiefs) and The Captivity of Judah (linked only by theme to an earlier oratorio of the same title) — point to a further evolution of Crotch’s style towards a significant broadening of harmonic (strong modulations, chromaticism, dissonance) and textural means (a prominent role for the orchestra, a variety of polyphonic techniques), whilst retaining the traditional, Handelian general principles.

In his theoretical works, Crotch addressed issues relating to performance practice and teaching, but above all to music history and aesthetics; in Lectures…, he set out his own concept of dividing music into three ahistorical styles: “the sublime”, “the beautiful” and “the ornamental”; he applied this division when compiling the anthology Specimens of Various Styles of Music.

A great scholar and author of works on architecture, fortifications, history and the natural sciences, Crotch also occupies a prominent place in the history of English culture as a painter, a representative of the ‘Oxford School’, and the creator of nearly 1,200 paintings and prints, mainly landscapes, whose work anticipated the pioneering experiments of J. Constable.

Literature: Ch. Burney Account of an Infant Musician, in: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, LXIX, part 1, 1779; J.S. Bumpus The Compositions of Dr Crotch, “Musical News” XIII, 1897 (contains a complete list of C.’s compositions); M. Raeburn Dr Burney, Mozart and Crotch, “The Musical Times” XCVII, 1956; I. Fleming Williams Dr William Crotch, Member of the Oxford School and Friend of Constable, “The Connoisseur” CLIX, May 1965; J. Rennert William Crotch, London 1975.