Chris Crawley

Chris Crawley, born in 1945, was for many years a self-taught composer and performer, who, after doing the usual childhood rite of passage thing with piano lessons, concentrated his performing energies on playing the French horn (taught by Ted Chance, Antony Gray and currently David Bentley) and is now principal horn with the Dacorum Symphony Orchestra and third/first horn in the St Albans Symphony Orchestra (amateur groups based in Hertfordshire, U.K.). He has a degree in English Language and Literature from University College London and spent his working life as a schoolmaster. In September 2014 he completed an MMus course in Acoustic Composition at Goldsmiths College, London. He remains at Goldsmiths as a research student following a practice-based MPhil/PhD course concentrating on composing music and investigating compositional processes, supervised by Prof. Roger Redgate.

He has written for The Horn Magazine, the former publication of the British Horn Society, and for The Horn Player, the current one. He is also a qualified reflexologist.

He has written music since childhood and as a young adult consulted Herbert Howells and Lennox Berkeley in connection with his compositions. Some years ago he published The Sir Gawayn Carols with the Oxford University Press. Other works include compositions and arrangements for orchestra, for choir, for chamber groups and for his own instrument - works which, though the majority have been performed, have not been published.

The end of the 1999 - 2000 season saw the highly successful première of his Four Romantic Songs for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, which attracted much favourable comment in the local press. This song-cycle is a reflection of his interest in words as well as music. Revising the Songs and preparing them for performance was an opportunity to get to grips with Sibelius as a composition tool. An updated version of the score of the Songs (together with a full set of parts) now appears in the Score Exchange, and, in due course, it is hoped that a selection of his other compositions will follow.

In 2008 he completed and revised Aspects of Eden, an extended work in one movement for large orchestra, based on ideas suggested by a visit to the Eden Project in Cornwall, extracts from which were performed in May 2006. Public performances of the complete score of Aspects of Eden took place on October 18th 2008 in St Albans (St Albans Symphony Orchestra) and May 16th 2009 in Berkhamsted (Dacorum Symphony Orchestra). Both were very favourably reviewed.

Since then he has started reworking a piece originally for horn and piano into a more ambitious piece for horn and orchestra, the first movement of which was given a play-through in July 2010. He has tentatively sketched out some material for another substantial work for orchestra based on a sixteenth century poem and on ideas suggested by travels in Europe.

In 2012 he completed a suite of dances for large orchestra to celebrate the Dacorum Symphony Orchestra's fortieth anniversary, which were performed in May 2013, some material for string quartet for a workshop involving the Allegri Quartet and a set of three pieces for horn duet.

He is currently working on another large-scale work, for symphonic wind ensemble.

Chris would describe his tastes in music as eclectic, ranging from early choral polyphony to twentieth century composers such as Britten, Shostakovich, Panufnik and Górecki and taking in some jazz and popular music. During his MMus course he developed a particular interest in Soviet and post-Soviet music.

He is particularly partial to the rich tonal palette of the orchestra. When he finds the time to listen to music he is as likely to reach for the symphonic repertoire of the late nineteenth century as anything else; he has a particular fondness for the music of Rachmaninov and Dvořák.