William Cranford

William Cranford was an English composer and singer active in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He died around 1645, and his birth date is not known with precision. His name is associated with London and St Paul's Cathedral, and he is now chiefly remembered for the quality of his consort music and for a body of sacred music that is largely lost or survives only in fragments.

He may have come from East Anglia, a region where the surname was common, although his family has not been traced. His presence in London is inferred from the six-part elegy Weep, Brittaynes, weep, written on the death of Prince Henry in 1612. Its context links him to a musical circle made up of St Paul's clergy and other residents of the neighbourhood, and the other contributors to Ravenscroft's Psalter of 1621 belonged to the same group. He was probably already a vicar choral at St Paul's, a post documented from 1624 and held until the Civil War. A list of 1643 naming Royalists considered suspect may refer to him, though this is uncertain, and he does not appear among the four vicars choral named in July 1645.

His vocal output includes the psalm tune "Ely", published in 1621, and several verse anthems in a simple, semi-polyphonic style, among them My sinful soul. O Lord, make thy servant Charles, also known as The king shall rejoice, probably his most popular work in that genre. Much of his sacred music survives incomplete, especially in sources connected with St Paul's. His three-part catches were widely circulated in the publications of Hilton and Playford, and according to some accounts Purcell added words to his music for Let's live good honest lives. About twenty instrumental consort pieces also survive, most of them in a Dublin manuscript dated to London around the 1630s, together with fantasias, pavans and pieces for two lyra viols.

His instrumental style has attracted the attention of commentators. Gordon Dodd described it as highly pointillistic in pieces with fewer parts, with unusual harmony and a texture that is often mechanical, while Dudley North stressed its marked contrasts between majesty, gravity and variety. Current criticism regards him as a competent composer of relatively minor importance, with an idiosyncratic output whose fragmentary transmission makes a full assessment difficult. It is not known whether he was related to Thomas Cranford, also a vicar choral at St Paul's, or to the Presbyterian James Cranford.