William Crotch

William Crotch (Norwich, 1775 – Taunton, 1847) was an English composer, organist, theorist and painter whose precocious gifts made him one of the most distinguished musicians of his day. His career joined the wonder of a child prodigy to a long academic and teaching life, and his lasting legacy lies chiefly in music theory and in the recovery of older music.

Childhood and the prodigy tours

Born in Norwich, he was the youngest son of Michael Crotch, a master carpenter, and his wife Isabella. At about eighteen months he was picking out tunes on a small house organ his father had built, and shortly after his second birthday he had taught himself to play "God Save the King" with the bass. In 1778 his mother began taking him on a series of tours through England and Scotland to exhibit his remarkable gifts. In London he played for the king and queen at Buckingham Palace, could transpose into any key, and could name the four notes of a chord by ear. Burney and Barrington recorded these abilities, and his reputation reached the Royal Society. Yet Crotch himself later admitted that the itinerant life had damaged him emotionally, and that he had been in danger of becoming a spoilt child.

Education at Cambridge and Oxford

Between 1786 and 1788 he worked at Cambridge as assistant to Professor Randall and played the organ at several college chapels. He was then sent to Oxford under the Reverend A. C. Schomberg, with a view to preparing him for university and holy orders. That plan was abandoned when Schomberg's health failed, and Crotch concentrated on music. His first oratorio, "The Captivity of Judah", to a text by Schomberg, was performed at Trinity Hall in 1789 after preparation under his Cambridge teacher Charles Hague and the aged Dutch composer Pieter Helendal. In these years he was much influenced by John Malchair, leader of the Oxford Music Club orchestra, who like Crotch was both musician and painter.

The Oxford years

In 1790, when barely fifteen, he was appointed organist of Christ Church. From 1793 he frequently deputised for the professor of music, Philip Hayes, as conductor of the Music Room concerts, a role he kept until 1806. He took his BMus in 1794 and his DMus in 1799. In 1797 he succeeded Hayes as professor of music and as organist of St John's College and the university church of St Mary the Virgin. The university offered no taught course in music, and Crotch was the first Heather Professor to give formal lectures on the history, theory and aesthetics of music. After an inaugural lecture in 1798, he gave an annual course to subscribers from 1800 to 1805, and a similar series at the Royal Institution in London in 1805–1807, one of the first of the new societies to offer regular music lectures.

London: performer, teacher and composer

In 1806 he left Oxford for London, though he kept the professorship until his death. In the capital he became well known as a teacher, composer and scholar. His appearances as a soloist were few but striking. In 1809 he gave a programme of his own arrangements of Handel for organ and piano to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the composer's death, possibly one of the first one-man public concerts in Europe. He helped Samuel Wesley and Benjamin Jacob bring the music of J. S. Bach before the public at organ recitals. In 1812 his oratorio "Palestine" was performed, the most successful of his works, and repeated many times in London and the provinces; Crotch never printed the score and charged for the loan of the instrumental parts and for his attendance as conductor at each performance. He conducted the Birmingham Festival in 1808 and often directed the Philharmonic Society's concerts in London, of which he became an associate at its foundation in 1813; the society performed his Symphony in F in 1814. He also gave many public lectures, and from 1812 to 1823 delivered annual courses at the Surrey Institution.

Principal of the Royal Academy of Music

When the Royal Academy of Music was founded in 1822, Crotch was appointed its first principal. He taught harmony, counterpoint and composition himself. Sterndale Bennett remembered him warmly: he walked each day from his home near Campden Hill to Tenterden Street, his pockets full of paint-boxes and sketchbooks, and he delighted his pupils by playing from memory series of Handel choruses, selected with endless variety. He resigned the principalship in June 1832. In that year he was also appointed a judge of the Gresham Prize for church music, alongside Horsley and Stevens.

Works, style and aesthetic thought

Crotch was not a prolific composer and concentrated on choral and keyboard genres. His reputation rested on "Palestine", the first even moderately successful oratorio composed in England since Handel's day, and on "The Captivity of Judah" (1834), a second setting of the text he had first set forty-five years earlier. His style is eclectic: he mingles movements in the ancient manner with others in a Classical idiom, and his knowledge of contemporary developments is evident, though he avoided vulgarity and sentimentality. His orchestral music rarely matches the level of his oratorios, although he was an imaginative orchestrator. Curiously, two of his most durable pieces in cathedral choirs were not conceived as anthems: "Lo! star-led chiefs" began as a solo quartet in "Palestine", and "Methinks I hear the full celestial choir" was published as a glee.

His most influential contribution was as a lecturer and writer. His "Elements of Musical Composition" (1812) was a widely used manual, and his lectures, collected in "The Substance of Several Courses of Lectures" (1831), offer a historical survey of music on an aesthetic footing. Crotch took from Sir Joshua Reynolds the categories of the sublime, the beautiful and the ornamental, and argued for a revival of the sublime style through the study and imitation of ancient music, a goal paralleling the Gothic revival in architecture. This doctrine was quoted for decades and also attacked, by Burney and, in 1836, by Henry Gauntlett. Despite his reverence for the past, he introduced audiences to a wide repertoire, and his pioneering lectures on Mozart's operas (1817–1821) are especially important. His three-volume anthology "Specimens of Various Styles of Music" was encyclopaedic in scope and still consulted early in the twentieth century.

Crotch also played an important part in reviving early English church music. In 1803 he published a selection of early psalm tunes, together with Tallis's Litany and "Veni Creator", and several Oxford churches and colleges began to revive them. By the 1830s his lectures had influenced Thomas Helmore and other leaders of the Tractarian movement. In old age he became rather dogmatic about what suited church music: he condemned S. S. Wesley's work for its novelty and expression, qualities that his own music displays abundantly.

Wider intellectual life and final years

His curiosity extended far beyond music. In 1800 he published observations on the shape of the earth and the lunar atmosphere, and proposed the pendulum as a metronome fifteen years before Maelzel adopted Winkel's system. In 1842 he wrote a treatise on perspective, and he is regarded as a distinguished member of an Oxford school of landscape painting that in some respects anticipated Constable. He left some 1,200 paintings and drawings, along with writings on architecture, astronomy, geography, optics and other subjects, much of which is held at the Norfolk and Norwich Record Office.

He withdrew from public life some years before his death; his last appearance was as organist at the Handel Festival in Westminster Abbey in 1834. He then devoted himself to sketching, composing and writing, especially for his nephews, nieces and grandchildren. He died in 1847 while visiting his son, the Reverend W. R. Crotch, headmaster of the grammar school at Taunton, and was buried at Bishops Hull, near that town.

Legacy

Crotch is remembered today less for his oratorios than for his thinking about music, his pioneering work as a teacher at Oxford and the Royal Academy of Music, and his part in rediscovering older English music. His career illustrates both the exceptional talent of childhood and the fact that maturity did not always fulfil it, yet also the contribution of a man who helped establish music as a subject of serious intellectual study in England.