Laurence Crane

Laurence Crane is a composer who writes for combinations of instruments and voices which are generally identified as 'classical', to which he sometimes adds elements from outside that genre. He mainly composes music for the concert hall, though his output includes pieces initially written for film, radio, theatre, dance and installation. Born in Oxford in 1961, he studied with Peter Nelson and Nigel Osborne at the University of Nottingham and since 1984 has lived and worked in London. He has been a member of the teaching staff in the composition department at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama since 2010.

Crane’s music has been performed, recorded and broadcast around the world, and over the past four decades he has collaborated with numerous ensembles and individual musicians. Ensembles he has worked with include Plus-Minus Ensemble (UK), Apartment House (UK), EXAUDI (UK), Decibel (UK), London Sinfonietta (UK), Ives Ensemble (Netherlands), Orkest de Volharding (Netherlands), asamisimasa (Norway), Cikada Ensemble (Norway), Oslo Sinfonietta (Norway), Ensemble Kore (Canada), Quatuor Bozzini (Canada), Freesound (Canada), 175 East (New Zealand) and Esposito Quartet (Ireland). Several CD recordings of his music have been released, on the labels Another Timbre (UK), Metier (UK), Nimbus (UK), Hubro (Norway), Lawo Classics (Norway) and LCMS (Ireland). His orchestral music has been performed by the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the LCMF Orchestra.

In 2017 he was the recipient of a 3-year Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Composers and in 2022 he won an Ivor Novello Award for Natural World, a work for soprano and piano with electronics, written for Juliet Fraser and Mark Knoop. Between 2019 and 2024 he participated in the research project ‘Performing Precarity’, based at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo.

soundcloud.com/laurence-crane

Photograph by Benjamin McMahon