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Gordon Crosse
1937 - 2021
Great Britain, England
Gordon Crosse (01/12/1937 - 21/11/2021), an English composer. Crosse was born in Bury, Lancashire and in 1961 graduated from St Edmund Hall, Oxford with a first class honours degree in Music. He then undertook two years of postgraduate research on early fifteenth-century music before beginning an academic career at the University of Birmingham. Subsequent employment included posts at the Universities of Essex, Cambridge and California. He won the Worshipful Company of Musicians' Cobbett Medal for services to music in 1976. For two years after 1980 he taught part time at the Royal Academy of Music in London but then retired to his Suffolk home to compose full time.
Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings
For the unfallen, Op.9 (1971), four songs for tenor voice, solo French horn and string orchestra:
• Merlin • In memory of Jane Frazer • Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings • In Piam memoriam Texts: four poems by Geoffrey Hill. Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings
For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores, Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good, To sound the constitution of just wars, Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood. Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust, Their usage, pride, admitted within doors; At home, under caved chantries, set in trust, With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs They lie; they lie; secure in the decay Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted, Before the scouring fires of trial-day Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head, Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea Across daubed rock evacuates its dead.
Geoffrey Hill (18/06/1932 - 30/06/2016) is an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University. Hill has been considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation.
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