Richard Causton

Richard Causton is one of the most prominent British contemporary composers of acoustic music, with an idiom influenced by the modernist tradition but also sometimes by world music. He is also an important educator.

Causton was born in London in 1971. He attended state-run schools and found a varied atmosphere there; at one, some 50 languages were spoken among the student body. His first instrument was the flute, but he also studied composition, beginning as early as age eight or nine. Causton spent time in India, where he studied composition with Param Vir. Back in Britain, he attended the University of York, studying with Roger Marsh and graduating with first-class honors in 1993. He went on for a master's degree at the school and also studied at the Royal College of Music with <a href="spotify:artist:4MHrqMZQnVBln2uBVxWOrn">Jeremy Dale Roberts</a> in composition and conducting with <a href="spotify:artist:2CDTStW27RfNtuFWtSfSKA">Edwin Roxburgh</a>. Causton rounded out his education at the Scuola Civica di Musica in Italy in 1997. By that time, he had already written a number of works, including the chamber orchestra piece The Persistence of Memory (1995), which has become one of his best-known works.

Causton's works have been exceptionally widely performed both in Britain and abroad; ensembles that have played his music include the <a href="spotify:artist:23BiSNXm5UaRFuusoWisYO">BBC Symphony Orchestra</a>, the Basel Symphony Orchestra, and the <a href="spotify:artist:4JxE9udapTtgj0yOFS4Se7">Nash Ensemble</a>. His works have been heard at the Spitalfields Festival, the Cheltenham Festival, and the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad under the auspices of the New Music 20x12 project where 20 composers were chosen to participate, among other venues. Many of his works are for chamber ensemble, but he has composed several works for orchestra, including Millennium Scenes (1999) and Ik zeg: NU (I say: NOW), which was premiered by conductor <a href="spotify:artist:71dLaXD8sd1tV1LzFqUj3q">Sakari Oramo</a> and the <a href="spotify:artist:23BiSNXm5UaRFuusoWisYO">BBC Symphony Orchestra</a> at the Barbican Hall in January of 2019 and released on an album in 2022. Causton generally writes for conventional orchestral instruments, but he has also included instruments from the Indonesian gamelan orchestra; at the Royal College of Music, where he taught, he founded a gamelan program. Causton has also taught at the Birmingham Conservatoire, the Wells Cathedral School, King's College, London, and Cambridge University, where he is professor of composition. More than a dozen of his works had been recorded as of the early 2020s. ~ James Manheim, Rovi