Crosse was born in Bury, Lancashire on 1 December 1937,[1] and in 1961 graduated from St Edmund Hall, Oxford with a first class honours degree in music, where his tutors included Egon Wellesz.
[2] He then undertook two years of postgraduate research on early fifteenth-century music before beginning an academic career at the University of Birmingham.
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.
The Demon of Adachigahara, another music theatre work for children and adults, is a retelling of a traditional Japanese folk-tale akin to a Brothers Grimm story; it warns of the dangers of curiosity.
Though the subject-matter is often dark – many of the texts relate to death – the composer aimed "to fashion something enjoyable to listener and performer alike."
Crosse also developed an interest in ballet after he adapted his orchestral piece Play Ground (1977) for choreographer Kenneth MacMillan.
These include two violin concertos, a cello concerto[5] (written in 1979 "in memoriam Luigi Dallapiccola", based on a motif from Dallapiccola's piece Piccola Musica Notturna) and three works featuring blown instruments (Ariadne for oboe, commissioned for the oboist Sarah Francis, Thel for flute and Wildboy for clarinet).
But following the completion of Sea Psalms, written for Glasgow forces in its year as European City of Culture, 1990, Crosse shifted his focus to computer programming and music technology, and in the following 17 years, produced little music, except several songs with recorder parts, written for the recorder player John Turner.
[8] Crosse married Elizabeth Bunch in 1965 after they met at Aldeburgh, and they bought a house, Brant's Cottage in Blackheath, Wenhaston, near Blythburgh, Suffolk.
In later years his partner was the poet Wendy Mulford, with whom he bought a cottage on Papa Westray, the northern-most of the Orkney Islands.