‘I didn't really know what a composer's life would be like, and everything has come as a horrible surprise!’

Some interviews lurch awkwardly from one topic to the next; others go off at irrelevant tangents and have to be steered back on course. The most pleasurable are those that quickly acquire a momentum in which the issues to be discussed arise naturally in conversation. Such was my interview with Gordon Crosse, which flowed so effortlessly that I scarcely needed to refer to my list of questions. But it was lengthy, and editing it for this chapter proved frustrating because I was forced to discard so much of what he said.

For more than forty years he has lived in a cottage in Suffolk that seems remote but in fact is just difficult to find, hidden from the road in gorsecovered heathland. When we met there in September 2011 he was recovering from the death of his wife a few months earlier, and this perhaps contributed to the length at which he spoke, his willingness to make innumerable mugs of tea and his enthusiasm in showing me his office and the computer on which he writes his music. I had no idea of how much time was passing, and hours later was forced to make my excuses and leave as politely as possible for a dinner appointment.

My reasons for wanting to interview him didn't include his temporary abandonment of composition in 1990 but it was inevitable that we would discuss the factors that led to it. He talked about the unsatisfactory first performance of his Sea Psalms in Glasgow that year and a crisis of selfconfidence compounded by what he believed was a lack of support from his publisher. John Rutter, in his own interview for this book, suggested a possible third factor: the large number of British composers who were born in the 1930s and who came to prominence in the 1960s. Composers don't compete with each other, at least intentionally, but it's easy to imagine how one lacking the confidence and support that he needed might have retreated from a front line that included Richard Rodney Bennett, Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, Nicholas Maw, John McCabe and Anthony Payne. ‘Perhaps’, Rutter suggested, ‘there just wasn't enough sunshine to go round.’