Laurence Crane

Laurence Crane studied at the University of Nottingham between 1980 and 1983, where he received composition tuition from Peter Nelson and Nigel Osborne. He writes music largely for the concert hall, though his output includes pieces initially composed for film, radio, theatre, dance and installation. 

A preoccupation of his work has been the use of commonplace musical objects in new structural relationships. Chords and intervals in their most basic state, arpeggios, drones, cadences, fragments of scales and short melodies are presented in regular and irregular repetitions and juxtapositions that are partly intuitive and partly structured according to formal schemes. He invents a new context for these objects, to attempt to discover a fresh beauty in the familiar and the ordinary. Between 1985 and 2003 he concentrated almost exclusively on writing miniatures; short pieces that are invariably focussed on a single idea. He has since developed an interest in making longer works, and several compositions since 2003 are of more extended duration. These explore the possibility of building large-scale structures using the same type of materials that were examined in the miniatures.

His work has been performed by ensembles, orchestras, singers and instrumentalists from around the world. Ensembles include Plus-Minus Ensemble (UK), Apartment House (UK), EXAUDI vocal ensemble (UK), London Sinfonietta (UK), Ives Ensemble (Netherlands), Orkest de Volharding (Netherlands), asamisimasa (Norway), Cikada Ensemble (Norway), Pinquins (Norway), Ensemble Kore (Canada), Quatuor Bozzini (Canada), 175 East (New Zealand) and Esposito Quartet (Ireland). 

Laurence Crane's music has been regularly broadcast, and in the UK has been featured on BBC Radio 3 and also on BBC 6 Music. His work appears on a number of CDs, and portrait discs have been recorded by Michael Finnissy (2008, on the Metier label), Apartment House (2014, Another Timbre), Cikada Ensemble (2015, Lawo Classics), asamisimasa (2016, Hubro), Ives Ensemble (2017, Nimbus Alliance) and Juliet Fraser & Mark Knoop (2023, Another Timbre).

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.