Adrian Cruft

Who was Adrian Cruft?

Adrian Francis Cruft was a British composer.

Cruft, the son of the double-bass player Eugene Cruft was educated at Westminster Abbey Choir School, Westminster School, and as a Boult conducting scholar at the Royal College of Music from 1938, completing his studies there briefly in 1946-1947 after service in World War II. He was a composition student of Gordon Jacob and Edmund Rubbra but also studied double bass with his father. Cruft became chairman of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain 1966.

Cruft, called a "performers' composer" by Roderick Swanston in an article in The Musical Times a couple of years after his death was, as a young chorister at Westminster Abbey, influenced by the revival of Tudor music and later by the counterpoint of Bach. Grove's music dictionary calls his music "diatonic, firmly based in tradition and generally straightforward in idiom". He composed church music as well as orchestral works and chamber music.