CROTCH, William (1775-1847), doctor of music, was born at Norwich, on 5th July 1775. When only three years and a half old, he was able to play tunes with their basses on the organ with great correctness. Dr Charles Burney, the English historian of music, gave an interesting account of the infant Crotch in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (vol. lx. pt. i. for 1779). Crotch also exhibited in his childhood a talent for drawing, which he afterwards cultivated so far as to become a very respectable amateur painter of. landscapes. At the early age of twenty-two he was appointed professor of music in the university of Oxford, and there in 1799 he took his degree of doctor in that art. In 1800 and the four following years he read lectures on music at Oxford. Next he was appointed lecturer on music to the Royal Institution, and subsequently, in 1822, principal of the London Royal Academy of Music. His last years were passed at Taunton in the house of his son, the Rev. W. R. Crotch, where he died suddenly on the 29th December 1847. He published a number of vocal and instrumental compositions, of which the best is his oratorio of Palestine. In 1831 appeared an 8vo volume containing the substance of his lectures on music, delivered at Oxford and in London. Previously, he had published three Volumes of Specimens of Various Styles of Music, referred to in his lectures. Among his didactic worksis Elements of Musical Composition and ThoroughBass ( London, 1812). He arranged for the pianoforte a number of Handel’s oratorios and operas, besides symphonies and quartette of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The great expectations excited by his infant precocity were not fulfilled; for he manifested no extraordinary genius for musical composition. But he was a hard student ...