As a young and enthusiastic member of my school recorder group in the late 1950s, eagerly scanning publishers' lists for new compositions for my favourite instrument, I bought and greatly enjoyed playing through many short and tuneful pieces, both folksong arrangements and original compositions, by Peter Crossley-Holland, a name previously unknown to me. At that time my appetite for new pieces (not just recorder music) was voracious (it still is!), and my weekly combing of Third Programme listings revealed the occasional performances of large-scale vocal works with orchestra, by the same composer, sometimes conducted by his great friend Denys Darlow (it was after attending an eightieth birthday party for Denys Darlow in London, that Crossley-Holland's sudden death occurred). But in the early 1960s, the flow of performances of his music seemed to dry up and it was not until thirty-odd years later that our paths crossed, purely by a happy coincidence. I was at a wedding reception near Lichfield, and sitting at the same table was Peter Crossley-Holland's daughter Sally, whose brother Kevin, the well-known poet and storyteller, was at that time writing the libretto for Nicola LeFanu's opera The Wildman. She encouraged me to write to her father, who was then living in the depths of rural Carmarthenshire, having resumed composition following his retirement from UCLA. The result of that letter was an extended piece for solo tenor recorder, Invocation at Midsummer, which I subsequently broadcast on Radio 3 from Bangor University as part of an eightieth birthday concert for the composer. Other recorder pieces followed in fairly regular succession!

Those early recorder works, published by Universal Edition between 1958 and 1962 – A Little Suite, Irish Tunes, Albion, and Breton Tunes – together with another unpublished recorder work from the same period, though all on a very modest scale, point clearly to the composer's preoccupations, which found their full flowering in an academic career of the utmost distinction over the succeeding decades. His absence from British shores and the limited time for original composition that his academic appointments permitted, meant that his achievements as a composer were overlooked, even though his music had been performed by artists of the stature of Kathleen Ferrier, David Franklin, Janet Baker, Doris Gambell, Sir Adrian Boult, Rudolf Schwartz, and Pears and Britten.

The publication of the last of these early recorder works more or less coincided with the composer's career move from the BBC, where he had been successively producer and Music Organiser (Third Programme), and where he had been responsible for introducing into the broadcast schedules Indian and other non-western music, to the more rarefied world of academe, as a result of his increasing interest in and involvement with ethnomusicological research. From 1964 to 1966, he was Assistant Director of the Institute of Comparative Music Studies and Documentation in Berlin. After teaching assignments in American Universities (Illinois and Hawaii), he was appointed in 1972 Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology) at UCLA (in fact taking Schoenberg's chair there), where he enthused the magic of traditional music and instruments from all over the world. The sheer breadth of his interests is shown in the Festschrift that was published by UCLA to celebrate his 65th birthday in 1981, a volume that also includes lists of his compositions and published writings to date. During his years in Berlin and the States there was little time for composition (he kept his muse alight by making arrangements of medieval and renaissance melodies for local choirs), but his contribution to ethnomusicology was immense, particularly his writings on, and field studies of, the musical traditions of Tibet, and his investigations into the musical instruments of pre-Columbian America.