Richard Causton was born in London in 1971 and received his early musical education at the ILEA Centre for Young Musicians. On leaving school he travelled in India, and subsequently studied composition privately with Param Vir. Between 1990 and 1994, he studied at the University of York with Roger Marsh and graduated with first-class honours in 1993, taking his M.A. in Composition the following year. He was a Foundation Scholar at the Royal College of Music, where he studied composition with Jeremy Dale Roberts and conducting with Edwin Roxburgh, winning both the Kit and Constant Lambert and Herbert Howells Prizes.
The Persistence of Memory (1995) was premiered by Oliver Knussen and the London Sinfonietta at the South Bank Centre (and revived under Paul Daniel in the London Sinfonietta's 1997 State of the Nation weekend) and later won the Third International 'Nuove Sincronie' Composition Competition. In October 1999 it was performed in the ICSM World Music Days in Chişinău, Moldova. Other distinctions include the SPNM George Butterworth Award for the solo piano work, 'Non mi comporto male' (1993), and the first ever Fast Forward composition award for Two Pieces for two clarinets (1995).
In May 1997 he was awarded the Mendelssohn Scholarship in its 150th anniversary year (previous holders have included Turnage, Martland, Butler, Ferneyhough and Sir Arthur Sullivan), as a result of which he studied electroacoustic composition at the Scuola Civica di Musica.
His works have been performed at the Spitalfields and Cheltenham Festivals, the Europ"cher Musikmonat (Switzerland) and the York Early Music Festival (as the culmination of a theatrical project with disabled people run by the Accessible Arts Club). Performers have included the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Basel Symphony Orchestra, CBSO, London Sinfonietta, Nash Ensemble, Sinfonia 21, Jane Manning, Barrie Webb, the Composers Ensemble, and Ensemble Corrente (of which he is a founding member).
Causton founded and runs the Royal College of Music Gamelan Programme and has written Concerto for Solo Percussion and Gamelan, which was given its first performance at the Cheltenham Festival in 2001 with Evelyn Glennie as the soloist. Also in 2001, Sinfonia 21 gave the first performance of Kyrie and Sanctus, an arrangement of two movements from Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame.
In 2003, Causton took up a 2 year position as Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge. Seven States of Rain, composed for Darragh Morgan (violin) and Mary Dullea (piano), won the Best Instrumental Work category of the 2004, British Composer Awards, and in December of 2004 Between Two Waves of the Sea, a substantial work for orchestra, was premiered by the CBSO under Mike Seal at Symphony Hall, Birmingham. The song cycle, La Terra Impareggiabile, set to poetry by Salvatore Quasimodo, was performed in its original version in July 2005 by baritone Jeremy Huw Williams, and 2006 saw premieres of new works for Caius College Choir, Cambridge (Jesu, sweete sone dear), the New London Children's Choir (Three Riddles), the Aldeburgh Festival (Sarabande/The Way the World Ends) and the London Sinfonietta (Phoenix).
2007 saw Causton?s music performed at the Wigmore Hall, London Festival of Contemporary Church Music, Aldeburgh Festival, and the CBSO Centre, as well as the premiere and tour of a new septet commission for the Britten Sinfonia, As Kingfishers Catch Fire.
Recently, Phoenix was the winner of the 2006 Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Chamber-Scale Composition and a recording is available on the London Sinfonietta label, SINF CD1-2008. His latest work for gamelan, Chorales was premiered at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge in May 2008 and he is currently working on a large ensemble piece commissioned by the BCMG for performance in 2009.