Gordon Crosse’s Meet My Folks! transforms eight of Ted Hughes’s comic family poems into a miniature work of music theatre for speaker, children’s chorus, percussion ensemble and adult instrumentalists.

The poems introduce a household of outsized relations—a formidable grandma, peculiar grandparents, siblings and parents—through the child’s-eye logic of exaggeration, where family mythology becomes grotesque, affectionate and faintly alarming.

Composed as A Theme and Relations, Op. 10, the work was first performed at the 1964 Aldeburgh Festival. Crosse’s score is unusually theatrical and flexible, combining conventional orchestral writing with children’s percussion, humming, spoken verse and George Adamson’s anarchic illustrations. This is the complete 68-page full score rather than the much shorter vocal booklet: an appealing object for collectors of Hughes, twentieth-century British music, illustrated scores and the stranger edges of children’s literature.

First edition, Oxford University Press, 1965. Illustrated softcover full score. Light rubbing, creasing and edgewear to covers; internally clean and sound.