Richard Causton (born 1971) is an English composer and teacher.

Born in London, Richard Causton attended Quintin Kynaston School and William Ellis Schools. His early musical education took place at the ILEA Centre for Young Musicians, specialising in flute (though also playing piano and singing in choirs).

Causton began his formal composition training in India under the direction of Param Vir, before studying for a bachelor's degree at the University of York under Roger Marsh between 1990 and 1993. Having graduated with first-class honours, he took an M.A in composition the following year. He also undertook a Foundation Scholarship at the Royal College of Music, studying composition under Jeremy Dale Roberts and conducting under Edwin Roxburgh. In 1997, receipt of the Mendelssohn Scholarship enabled him to study electro-acoustic composition at the Scuola Civica di Musica. He has subsequently gone on to forge a consistent and productive career as a freelance composer and arranger.

As well as composing, Causton has taught at the Birmingham Conservatoire (alongside his former teacher Edwin Roxburgh), Wells Cathedral School, and the Royal College of Music, and was Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is currently Professor in Composition at Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College.

Causton founded the Royal College of Music Gamelan Programme. He is also a founding member of Ensemble Corrente and has been a panel judge for the SPNM (Society for the Promotion of New Music) composers shortlist. He occasionally writes feature articles on contemporary music for The Guardian.

Causton is best known for his work in acoustic contemporary classical music. He first came to attention with The Persistence of Memory, which drew significant attention when premiered at the London Sinfonietta's 1995 'State of the Nation' Festival. He has been hailed as "a beguilingly gifted young composer" creating "moments of exquisite timbral sensitivity" (Robin Holloway in The Spectator), "nothing if not distinctive in his approach to composition" (www.classicalsource.com) and as "one of the finest of the new generation of British composers" (The Guardian). Causton's contemporary Julian Anderson (former Head of Composition at the Royal College of Music) has described him as being one of "the most original of his generation" and of possessing "exceptionally high standards of invention and imagination."

Causton's compositions are widely played and have been performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Basel Symphony Orchestra, CBSO, London Sinfonietta, Nash Ensemble, Sinfonia 21, Jane Manning, Barrie Webb, and the Composers Ensemble. In the United Kingdom, his work has featured at the Spitalfields Festival, the Cheltenham Festival, the Park Lane Group evenings, and the York Early Music Festival (the latter in association with the Accessible Arts Club as part of a theatrical project with disabled people). In December 2010, it was announced that Causton had been selected as one of twenty composers to participate in the New Music 20x12 project as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Causton will compose a new work for the European Union Youth Orchestra to be premiered in 2012.

Although the majority of his compositions are written for standard orchestral instruments and ensembles, some of Causton's material has featured unusual instrumentation not commonly used in Western classical music (such as gamelan ensembles or homemade instruments). He has also experimented with compositions utilising unusually placed sound sources - his radical 2001 arrangement of the Sanctus from Guillaume de Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame featured two instrumental groups separated as far as possible (a strategy which anecdotally once broke up a Sinfonia 21 rehearsal when a "burly, tattooed Fire Officer" took exception to one of the groups blocking a fire exit).