The South Downs is a range of chalk hills that extends for approximately 260 square miles across the southeast of England, from the Itchen Valley in Hampshire to Beachy Head in the East. This is a beautiful and justly famous landscape that has inspired poets, writers, visual artists and musicians for centuries.

A new album of chamber music by Ed Hughes explores and celebrates the relationship between music and the contemporary experience of this fragile landscape. The performers are the New Music Players and the Primrose Piano Quartet.
For Ed Hughes, walking the South Downs is both a physical and spiritual journey. It is a process that can open the mind to the beauty and fragility of nature. Like walking, Ed Hughes’s music is a journey of the mind involving pace, repetition and variation. The compositions on this album explore music’s affinities with ancient landscape and the effects of light and weather, imaginatively invoking paths and tumuli, forts and field systems, wild woods, with echoes of Sussex folk song, to create a series of vivid and contrasting chamber works.
“Ed Hughes’ refreshing, cultured, lovingly patterned music is built around a thoroughly contemporary theme; our present-day contemplation of landscape, and how we give it the attention and respect it deserves. Via music, the composer suggests, which works like the weather on a hilly walk in the South Downs. Our perceptions constantly change and re-energise as we encounter familiar objects while colours, shadings and vegetation are in a constant flow of development. The same can be certainly said of all the works in this rich collection, which surge forward with textural warmth and harmonic continuity. This is music for walkers, and people who love the earth.” – Judith Weir
Music for the South Downs (MSV 28623)
Label: Métier
Composer: Ed Hughes
Artists: New Music Players, Ed Hughes (conductor), Primrose Piano Quartet
Recordings made in three sessions in March, October and December 2021
Works:
- Flint – movement 1 (04:16)
- Flint – movement 2 (04:13)
- Flint – movement 3 (05:15)
- Nonet – movement 1 (05:32)
- Nonet – movement 2 (05:54)
- Nonet – movement 3 (05:48)
- Lunar 1 – (06:06)
- Lunar 2 – (08:56)
- Chroma (09:58)
- The Woods So Wild – movement 1 (05:34)
- The Woods So Wild – movement 2 (02:31)
- The Woods So Wild – movement 3 04:38
Album duration: 69:03
Ed Hughes Discography on Divine Art
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Distant Voices, New Worlds: Songs, Landscapes and HistoriesPrice range: £8.99 through £14.99
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Ed Hughes: Music for the South DownsPrice range: £8.99 through £14.99
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Ed Hughes: Time, Space & ChangePrice range: £8.99 through £14.99
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Symphonic Visions Soundtrack: New Music for Silent FilmsPrice range: £8.99 through £14.99
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Symphonic Visions – New Music for Silent Films£15.99
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Ed Hughes: When The Flame Dies (CD-DVD)Price range: £8.99 through £15.99
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Dark Formations – Music by Ed HughesPrice range: £12.49 through £18.00