Archive for Ed Hughes

New Album of Chamber Music by Ed Hughes

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.

Composer Ed Hughes
Ed Hughes © Katie Vandyck

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:

  1. Flint – movement 1 (04:16)
  2. Flint – movement 2 (04:13)
  3. Flint – movement 3 (05:15)
  4. Nonet – movement 1 (05:32)
  5. Nonet – movement 2 (05:54)
  6. Nonet – movement 3 (05:48)
  7. Lunar 1 – (06:06)
  8. Lunar 2 – (08:56)
  9. Chroma (09:58)
  10. The Woods So Wild – movement 1 (05:34)
  11. The Woods So Wild – movement 2 (02:31)
  12. The Woods So Wild – movement 3 04:38

Album duration: 69:03

Ed Hughes Discography on Divine Art

Ed Hughes nominated for Ivor Novello Award

Ed Hughes’s The Cuckmere Soundwalk has been nominated for an Ivors Academy Ivor Novello Award in the Sound Art category. The Soundwalk is on the Echoes Interactive Sound Walks App and features movements from Ed’s 2018 Brighton Festival commission ‘Cuckmere: A Portrait’, performed live with Cesca Eaton’s glorious 30’ film.

Echoes App users can download the walk on their phones and explore the iconic Cuckmere River and Cuckmere Haven in East Sussex whilst listening to Ed’s music performed by the Orchestra of Sound and Light. Download the free Echoes app on the App Store and Google Play.

BBC Radio 3’s Breakfast show featured ’Spring’ from ‘Cuckmere: A Portrait’ in this morning’s coverage of the Awards. The Award winners will be announced on 8 December.

You can hear Ed talking about the Soundwalk at Cuckmere Haven on BBC South East Today here.

Ed Hughes Performance Premiere

On Saturday 27 November the Primrose Piano Quartet premiere Ed Hughes’s ‘The Woods So Wild’ in Lewes, East Sussex. Tickets here.

Ed says:

”My new piano quartet ’The Woods So Wild’ is infused with fragments of a popular Tudor song, possibly sung by Henry VIII. The tune also inspired sets of keyboard variations by Elizabethan composers William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons. Building on my string ensemble work ‘Flint’, which contained dream-like echoes of a Sussex folk song, ‘The Woods So Wild’ meditates on an ancient melody whose origins are long-lost but which bears peculiarly English qualities – a complex of characteristics including a deep love of landscape and a restless spirit in search of love and reconciliation.’’

Ed Hughes Discography

Ed Hughes: Time, Space and Change a Sunday Times Best of 2020!

The Sunday Times has released their Top 100 Recordings of 2020 and Ed Hughes: Time, Space and Change on Métier made the list!

“The title alludes to England and its music. Cuckmere: A Portrait is the transformed score for a film about a river, the idiom a cheerily naturalised minimalism.”

See the full list at TheTimes.co.uk

Sunday Times 100 Best Records of 2020

Ed Hughes on BBC South East Today

Ed Hughes and his work, “Cuckmere: A Portrait”, from his album, Time, Space & Change, was featured on BBC South East Today as it has been integrated into a new app called Echoes: Interactive Sound Walks. So the next time you’re visiting the Cuckmere Valley and Haven in East Sussex, you can listen to the work while you explore the footpaths down the river to the sea. The app uses GPS to trigger eight extracts from the score, giving you an immersive audio journey from the depths of winter to high summer while you walk! Watch the clip here:

Time, Space & Change Album Launch

Cuckmere: A Portrait - Launch Poster

Saturday, 7 March, 2020 at 7.30pm at All Saints Center, Lewes will be a special screening of Emmy award-winning film-maker Cesca Eaton’s beautiful portrait of the Cuckmere river and Cuckmere Haven through the seasons, with a lush, evocative score by Lewes-based composer Ed Hughes, to mark the release of Ed Hughes’s CD “Time, Space and Change” on Métier.

‘Cuckmere: A Portrait’ was originally commissioned by the Brighton Festival and premiered by the Orchestra of Sound and Light playing live at the Attenborough Centre at the University of Sussex, where Ed Hughes is Professor of Composition in Music, as part of the 2018 Brighton Festival.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Ed Hughes, Cesca Eaton, Tony Whitbread (President, Sussex Wildlife Trust) and Trevor Beattie (Chief Executive, South Downs National Park Authority) chaired by local writer and musician Eleanor Knight.

Details

Saturday 7 March 2020 at 7.30pm
All Saints Centre, Friars Walk, Lewes BN7 2LE
Tickets £10 (under 16s free) or at the door. Entry includes CD.

New Album of Music for Small Orchestra from Composer Ed Hughes

Composer Ed Hughes
Ed Hughes © Katie Vandyck

Metier Records, a division of the Divine Art Recordings Group, will be releasing a new album of music by Sussex (England) based composer Ed Hughes. This will be Hughes’s fourth album for Metier in a series which includes an opera (CD/DVD set), a DVD of silent films with new music by Hughes, and a highly acclaimed double album of chamber works.

The new album contains three works: Sinfonia and Cuckmere: A Portrait for chamber orchestra, and a piano trio – Media Vita.

Ed Hughes writes music which can be very lyrical with long lines, and yet also polyphonic – sometimes dense, and sometimes translucent. Very characteristic is that things go in and out of focus, so you hear different things at different times, flowing in and out. There’s always a sense of forward momentum in that the music is constantly on a journey. A definite sense of momentum and energy. You are left wanting more. It resists definition! Sinfonia explores violent extremes of emotion ranging from anguished and desperate states, to the serene, with hints of early music. Whereas Cuckmere is often really gentle – the beginning of Spring is fleet of foot and light, whereas Summer has this amazing warmth and richness to the textures, which is a big contrast to the brittle shards of Winter. And the windswept Autumnal textures. Overall the album is a portrait, unified stylistically, even though the pieces exhibit many contrasts. (comments by Liz Webb)

Ed Hughes says: “My new CD features the most amazing performances of my music by the New Music Players and the Orchestra of Sound and Light brilliantly recorded and mixed by Simon Weir and the Classical Media Company.

“The CD opens with Cuckmere: A Portrait. A four movement piece evoking the journey of the Cuckmere river, this is also a journey through the seasons. So it is an exploration of time and space. It has a changing texture, even though the work is a continuous play, because there are a prelude and three interludes introducing and connecting the four main movements. Using the resources of a small orchestra and electronics I try to create a sense of spaciousness, cold, warmth, beauty, scale, and the drama of the environment conjured in Cesca Eaton’s film, for which this piece was originally conceived as part of a major 2018 Brighton Festival immersive commission.* I did this through searching melodies, changing harmonies, shifting string colours, blocks of wind and brass, and the strangeness you get when the landscape is transformed through snow and ice conveyed through ‘on the bridge’ string effects, and the occasional addition of electronics in the interludes.

Media Vita is the piano trio which goes back to my first professional compositions. I am fond of it because it freely explores the intense harmonies of an early motet – John Sheppard’s Media Vita (c. 1550) with its exquisite harmonic progressions and expressive melodies. I transform this into quite a bold and searching piece for piano trio.

“The final piece is called Sinfonia (2018) – it links to Media Vita (1991) because more than 25 years on from Media Vita it’s a return to the idea of trying to get under the skin of early English music. But this time in a sort of chronological survey of music composed between 1415 and c. 1600 using pieces originally concerned with war, passion, the human spirit, death, environmental disaster and the sounds of the city… all these different mixed elements from an early period. I’m trying to transform them into a statement that’s more about today than yesterday, through this large scale ensemble piece, Sinfonia.”

Ed Hughes: Sinfonia (Métier MSV 28597)

Coming Spring 2020

Recorded by Simon Weir (Classical Media) in 2018.

Works & Performers:

  • Sinfonia – Featuring the New Music Players conducted by Ed Hughes
  • Cuckmere: A Portrait – Featuring the Orchestra of Sound and Light conducted by Nicholas Smith
  • Media Vita – Featuring Susanne Stanzeleit (violin), Joe Giddey (cello), Richard Casey (piano)

Ed Hughes Recordings on Métier

Ed Hughes: Distant Voices, Living Music: Wed 6 March at 6pm, ACCA

Ed Hughes’s FREE Professorial Lecture is on Wednesday 6 March from 6-7pm at the ACCA, University of Sussex. Ed will explore the tension between tradition and innovation from a personal perspective, with examples ranging from the Old Hall Manuscript (c. 1410-20) to his own Sinfonia, composed for the New Music Players last year.

Featuring a fantastic line-up of professional musicians playing the examples live on stage. 

‘Distant Voices, living music: hearing the past and writing the present’
Professor Ed Hughes

Wed 6 March 2019 at 6pm to 7pm
Free but please reserve

With the New Music Players
Helen Whitaker (flute)
Fiona Cross (clarinet)
Darragh Morgan (violin)
Joe Giddey (cello)
Mary Dullea (piano)

Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts, Gardner Centre Road, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9RA

Ed Hughes Recordings

Symphonic Visions by Ed Hughes

A fascinating new video album will be released by Métier comprising new music for silent films by Ed Hughes. Métier has worked with Hughes before on a chamber/vocal disc (Dark Formations, MSV 28530) as well as an opera disc (When the Flame Dies, MSV 77203), both to critical acclaim. Hughes has written new scores for many classic films and this new collection includes music for ‘A Voyage to the Moon’ (1902) and the surrealist ‘The Nose’ (1963) as well as incidental music to accompany RAF and Imperial War Museum footage from the 1940s. The catalyst for the project was however a commission from the City of Brighton (UK) to produce a 45-minute orchestral score as part of the Brighton Festival’s 50th anniversary in 2016. The score was to accompany a new silent film ‘Brighton: Symphony of a City’ by Lizzie Thynne – a portrait of everyday Brighton but with historic archive clips referencing the past.

This is an eclectic mix of fascinating visual material bound together by the excellent compositional skills of Hughes.

Due for release in February 2018 (Métier MSVDX 203 – DVD format in universal play). The audio version “soundtrack” will also be issued simultaneously as a digital-only album (MSV 50801).