Ed Hughes

Ed Hughes's (b. 1968) work as a composer has become known in recent years following major commissions from the City of London Festival (an opera The Birds) and the Brighton Festival (including a new score to Sergei Eisenstein's classic silent film Battleship Potemkin). These works have toured to the Salamanca Festival (2005) and to the Sydney Festival (2005) in the Sydney Opera House, where his collaboration with the distinguished Japanese textile artist Teruyoshi Yoshida was given six performances live by the Seymour Group. His 2001 score to Ivens's Rain continues to be performed widely, most recently by the Israel Contemporary Players in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in May 2007, where it was broadcast on Israeli network radio, and as part of the International Hanns Eisler Conference in Berlin in November 2008.

His collaboration with Yoshida (Memory of Colour) was nominated for a British Composer Award in 2005. His work for the Opera Group The Birds was awarded the Gresham College Prize and was profiled live on BBC Radio 3 with extracts performed by the cast.

He was commissioned by Glyndebourne Opera and Photoworks to write a new orchestral score to the Sophy Rickett film (commissioned simultaneously) about Glyndebourne entitled 'AUDITORIUM'. The joint work premiered live at Glyndebourne on 17 November 2007 and was installed at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, prior to an international tour. This major collaboration will be the subject of a book to be published by Photoworks in 2009. 'Auditorium' was shown at Tate Modern on 7 March 2008, and at Ffotogallery, Cardiff, Palazzo Santa Margherita in Modena, Italy, Alberto Peola Arte Contemporanea in Turin and Nichido Contemporary Art, Tokyo. 'AUDITORIUM' was shortlisted for a British Composer Award in 2008; extracts were broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

He has also had performances at a national level including Oxford Playhouse, Cheltenham Festival, Buxton Opera House, South Bank Centre in London, and many of his works have been recorded and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. 'Strike Sketches' was broadcast on Hear and Now in May 2008 and extracts of 'AUDITORIUM' were broadcast in December 2008.

In 2006 he was awarded a grant by the Arts Council England to write a score for the silent film Strike, also by Eisenstein. This work was completed in 2007 and premiered at the Barbican in July. It toured the UK in 2007 and was released by Tartan Video in a box-set of Eisenstein's early films, also including Battleship Potemkin. The Israel Contemporary Players gave two live performances of Battleship Potemkin in Tel Aviv in May 2008.

In November 2008 Ed's new opera 'Cocteau in the Underworld, a collaboration with librettist Roger Morris, was workshopped by the ROH2 OperaGenesis Programme, culminating in a fully-staged performance of the opening and closing scenes. A revised version of the same scenes was performed to a large and enthusastic audience at the Brighton Festival on Monday 4 May 2009.

Auditorium, Ed's collaboration with filmmaker Sophie Rickett, continues to tour internationally with installations in Alsace in August 2009. Auditorium featured in Berwick on Tweed Media and Arts Festival from 18-20 September 2009, where it was installed in a former Ice House.

Future performances include two concerts with the Camilleri Trio featuring Ed's Trio in memoriam David Osmond Smith in Southampton and Oxford in February 2010, and the world premiere of a new work for choir and electronics by Bath Camerata directed by Nigel Perrin on Good Friday, 2010 in Wells Cathedral based on poems by prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.

Ed Hughes lives in Lewes and lectures in Music at the University of Sussex.

Listen: www.edhughescomposer.blogspot.com and www.edhughes.org.uk

'A richly sonorous music'
Sunday Times 13 April 1997 on Chroma

'A fine example of the hidden gems the Brighton Festival can produce'
Evening Argus 12 May 2004 on Memory of Colour

'Pure magic...A rip-roaring vital spectacle...a show of terrific vitality and verve'
Independent 1 July 2005 on The Birds

'truly emotional...an atmosphere of deeper resonances'
Times 1 July 2005 on The Birds

'Hughes's score is by far the highlight of this Potemkin'
Sight & Sound November 2007 on Battleship Potemkin

'A very effective score by Ed Hughes'
Sight & Sound November 2007 on Strike

"Because I am interested in polyphonic music, I find that it is very important to achieve an audible rhythmic complexity, which may be a reason why I favour seemingly transparent harmonic structures.

"Two objectives seem to me important in contemporary art: to awaken the listener to spiritual consciousness; and to respond to a culture in which the condition of numbness and the routine acceptance of a thoughtless mass entertainment are prevalent. In music, one can play upon the action of memory and work with the sense of time passing. These are powerful ways of awakening the listener, and of making him or her 'susceptible to divine influences', as John Cage once wrote. Exploring such issues has prompted me recently to work on a relatively large scale. Larger scale forms have enabled me to experiment with periodicity in music; with repetition; symmetries; and journeys through varying tonal landscapes; with change and transfiguration, including crossing borders between acoustic and electronic sound.

"My music can be contemplative, but is not mindless. Colour in my language is a way of speaking figuratively of timbre, instrumental line, mixing, articulation and multiple forms of tone production, and of shimmering tonal centres. The more one experiences this music, the more its vibrancy is apparent through its focus on an evolving polyphony — an aesthetic that is quite different from minimalism."

"I am influenced by those composers of the late medieval and early renaissance period who in their music created harmonies of great intensity, shot through with lines of energy and abandon. I connect harmony in music with the spiritual aura created by colour in painting (eg. certain works of Mark Rothko). I do not regard the process of composing as a romantic exercise, however. Most of my works have a rigorous rhythmic structure. I am interested in the way in which lines gather their own momentum and energy, seeming to flow over and break through the predetermined boundaries of the composition."

Ed Hughes

» Ed Hughes' website

Ed Hughes

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