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Ed Hughes Interview
Posted on Wednesday, June 15, 2005. © Copyright 2004-2008 David Bruce
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C:T talks to composer Ed Hughes, who's opera The Birds is being performed by I Fagiolini in this years City of London Festival.
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Ed Hughes
| Tell us something about your background.
I studied at Cambridge University with Robin Holloway and Alexander Goehr, and later completed a PhD at Southampton University with Michael Finnissy. While I was at university I probably spent as much time composing and organising concerts as I did on academic work. Composing wasn't really central to the curriculum then but it was discretely encouraged by some of the more enlightened tutors. Of course one of the most amazing things about the place were the fantastic musicians one met as students, Jonathan Powell, Nic Hodges, Charles Mutter, Zoe Martlew, Emma Johnson, Philip Gibbon, and many more.
How did you start composing?
As an outsider. Although I studied piano for many years I never really became a player. So I realised one way of being able to get inside the extraordinary process which is music making would be to write music.
Who or what has influenced your style as a composer?
More recently I have been realising again, more and more acutely, the importance of my exposure to various forms of vocal ensemble music as a student and in subsequent years. I mean the early English vocal music of John Browne, William Cornysh, John Sheppard, Tallis and so on. My sense of harmony, abrupt juxtapositions of texture, polyphonic approaches to rhythm, and voicing, probably have a lot to do with this relatively early fascination.
Do you have particular techniques - ones you come back to again and again? Tell us a bit about them.
I borrowed the idea of rhythmic structure from John Cage's work 'String Quartet in Four Parts' and never really looked back.
Interview by David Bruce © Copyright 2004-2008
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