Time, Space and Change: Cuckmere, Sinfonia - new CD
Time, Space and Change
Métier MSV 28597
Cuckmere | Media Vita | Sinfonia
MUSIC BY ED HUGHES
NEW MUSIC PLAYERS | ORCHESTRA OF SOUND & LIGHT | NICHOLAS SMITH
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Release 13 March 2020
Cuckmere: A Portrait 30:31
Media Vita 10:34
Sinfonia 30:23
Duration: 71:37
My new CD comprises first recordings of three works. Born in the UK in 1968, I am Professor of Composition at University of Sussex, founder of the New Music Players, and co-founder, with producer Liz Webb, of Orchestra of Sound and Light.
Commissioned by the Brighton Festival and conceived with filmmaker Cesca Eaton, Cuckmere: A Portrait (2018) is a musical portrait of the landscape near Lewes in East Sussex where I live. This continuous symphonic sequence was designed to be heard alongside Eaton's film which purchasers of this disc can view via an online link provided within the CD booklet. In the music, as Eleanor Knight comments, 'though there are fleeting moments of reflective stillness in Hughes’ Portrait, the piece is about movement; movement across a landscape, movement within the landscape, and movement that is the unstoppable flow of the river, the passage of time and the changing of the seasons.'
Sinfonia (2018) reflects my interest in early English polyphonic vocal music and is a series of transformations of compositions from around 1400 to 1600.
Sinfonia travels through time and space. Its beginnings were in fragments of early music which conjour up aspects of 16th and 17th centuries' history and experience including war, plague, faith, sex, city life and environmental disaster. I love these early compositions which are transformed in instrumental fantasies featuring riotous polyphony in a highly contemporary style. The score was written specially for the virtuoso musicians of the New Music Players. My approach actually recalls 17th century composers who often recomposed vocal music for instrumental solo and ensemble. My work was thus rooted in an English lyric and harmonic sensibility with the opportunity to craft new developments and variations.
Media Vita (1991) is a piano trio written 'when Hughes was a young graduate, so it’s fitting that it should act as a hinge between these two longer, more recent pieces. Based on John Sheppard’s 16th century motet and scored for piano trio, Media Vita represents a formative, thematic stage on the musical journey that brings us back up to date with Sinfonia.' (Eleanor Knight).