About the Composer
Introduction
Gareth Olubunmi Hughes is a Welsh composer of contemporary classical music, born in Cardiff on 24th August 1979. His work is largely influenced by European modernism and avant-gardism; however, influences from other non-classical genres do also feature in his work, including jazz, folk music and beat-based or ambient electronic music. Hughes is experienced at composing for both acoustic and electroacoustic medium, with his output ranging from orchestral, instrumental and vocal/choral music, through to works that combine live acoustic elements with electronic soundscapes, synthesizers and microphone processing. Hughes is also a skilled pianist in a variety of styles/genres and composes piano parts that are elaborate, technically challenging and idiomatic for the instrument.
As one of Wales’s most talented composers of his generation, Hughes is keen to support and contribute towards the arts in Wales and takes a strong interest in Welsh and Celtic mythology, poetry, prose, visual art and sonic art; with a view towards integrating many of these non-musical art forms into his work. He is an active supporter of the Welsh language and a member of the ‘Throne of Bards’ (‘Gorsedd y Beirdd’) at the Welsh National Eisteddfod, having won its main composers’ medal (‘Tlws y Cerddor’) on two separate occasions. Further information about his interest in Welsh and Celtic literature can be found on in the Welsh & Celtic Literature section on this page.
Aside from his musical activities, Hughes is also an experienced software developer and codes the software interfaces that are used with his electroacoustic works. Further information about his experience in this area can be found on the Software Development page on this site.
Education
Hughes completed his school-level qualifications at Ysgol Gyfun Gymraeg Glantaf (including A-levels in Music, Mathematics and Physics), whilst studying piano with a variety of tutors, including Professor Carole Oakes at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama after being awarded a local scholarship. He also composed music extensively in his spare time whilst at school.
In 1997 he began a BMus degree at King’s College London, where he studied contemporary composition and theory under Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Robert Keeley and Silvina Milstein, graduating with first class honours in 2000.
After completing his undergraduate studies, Hughes developed a strong interest in Electronic & Computer Music and in 2003 he completed an MPhil in Electroacoustic Music under Jonty Harrison and Erik Oña, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB, now the AHRC).
In 2016 Hughes completed the final steps and requirements of a PhD in Contemporary Composition at Cardiff University under the supervision of American composer Arlene Sierra (with further input from Robert Fokkens, Judith Weir, Anthony Powers and Richard Elfyn Jones), funded by the David Wynne Scholarship Fund. During the period of the doctorate his work was performed by a variety of professional musicians and ensembles, including the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, rarescale, Exaudi, the Carducci String Quartet, Lontano, harpist Catrin Finch and flautist Fiona Slominska.
In addition, during the period of the doctorate Hughes completed several formal academic qualifications in Software Development at night school, leading to a Diploma of Higher Education in Computer Science (equivalent to the second year of a Computer Science degree). This corresponded with Hughes’s interest in Electronic & Computer Music and many of the software skills development during this period have been incorporated into Hughes’s compositional works that use electronic sonorities.
Prizes & Accolades
Gareth has won a plethora of prizes at the Welsh National Eisteddfod for both composing and performing on the piano. He has recently gained recognition for himself by winning the main composers’ medal (‘Tlws y Cerddor’) on two separate occasions: in 2016 (Monmouthshire) and 2012 (Vale of Glamorgan). His winning work in 2016 was a cycle of four songs for bass-baritone voice and pianoforte, based on the Welsh-language poetry of Llŷr Gwyn Lewis, from his series Storm ar Wyneb yr Haul (A Storm on the Face of the Sun); his winning work in 2012 was Cwyn y Gwynt (The Wind’s Lament), a sonata for flute and harp in three movements, inspired by Sir John Morris-Jones’s well-known poem under the same name. In addition he won the piano solo competition and a prize for composing a work for percussion in 2016; a prize for composing a new work for alto flute & piano in 2015 (Montgomeryshire); inauguration to the Throne of Bards (‘Gorsedd y Beirdd’) with a white robe in 2014 (Carmarthenshire); second place in the piano solo competition in 2010 (Ebbw Vale); a prize for composing a new orchestral work in 2004 (Newport); and third place in the piano solo competition in 2003 (Montgomeryshire).
Hughes was commissioned to compose a new work for the 2017 Bangor Music Festival (funded by the Arts Council of Wales, Tŷ Cerdd and the PRS Foundation) and composed Amber on Black iii (“Flying north at night...”) for soprano, alto flute and live electronics, set to a poem by Stephen Boon, which was premiered by Juliet Fraser, Richard Craig, Gareth Olubunmi Hughes and Electroacwstig CYMRU at the Pontio Arts Centre, Bangor on 18th February 2017.
In addition, Hughes was a finalist at the 2012 Welsh Composers’ Showcase with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, where Civilisations (formerly called Fractal Civilisations), the second movement of his symphonic work Human Visions was performed and recorded.
Style & Technique
Overview
Hughes has experimented with several recognised styles of composition and pitch organisation, ranging from modal and post-tonal theory through to the use of serialism, microtones and electronics. Several unique and elaborate systems of sonic organisation have emerged from this, forming an integral part of his style of composition. Although some of his works adopt a number of methods which look outside of the realm of the 12-tone Pythagorean system adopted in Western art-music (i.e. by using natural harmonics, microtones, electronics etc...), the core of his most recent work has centred on a number of methods that act as a hub between modal and chromatic styles of writing.
Hughes is a technically skilled composer and his work is broad ranging in scope and demonstrates a high level of variety and versatility, along with the ability to compose convincingly, with stylistic accuracy in a plethora of historical classical and non-classical genres. Some of his pieces are unashamedly modal in style (in particular his works for amateur-level singers and choirs); however, the majority of his recent work is a great deal more chromatic and avant-garde in style, often adopting some form of polymodality (operating in several chromatically related modes simultaneously) and/or twelve-tone technique. Hughes also often experiments with extended instrumental and vocal techniques and electronics in order to add timbral effects, colouration and atmospherics to the sonic world created in his music language.
Pitch Organisation
The majority of Hughes’s most recent acoustic compositions adopt some form of post-tonal, post-impressionistic chromaticism, leaning towards the polymodal chromaticism which is coined in many of the chromatic and twelve-tone works of Béla Bartók and Olivier Messiaen (and also alluded to in Messiaen’s Technique of My Musical Language). Serialism and the expressionist methods of the Second Viennese School also form an influence on Hughes’s use of pitch; however, various serial techniques (such as hexachordal rotation or pentachordal rotation) tend to be adopted in an auxiliary fashion in Hughes’s work and are rarely employed in a strict didactic manner. There is a correlation between Hughes’s use of rotation-based serial techniques and that which is seen the works of several modern British serialists, including Oliver Knussen and Julian Anderson.
Polymodality, polyharmony and the use of polychords form the basis of Hughes’s most radical style of pitch organisation, which is complex and elaborate and he has devised his own unique system for combining chromatically related modal patterns in different ranges of the pitch spectrum (coined as stacked polymodality). Please refer to the Polymodes section on the Music Theory page of this site for further information; there is also a Wikipedia page on this topic.
Extended Timbre
Some of Hughes’s most experimental works engage with more specific influences of later modernists who developed more radical approaches to composing contemporary music during the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century, adopting effects that create symbolism with the natural world and draw on ideas that are partially indebted to the influence of unique contemporary composers such as Toru Takemitsu, Kajia Saariaho, Geroge Crumb, Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino.
Some of Hughes’s most recent string writing makes use of extended string timbre, such as unorthodox string harmonics, slides along the strings’ harmonic nodes (i.e. ‘harmonic arpeggios’), harmonic trills unorthodox bowing and three or four-note tremolos. In addition, many of Hughes’s recent chamber works using alto/bass flute make use of extended woodwind timbre, such as multiponics, harmonics, quartertones, microtones, pitch bends, articulated air sounds, modifications to the flute’s natural timbre, simultaneous singing & playing effects, flutter tongues and timbral trills.
Hughes is also particularly interested in the harmonic series and his use of harmonics, microtonal deviations and pitch bends often relates to the precise intonation of natural harmonics in one way or another. The use of pitch in this way adds colouration and harmonic texture to the above mentioned system of chromatic pitch organisation, but does not normally acts as a substitute.
Vocal Writing
Much of Hughes’s most recent contemporary vocal writing also adopts extended timbral/colouristic effects and is influenced by the avant-garde vocal works of György Ligeti, Luciano Berio and Karlheinz Stockhausen during the 1960s and 1970s. The vocal lines are effectively treated as musical instruments and incorporate a variety of extended techniques, including Schoenbergian ‘Sprechgesang’ (speech-song), ‘Sprechstimme’ (relatively-pitched speech), whispering, murmuring, inhaling, exhaling and rapidly repeated syllables. Non-linguistic phonetic pronunciations are also used, words from poems are transformed and mutated and onomatopoeic effects add symbolic meaning to the sounds and gestures created.
Electronic Timbre
Several of Hughes’s most recent works are for mixed acoustic and electroacoustic media, with the use of electronics taking the above mentioned modifications to the natural timbre of acoustic instruments and voices one step further: the acoustic sounds can be processed through a microphone and effects such as reverberation, echo, wave filters, pitch shifts and timbral modifications can be applied to the signal; soundscapes created from pre-recorded natural environmental sounds can also be added to the musical texture, as well as electronically generated synthesizer layers and atmospheres.
The use of electronics in Hughes’s compositional work acts either as an extension of natural acoustic timbre, or to complement it by adding symbolic environmental or synthetic layers and textures to the music. Further information about Hughes background and aesthetic interests in this area can be found in the Electronic & Computer-Generated Sonorities section below.
Electronic & Computer-Generated Sonorities
As an undergraduate student in London, Hughes first began to take an academic interest in the electronic and computer music of pioneers such as Pierre Schaefer, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis, before embarking on the completion of a master’s degree at Birmingham University from 2001–3, under the supervision of electroacoustic composers Jonty Harrison and Erik Oña. During this period, Hughes gained experience of composing musique concrète and acoustmatic music (electroacoustic music for pre-recorded tape). Following this, Hughes also gained experience and familiarity with many of the principles of commercial audio engineering whilst producing beat-based and ambient styles of electronic music following the completion his master’s degree.
In addition to his interests as a composer, Hughes also has both an academic and practical background in mathematics, physics, computing and sound engineering and took several formal academic qualifications at night school in a variety of generic (non-musical) computer programming languages, namely C, C++, Java, Perl and UNIX shell-scripting, HTML/CSS, Javascript and PHP during the period of his doctorate (Further information about his experience in this area can be found on the Software Development page on this site).
Hughes has a strong interest in the current activities of various centres of excellence in electronic/computer music, in particular at BEAST (Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre, at Birmingham University) IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, Paris) and CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford University, USA). There is a particular emphasis on live sound synthesis and the live electronic processing of natural acoustic musical sound in Hughes’s work and his most recent electroacoustic compositions are for mixed acoustic and electroacoustic media.
Hughes first began to work with the SuperCollider audio synthesis programming language after being introduced to CCRMA’s open-sourced bundle of music/audio software languages called Planet CCRMA, which mirrors the systems that are configured at their institution in Stanford University and is built on Linux Fedora (a powerful open-sourced operating system maintained by Red Hat). SuperCollider also runs well on Apple-Macs as well as other Linux and UNIX-based distributions.
Hughes currently uses SuperCollider extensively for any sound synthesis that is used in his live electroacoustic compositions and likes the mathematical precision that it allows. Despite being a script-based language, it is also interactive and allows the programmer to run or sonically ‘audition’ a program or part of a program without needing to compile it first. SuperCollider also allows the programming of hundreds (or even thousands) of efficient and complex synthesizers simultaneously – this can be done either manually with great accuracy, or via the use of a pre-programmed automated function, which can be written to randomly or stochastically generate each individual synthesizer; it is a highly effective way of allowing a programmer or composer to synthesize complex, evocative and atmospheric sound-masses or clusters of sound and has become popular amongst post-Xenakisian composers in recent years.
Welsh & Celtic Literature
Hughes is fluent in the Welsh language and has a particular interest in Welsh and Celtic literature, including bilingual (Welsh and English-language) settings of mythology, poetry, novels and other prose. Literature of this nature has formed the basis of much of his vocal and choral music and has also been a direct source of inspiration for several of his instrumental compositions, including poems by Llŷr Gwyn Lewis, T. Gwynn Jones, Sir John Morris-Jones and fables taken from Welsh/Celtic mythology.
Hughes has a particular interest in traditional Welsh/Celtic mythology, in particular The Four Branches of the Mabinogi, Arthurian mythology, the works of Brythonic poets Taliesin and Aneirin and adaptations of some of these fables by modern playwrights such as Saunders Lewis and Tony Conran. Hughes is also fascinated with works by other composers that are set to or inspired by Celtic/Arthurian mythology, including compositions by Harrison Birtwistle, James Macmillan, Guto Pryderi Puw, Pwyll Ap Sion and Joseph Holbrooke. With this, Hughes has a vision to create a new contemporary chamber opera, which combines instruments and voices, along with live electronic sounds and processing.