Elaine Hugh-jones
Pianist, composer and BBC stalwart who set poems by Walter de la Mare and Wilfred Owen to music
ELAINE HUGH-JONES, who has died aged 93, was a pianist and composer known for her powerful yet sensitive and tuneful songs; she was also a stalwart of BBC radio and television, working as official accompanist on countless programmes from the postwar years until 1983.
Of her several song cycles the best known are the seven Walter de la Mare Songs, written between 1966 and 1988, which blend the French influence of Gabriel Fauré with the English romanticism she inherited from her teacher Lennox Berkeley. The cycle was broadcast several times on Radio 3 and was followed by several more including the powerful Songs of War, settings of Wilfred Owen’s poetry, and arrangements of verses by Frances Cornford and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Her music was championed by several organisations, including the English Song Weekend in 2013, at Ludlow, where four of her songs were performed by the soprano Elizabeth Watts, accompanied by the pianist Iain Burnside. Two years later her songs were heard at the Royal Opera House in a lunchtime concert given by the mezzo-soprano Fiona Kimm.
Elaine Hugh-jones once explained how she started writing each song by experimenting at the piano with random notes and musical fragments, continuing until the accompaniment began to suggest the atmosphere created by the words: “Only when this is established does the vocal line emerge from among the sounds.”
The process was not always smooth and she could be modest to a fault. “Sometimes when I look at something I wrote the night before with great enthusiasm, I think to myself: ‘What a load of rubbish’, and chuck it away,” she said in a lecture at the Elgar Museum, Malvern, in 2009.
Despite being championed by prominent musicians including the soprano Jane Manning and John Potter of the Swingle Singers, getting her works performed could be a struggle. She recalled asking the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham why he did not play her music. “You’re a woman,” he replied. “And there are no women composers.”
Dorothy Elaine Hugh-jones was born in London on June 14 1927, the daughter of Thomas Hugh-jones, a veteran of the First World War, and his wife Dorothy (née Bousfield). They were proud of their Welsh heritage and the country’s national anthem was sung at home frequently and with gusto.
Her parents separated and she grew up by the Solway Firth at Silloth, near Carlisle. It was a difficult time and she recalled a period living in a barn behind her grandparents’ house. Nevertheless, she was surrounded by singers: “My mother sang, my grandmother sang, an uncle, a great-uncle and an aunt – they all sang, and as soon as I could play the piano well enough I was roped in to play their accompaniments.”
In 1939 she came second in the pianoforte class at the Carlisle and District Musical Festival and after the war made her way to London. She studied piano with Frederick Wadely, Harold Craxton and Julius Isserlis, and composition with Lennox Berkeley. Later John Joubert gave her coaching on orchestration.
She soon joined the BBC, working with artists including the clarinettist Jack Brymer, the trumpeter Philip Jones and the flautist James Galway. This was combined with teaching at Derby High School, where she was appointed director of music in 1949. The following year her trio for flute, clarinet and piano was given its first performance at Derby Music Club along with two of her songs.
In 1955 she moved to Kidderminster High School, and eight years later Malvern Girls College, for which much of her choral music was written including a setting of the Canticles for when the school choir sang Evensong at Coventry Cathedral in March 1974. She also taught at Malvern College.
Her radio, and later television work continued, based at the BBC in Birmingham, where she accompanied stars on the lunchtime Pebble Mill show. When arthritis prevented her from playing she turned to writing.
Take Ten, her tutor book for beginner pianists, was published in 1985. More recently she wrote Bella and the Witch of Shadowland (2011), a magical children’s story about a kidnapped girl who is rescued from the evil woods.
Although Elaine Hugh-jones had composed throughout her life it was in retirement that she was able to give it her full energy. In February 2021 her music was heard in Forgotten Voices, an online concert for International Women’s Day organised by the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.
Elaine Hugh-jones was unmarried. She enjoyed the company of friends and loved her poodles and her garden filled with vivid flowers, especially amaryllis and geraniums. She once propagated a red and white pelargonium that she christened La Belle Elaine.
Elaine Hugh-jones, born June 14 1927, died March 29 2021