Michael John Hurd (19 December 1928 – 8 August 2006) was a

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and def ...

, teacher and author, principally known for his dramatic cantatas for schools and for his

choral music A choir ( ), also known as a chorale or chorus (from Latin ''chorus'', meaning 'a dance in a circle') is a musical ensemble of singers. Choral music, in turn, is the music written specifically for such an ensemble to perform or in other words ...

.Obituary, ''The Independent'', 16 Aug 2006, Lewis Foreman
/ref>

Life

Michael Hurd was born in

Gloucester Gloucester ( ) is a cathedral city, non-metropolitan district and the county town of Gloucestershire in the South West England, South West of England. Gloucester lies on the River Severn, between the Cotswolds to the east and the Forest of Dean ...

on 19 December 1928 and educated at The Crypt School, Gloucester, and

Pembroke College, Oxford Pembroke College, a constituent college of the University of Oxford, is located on Pembroke Square, Oxford. The college was founded in 1624 by King James I of England and VI of Scotland, using in part the endowment of merchant Thomas Tesdale ...

, where he studied music with Thomas Armstrong and Bernard Rose.Geoffrey Bush
Michael Hurd, in Grove Music Online
/ref> He was also a composition pupil of

Lennox Berkeley Sir Lennox Randal Francis Berkeley CBE (12 May 190326 December 1989) was an English composer. Biography Berkeley was born on 12 May 1903 in Oxford, England, the younger child and only son of Aline Carla (1863–1935), daughter of Sir James ...

. After National Service he taught at the Royal Marines Band School at

Deal In cryptography, DEAL (Data Encryption Algorithm with Larger blocks) is a symmetric block cipher derived from the Data Encryption Standard (DES). Its design was presented by Lars Knudsen at the SAC conference in 1997, and submitted as a proposa ...

, (1953–59) before settling as a freelance composer in East Hampshire, where he took a leading role in the area's music-making. He bought the terraced, two-bedroom cottage at 4, Church Street, West Liss in 1961 and lived there for the rest of his life. Like his fellow

Petersfield Petersfield is a market town and civil parish in the East Hampshire district of Hampshire, England. It is north of Portsmouth. The town has its own Petersfield railway station, railway station on the Portsmouth Direct line, the mainline rai ...

resident, the tenor Wilfred Brown, Hurd championed the memory of

Gerald Finzi Gerald Raphael Finzi (14 July 1901 – 27 September 1956) was a British composer. Finzi is best known as a choral composer, but also wrote in other genres. Large-scale compositions by Finzi include the cantata '' Dies natalis'' for solo voice and ...

(co-editing the composer's correspondence with

Howard Ferguson George Howard Ferguson (June 18, 1870 – February 21, 1946) was the ninth premier of Ontario, from 1923 to 1930. He was a Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, Conservative member of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from 1905 to ...

), as well as

Rutland Boughton Rutland Boughton (23 January 187825 January 1960) was an English composer who became well known in the early 20th century as a composer of opera and choral music. He was also an influential communist activist within the Communist Party of Gre ...

(he was music advisor to the Rutland Boughton Music Trust from 1978 to 2006),

Ivor Gurney Ivor Bertie Gurney (28 August 1890 – 26 December 1937) was an English poet and composer, particularly of songs. He was born and raised in Gloucester. He suffered from bipolar disorder through much of his life and spent his last 15 years in psy ...

and

Cyril Scott Cyril Meir Scott (27 September 1879 – 31 December 1970) was an English composer, writer, poet, and occultist. He created around four hundred musical compositions including piano, violin, cello concertos, symphonies, and operas. He also wrot ...

Stephen Banfield Stephen David Banfield (born 1951) is a musicologist, music historian and retired academic. He was Elgar Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham from 1992 to 2003, and then Stanley Hugh Badock Professor of Music at the University of Br ...

, unimpressed by the critical stance of his 1962 biography of Boughton ("Hurd seemed unable to accept the poverty of Boughton's musical imagination - it would perhaps have been difficult to justify the biography had he done so"), was much more positive about ''The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney'', published in 1978 ("not only authoritative and rounded but intensely moving"). From the 1960s Hurd acted as general editor to the Novello Short Biographies series and wrote the volumes on Britten and Tippett. He also wrote three volumes in the Faber Great Composers series. His lifelong friends included the writer David Hughes and his wife

Mai Zetterling Mai Elisabeth Zetterling (; 24 May 1925 – 17 March 1994) was a Swedish film director, novelist and actress. Early life Zetterling was born in Västerås, Sweden to a working class family. She started her career as an actor at the age of 17 at ...

. Hughes wrote the libretto for Hurd's first chamber opera, ''The Widow of Ephesus'' (1971), and Hurd wrote the music scores for two Zetterling films, Flickorna (1968), and Scrubbers (1982). He was also friends with the British-born Australian composer

Michael Easton Michael Easton (born February 15, 1967) is an American film, television and voice actor, writer, and director. Although the Emmy-nominated actor may be best known for his work on the series ''Ally McBeal'', '' VR.5,'' ''Total Recall 2070, One Li ...

, with whom he helped establish the Port Fairy Spring Music Festival in

Victoria, Australia Victoria, commonly abbreviated as Vic, is a state in southeastern Australia. It is the second-smallest state (after Tasmania), with a land area of ; the second-most-populated state (after New South Wales), with a population of over 7 million; ...

.Obituary by Geoffrey Peck at ''MusicWeb International''
/ref> He died on 8 August 2006 in Petersfield.

Music

As a composer, Hurd was prolific. His numerous dramatic works for schoolchildren,
/ref> especially the " pop cantata" ''Jonah-Man Jazz'' (1966), were widely performed during his lifetime and are still heard in schools today. ''Jonah-Man Jazz'' followed on in the tradition of Herbert Chappell's ''The Daniel Jazz'' (1963), which had previously been issued by Hurd's publisher Novello. Its popular success led Novello to pay

Andrew Lloyd Webber Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber (born 22 March 1948) is an English composer and impresario of musical theatre. Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End theatre, West End and on Broadway theatre, Broad ...

a 100-guinea advance to compose a work along the same lines. This resulted in ''

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat ''Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat'' is a sung-through musical with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice, based on the character of Joseph from the Bible's Book of Genesis. This was the first Lloyd Webber and Rice ...

'' (1968). However, as Geoffrey Bush pointed out, more serious pieces by Hurd such as the ''Missa brevis'' (also 1966) share equally the lyrical invention, sensitivity to words and understanding of the voice seen in his most popular works. There are three chamber operas: ''The Widow of Ephesus'' (1971),''The Widow of Ephesus''
MusicWeb, October 2011
/ref> ''The Aspern Papers'' (1994), and ''The Night of the Wedding'' (1998). Of those, the three-act ''Aspern Papers'', derived from the

novella A novella is a narrative prose fiction whose length is shorter than most novels, but longer than most novelettes and short stories. The English word ''novella'' derives from the Italian meaning a short story related to true (or apparently so) ...

Henry James Henry James ( – ) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the ...

, is the most substantial. It was a success at the Port Fairy Spring Festival in Australia in 1995, and while it hasn't been revived since, it has been recorded.''The Aspern Papers'', Lyrita SRCD2350 (2015)
/ref> His orchestral works include the three movement ''Sinfonia concertante'' in neo-classical style, first performed in 1973 by the

Kathleen Merritt Eva Kathleen Merritt (1901November 1985) was a British conductor who led her own orchestra from the 1920s into the 1970s. She was best known as a pioneering woman conductor, and for her local music-making in Petersfield, Hampshire. Merritt was b ...

String Orchestra, and the more ambitious four movement choral symphony ''The Shepherd's Calendar'' (1975), a setting of

John Clare John Clare (13 July 1793 – 20 May 1864) was an English poet. The son of a farm labourer, he became known for his celebrations of the English countryside and his sorrows at its disruption. His work underwent major re-evaluation in the late 20t ...

's 1827 poem.''The Shepherd's Calendar'', MusicWeb, September 2012
/ref> The ''Concerto da Camera'' of 1979 is a melodic oboe concerto showing the influence of

Francis Poulenc Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (; 7 January 189930 January 1963) was a French composer and pianist. His compositions include mélodie, songs, solo piano works, chamber music, choral pieces, operas, ballets, and orchestral concert music. Among th ...

. His final work, the ''Three Piece Suite'' of 2004, was dedicated to the recorder player

John Turner John Napier Wyndham Turner (June 7, 1929September 19, 2020) was a Canadian lawyer and politician who served as the 17th prime minister of Canada from June to September 1984. He served as leader of the Liberal Party and leader of the Opposit ...

. Much of his music has now been recorded, supported by a British Music Society Charitable Trust. Notable recordings include the choral music and complete solo songs on Lyrita (two volumes),Choral Music Vol.1, SRDC 366
(2017) an

(2018) three of the chamber operas on Lyrita and Dutton Epoch, the pop cantatas on Naxos, and ''The Shepherd's Calendar'' on Dutton Epoch.

Selected compositions

Selected publications

* ''Immortal Hour: the Life and Period of Rutland Boughton'' (1962), rev. 1993 as ''Rutland Boughton and the Glastonbury Festivals'' * ''Young Person's Guide to Concerts'' (1962) * ''Young Person's Guide to Opera'' (1963) * ''Young Person's Guide to English Music'' (1965) * ''Benjamin Britten'' (Novello Short Biographies, 1966) * ''The Composer'' (1968) *''An Outline History of European Music'' (Novello, 1968, revised 1988) * ''Elgar'' (Faber Great Composers, 1969) * ''Vaughan Williams'' (Faber Great Composers, 1970) * ''Mendelssohn'' (Faber Great Composers, 1970) *''The Ordeal of

'' (OUP, 1978) * ''Michael Tippett'' (Novello Short Biographies, 1978) *''New Oxford Junior Companion to Music'' (1979) *'' Vincent Novello and Company'' (Granada, 1981) *''The Orchestra'' (Phaidon, 1981) * (with

).
Letters of Gerald Finzi and Howard Ferguson
' (ed.) (2001)

References

External links

*http://www.michaelhurd.org.uk

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hurd, Michael 1928 births 2006 deaths People from Petersfield English composers Alumni of Pembroke College, Oxford People educated at The Crypt School, Gloucester