Michael Hurd - Obituaries

Obituary Notices

Michael Hurd was born on December 19th, 1928, in Park Road, Gloucester, the son of a cabinet-maker and upholsterer. The family moved first to Reservoir Rd, and then settled in Southfield Rd, which was very convenient for Michael’s education at the Crypt School.

Here he became one of the leaders in the school’s cultural life, taking part in drama and writing music for a scaled-down version of Hamlet. He also composed various songs, including a daringly chromatic setting of Shakespeare’s Fear no more the heat o’ the sun (Cymbeline). There were also settings of what he had been reading at the time, including poems by Shelley and Thomas Lovell Beddoes.

To put this music down on paper required a knowledge of notation, and for this Michael was largely self-taught. He never had any piano lessons either, and learnt to play by experience – this meant that his piano technique was always adequate rather than startling, but by the time he left school he could cope with early Beethoven Sonatas. This is typical of how Michael seemed to have an instinctive grasp of anything to do with music, drawing down knowledge and skill almost from thin air.

This burgeoning musical productivity required advice, and for this Michael turned to Alexander Brent-Smith, a well-known local composer and lecturer. Brent-Smith had once taught at Lancing College, where amongst his pupils was Peter Pears. His Elegy (in memory of Elgar) was one of the pieces whose performance was planned for the 1939 Three Choirs Festival at Hereford, which had to be aborted owing to the outbreak of war. (Another piece to suffer similarly was Finzi’s Dies Natalis). Brent-Smith was sufficiently impressed with Michael’s work to encourage him to make music his career, and he was able to persuade the authorities at Oxford to allow him to change schools from English to Music.

Military service with the Intelligence Corps followed, and a posting to Vienna enabled Michael to indulge a fast-growing passion for Opera. At this stage, he was passionately devoted to Puccini, but he brought back from Vienna a vocal score of Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt – hardly known in England at that time – as well as familiarity with the operas of Richard Strauss and Mozart, stalwarts of the Vienna repertoire. This was the beginning of a lifelong enthusiasm for the music of Korngold, which it was the more easy for him to indulge as Korngold’s music became better known and eventually achieved almost iconic status.

Another musical influence from around this time was the eccentric composer Rutland Boughton, famous for the opera The Immortal Hour, which had notched up nearly 400 performances in the early 1920’s. Boughton’s star had faded now, and he had bought a smallholding near Newent in West Gloucestershire. Michael approached him for advice, and this led to a friendship which was only terminated by Boughton’s death in 1960, and to Michael’s writing the first biography of Boughton, much of which was written while Boughton was still alive.

Michael was devoted to the music of Boughton, though not so blinkered that he could not see its shortcomings. He sought every opportunity of encouraging the performance of Boughton’s music, from a performance of the cantata Bethlehem at Aylesbury (Boughton’s birthplace) in 1957; to a presentation of the opera The Lily Maid at Chichester in 1985. In more recent years he had a hand in arranging revivals of some of the music by the BBC and by Hyperion records. His lifelong advocacy of this neglected music has led to much reappraisal, so that Boughton is probably held in higher regard now than for several decades.

Then came Pembroke College, Oxford, where he read Music under Bernard Rose and Thomas Armstrong, the university’s leading music tutors of the day. He was President of the University Music Society. Later, he had private lessons with Lennox Berkeley.

Michael also received advice and encouragement from Arthur Benjamin, then a Professor at the RCM, and a friendship with Hans Werner Henze might have been stimulating on both sides, only Henze became increasingly politicised, reflecting this is his music. With this sort of thing Michael was very much out of tune, and the friendship came to nothing.

This is not to say that Michael did not have his Causes, and amongst the fringe movements which he supported was CND – he went on some of the earliest Aldermaston marches. And when writing his Concerto da Camera in 1979, he used a motto theme of three notes (CBE) at the beginning of each movement (in different combinations) which, when written in German, spells out the initials of another fringe movement which he avidly supported. For Michael was a gentle, liberal-minded sort of person who would readily go along with such movements though he was basically apolitical.

After taking his degree, Michael taught at the Royal Marines School of Music at Deal from 1953 – l959, as Professor of Theory, living in a lovely apartment right on the sea front. But the death of his parents gave him more independence, and responding to a suggestion from an Oxford friend, the writer David Hughes, and his wife, the actress Mai Zetterling, Michael moved to live near them in Hampshire and became a free-lance musician and author.

Michael’s compositions are many and varied, but perhaps the best-known to the general public are the seven jazz-cantatas which he wrote from 1966 – 1982. Schools have always been eager to perform these, which make an instant appeal even to non-musical pupils with their witty lyrics and catchy tunes. Jonah-Man Jazz (1966) and Hip-hip Horatio (1974) are two of the most popular, and the very titles betray the skittish irreverence with which he approached his subjects. Other titles include Swingin’ Samson (1973) and Rooster Rag (1975).

He always said that he took particular care that the piano part should not be too difficult, since it was probably going to be played by a primary school teacher without any claims to virtuosity. No special demands are made of the singers either, since they would most likely be untrained pupils only capable of singing in unison. This attention to the ability of the performers has ensured these unpretentious cantatas a sure place in school music-making, and it is typical of Michael’s care to make all his music performable.

His more serious compositions are chiefly vocal. Local performances include the Missa Brevis given at the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival in 1968, the opera The Widow of Ephesus (with libretto by David Hughes) at the Stroud Festival in 1971, and Shore Leave at the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival in 1998. His most ambitious work is probably Shepherd’s Calendar, a Choral Symphony with words by John Clare, which was commissioned by the Southampton Choral Society in 1975.

Many other groups commissioned works from Michael, of which mention might be made of Canticles of the Virgin Mary (Farnham Festival, 1965), Charms and Ceremonies (Downs School, Malvern, 1969), The Phoenix and the Turtle (Canterbury Singers, 1974) and This Day to Man (Chichester Singers, l979). More recently, his operas The Aspern Papers (based on Henry James) and The Night of the Wedding have been performed as part of the Port Fairy Spring Music Festival in Melbourne, Australia, in 1995 and 1998 respectively. This was a Festival which Michael himself had had a part in setting up in 1990, together with an Australian friend, the composer Michael Easton, who died tragically young in 2004.

Though Michael only wrote a few orchestral pieces, all have now been recorded. Overture to an Unwritten Comedy dates from 1970 (revised 1979); Dance Diversions was commissioned by the Havant Symphony Orchestra in 1972; Sinfonia Concertante was first performed by the Kathleen Merritt String Orchestra in 1973, and Concerto da Camera was written for the oboist Geoffrey Bridge and the Havant Chamber Orchestra in 1979. This last piece is especially attractive, and has been given several performances in recent years by Robin Hales and Diana Nuttall, in a version for oboe and piano.

Listening to these pieces, one is constantly struck by their readily approachable style – their gentle half-colours are quite devoid of bombast or rhetoric and this makes them unmistakeably English. It is a characteristic of all Michael’s music that it is always beautifully crafted yet easy to listen to. Not for him the over-intellectual abstruseness of so much 20th century music – he is writing to give pleasure to his performers and delight to his listeners. He always expressed a fondness for the music of Poulenc, a composer who wrote with the same ends in mind.

He never expressed much liking for the music of other French composers, however, apart from Berlioz, and was particularly critical of Ravel (‘He can’t climax’ – a strange remark when you think of ‘La Valse’!). The shimmering vagueness of Debussy or the tenderly civilised restraint of Fauré had little appeal. Nor was he very enthusiastic about Russian music, with the exception of Rachmaninov, whose superbly well-written pianism he admired greatly. It was English music that chiefly attracted him, together with a little German and Italian Opera.

Michael also wrote music for many plays - eg a dramatic version of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie (1963) and William Saroyan’s Playthings produced by Mai Zetterling in 1980. There is some film music, too, for Mai Zetterling’s Flickorna (1968) and Scrubbers (1982). He has written music for son et lumière productions, as well as for the fringe performances of Shakespeare at recent Gloucester Three Choirs Festivals.

But besides all this, Michael was a prolific author, writing short biographies of Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett, and longer definitive biographies of Rutland Boughton (Immortal Hour, 1962, revised 1993 as Rutland Boughton and the Glastonbury Festivals) and Ivor Gurney (The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney, 1978). He wrote An Outline History of European Music for Novello’s in 1968, edited the revised Oxford Junior Companion to Music in 1979, and has contributed articles to many music reference books, including Grove’s Dictionary and the Athlone History of Music in Britain. As a thank you offering to his publishers, he wrote a history of the publishing house of Novello’s in 1981.

It is as an authority on English music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that Michael’s musical scholarship stands out. Read the sleeve notes of a CD of lesser-known music of this period, and they will probably have been written by Michael. Listen to a radio talk on the same subject, and he will have had something to say about it. His house near Petersfield contained a massive collection of scores of such music, much of it unknown or forgotten, but he could always find something interesting in it, and was expert at communicating his enthusiasm to all his friends.

He worked hard for music in his adopted Hampshire, conducting annual performances of amateur opera in works by Gilbert & Sullivan, other early 20th century lighter composers, and even American musicals; and he was also closely connected with the programmes and administration of the Farnham Festival. He gave music lectures all over the country, and work for the British Council took him further afield, to such ex-colonial territories as Ghana, Sierra Leone, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Hong Kong, India and Malaysia. To direct performances of his music, he visited Sweden, Holland, and the USA.

Michael was a friend who was always fun to be with, providing stimulating and witty conversation together with a slightly irreverent and totally unstuffy manner. I knew him since schooldays, for more than 60 years, and amongst many memories I recall an occasion when he seemed to be distracted and inattentive during an English lesson. "Are you listening?" demanded the teacher. Then came the ultimate put-down answer – "Oh Sir, I was just composing my new love-duet".

Alas, there will be no more love-duets, or jazz-cantatas or biographies or lectures. Michael Hurd died from cancer in Petersfield Hospital on August 8th 2006.

Lewis Foreman

The composer, choral conductor and writer Michael Hurd's first music to appear in print was two groups of unison settings of Walter de la Mare, Araby, Please to Remember and Sailor's Song. The Silver Penny and Tillie in 1963 (collected with others as Sea and Shore Songs in 1970). This started his long-standing association with Novello & Co, who not only published almost all his music, but also his books, and whose history, Vincent Novello & Company, he wrote in 1981. When, in 1983, Novello issued a brochure listing Hurd's works published by them, it ran to 12 pages.

His many commissions came from local societies such as the Havant Symphony Orchestra and Havant and District Schools Music Festival, Southern Orchestral Concerts Society, the Farnham Festival, the Petersfield Music Festival, the Stroud Festival and the Hampshire Federation of Women's Institutes.

Out of these, Hurd developed an accessible line in popular cantatas for children's groups including Jonah-man Jazz (1966), Swingin' Samson (1972), Hip Hip Horatio (1974), Rooster Rag (1975) and Captain Coram's Kids (1988), which for perhaps twenty years were widely performed.

In the more serious of these Hurd uses a narrator, most dramatically, perhaps, in Pilgrim (1978), his response to a commission from Bedfordshire County Council to celebrate the tercentenary of the publication of Pilgrim's Progress. Also notable among these was his "music-hall guide to Victorian living", Mrs Beeton's Book (1982), using words from the celebrated cookery book to amusing effect.

A reminder came of the eloquence of his many serious vocal works, both choral and for solo voice and orchestra, when his orchestral song cycle Shore Leave, five enchanting settings of poems by Charles Causley, was revived by the baritone Roderick Williams during the 1998 Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester. This had first appeared as a work for tenor and string orchestra in 1963 when it was sung by Wilfred Brown at Haslemere in Surrey.

These works were crowned by the four-movement choral symphony Shepherd's Calendar, after John Clare, for baritone, chorus and orchestra, first heard in 1975.

Michael Hurd was born in Gloucester in 1928, the son of a cabinet-maker and upholsterer. He attended the Crypt Grammar School in Gloucester, and while still at school was encouraged in his musical interests by the Gloucester composer Alexander Brent-Smith. I can remember him fondly recalling the importance of Cheltenham Public Library in his musical education.

Called up for National Service, Hurd found himself in the Army Intelligence Corps where a posting to Vienna enabled him to indulge a growing passion for opera. He went up to Pembroke College, Oxford in 1950, to read music under Sir Thomas Armstrong and Bernard Rose, and was President of the Oxford University Music Society. Subsequently he was Professor of Theory at the Royal Marines School of Music at Deal from 1953-59. For many years he was a composition pupil of the composer Lennox Berkeley.

The death of his parents gave him a small inheritance with which he was able to buy (for only a few hundred pounds) the small cottage in West Liss, Hampshire, where he lived for the rest of his life. Going freelance, he developed a portfolio of musical activities which gave him a living and enabled him to compose. Locally these included conducting the Alton and Petersfield Choral Societies, together with Gilbert and Sullivan operettas for his local operatic society.

One of his singers remembers him as "highly thought of, dynamic, creative". He lectured widely, adjudicated, appeared regularly on BBC Radio 3, usually talking about British music (Rutland Boughton, Ivor Gurney, Gerald Finzi) and fulfilled many commissions, notably writing music for local choral societies, schools and orchestras.

When only 19 he had sought out the composer Rutland Boughton for advice on his own music, but soon found himself producing the first book-length account of Boughton's life and music which became his first significant publication in 1962, much later expanded as Rutland Boughton and the Glastonbury Festivals for the Clarendon Press in 1993.

A longstanding friend of Hurd was the writer David Hughes and his wife the actress Mai Zetterling at whose house he had completed his book on Boughton. They introduced him to writing film music, for Flickorna (1968) and Scrubbers (1982). He wrote the music for a son et lumiére production at Kenilworth Castle in 1962 and incidental music for Edward II at Berkeley Castle and Comus at Highnam Court, both these last in his native Gloucestershire.

He had produced two operas for children, Little Billy, "a nautical opera" first performed at Brightlands School, Newnham-on-Severn in 1964 and Mr Punch, an "operatic entertainment for young people" commissioned by the Stiftelsen Institut für Rikskonserter, Stockholm, and first seen at Gothenburg in 1970. This operatic talent found a larger canvas when, working with David Hughes, he produced the dark one-act chamber opera The Widow of Ephesus for the 1971 Stroud Festival. Later came two more operas, The Aspern Papers (1995) and The Night of the Wedding (1998).

While Hurd's musical activities were largely focused on the UK and especially the south and west, he certainly travelled abroad, usually as choral conductor or adjudicator, visiting Rhodesia early on and Madras in 1985 to give choral workshops. He had a warm reception in Australia, writing to me how they "seemed to like" his music after his fourth visit in 1991. There, in 1995, he enjoyed the only production so far of The Aspern Papers. Indeed, all his operas were given there and he was beginning to wonder whether if he were younger he would prefer living in Melbourne.

Hurd's books included many for children, including Young Person's Guide to Concerts (1962), Young Person's Guide to Opera (1963), Young Person's Guide to English Music (1965) and an extensive revision to The Oxford Junior Companion to Music. He became Novello's editor for their series of short biographies, and contributed the volumes on Mendelssohn, Vaughan Williams and Elgar to Faber's "The Great Composers" series.

As well as Boughton, the other composer Hurd was notably associated with was the Gloucestershire-born Gurney, on whom he wrote the first full-length study, The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney (1978). Here he wrote from personal experience, not only of his boyhood's Gloucestershire, but of the experience of being a composer. In his book The Composer (1968), Hurd was undoubtedly writing autobiographically when he wrote "From the moment the composer is born, his mind begins to hoard away musical experiences."

Hurd was long associated with preparing for performance the music of the two composers he notably championed, Gurney and Boughton, and with a local operatic group, Opera 70, he actually conducted a stage production of Boughton's opera The Lily Maid at Chichester in 1985. Early in his career the Farnham Festival performance of his Canticles of the Virgin Mary had appeared on LP and with the Rutland Boughton Music Trust he was able to arrange the promotion of commercial recordings of Boughton's operas and orchestral works.

And yet he never seemed able to pull together the organisation necessary to arrange the recordings of his own music which would have given it a higher profile than it at present enjoys.

Michael Hurd was a solitary and private man, albeit a charming and humorous one. Although I was acquainted with him for more than 30 years, I never had any hint of his family or any personal relationships.