Hubert Hughes (1882-1937), born in Belfast, was a composer, journalist, and song collector. The subtitle "Irish Songs by Herbert Hughes" is ambivalent, and intentionally so -- the music heard on this disc has remained obscure in comparison with other British collections of Irish song probably because what Hughes did with his Irish source material is difficult to classify. "Is arrangement . . . the right word?" asks annotator Philip Lancaster. "At what point do they become compositions? This CD clearly has examples of both, ...
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Hubert Hughes (1882-1937), born in Belfast, was a composer, journalist, and song collector. The subtitle "Irish Songs by Herbert Hughes" is ambivalent, and intentionally so -- the music heard on this disc has remained obscure in comparison with other British collections of Irish song probably because what Hughes did with his Irish source material is difficult to classify. "Is arrangement . . . the right word?" asks annotator Philip Lancaster. "At what point do they become compositions? This CD clearly has examples of both, together with many delicious hybrids." The appeal of the music lies not only in the surpassingly lovely tunes of songs like "She Lived Beside the Anner" (track 20) but also in the nature of Hughes' experiment -- he seems to have tried to create an art that was firmly rooted in folk practices but could also extend beyond that realm. The songs are a sort of miscellany intended to depict a range of Irish attitudes (sort of an Irish counterpart to Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch, says...
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