The composer Elaine Hugh-Jones, who has died aged 93, made a striking contribution to English song. In her survey New Vocal Repertory (vol 1, 1986), the soprano Jane Manning wrote of the pleasure of discovering a composer with a complete mastery of voice and piano writing: “Although they are firmly based on a traditional musical style – that of English post-Romantic – the songs are not in the least derivative [but show] a wonderful assurance and freshness of approach and an exceptionally sensitive response to words.”
The works in question were six settings of poems by Walter de la Mare, written between 1966 and 1985. Two more, from 1988-89, went on to make a set of eight, and they have been broadcast several times on BBC Radio 3.
The sense of spontaneity that Manning noted came from the considerable time that Elaine spent meditating on the poetry. This is particularly evident in her Cornford Cycle (1972-74), settings of the Edwardian poet Frances Cornford, ranging from the delightful simplicity of The Old Woman at the Flower Show to the pianistically fiendish Night Song.
She set mainly 20th-century British poets, as in her Six Songs of RS Thomas (1991); Songs of War, setting Wilfred Owen (2002); and Strange Journey, setting Edward Thomas (2003-11). But there was also Shakespeare’s Fear No More the Heat of the Sun, from Cymbeline (2010) as well as Four American Songs, to texts by Hilda Doolittle, Emily Dickinson and Carl Sandburg (1974-79).
Elaine studied composition with Lennox Berkeley, while her later songs show the influence of Benjamin Britten. Her friend and fellow song composer Ian Venables also discerned a French influence, finding her songs “suggestive of Fauré, but refracted through a later 20th-century idiom”.
Born in London, Elaine was the daughter of Dorothy (nee Bousfield) and Thomas Hugh-Jones. When she was 10, her parents separated, and she and her mother went to her grandparents’ home on the Solway Firth, near Carlisle.
She came from a musical background, and five indomitable aunts on her father’s side nurtured her talents. Elaine was also fortunate to have an exceptional early teacher, Gertrude Boggis, and went on to study the piano with Harold Craxton and Julius Isserlis.
In 1949 she set a poem by De la Mare, The Song of Shadows, and was made director of music at Derby high school. This she combined with working as an official accompanist for radio and television programmes with the BBC in Manchester.
She moved to Kidderminster high school in 1955, and from the following year until 1983 continued her radio work for the BBC in Birmingham. In the meantime, in 1963 she took up a post at Malvern girls’ college (now Malvern St James school), for which she wrote choral pieces, and from 1987 at Malvern college, then a boys’ school. For television, she accompanied many of the stars who featured on the lunchtime programme Pebble Mill at One in the 1970s and 80s.
Elaine lived in Malvern, where she had a home with her mother, who died in 1992. After Elaine’s retirement from teaching, she focused not only on music, but also on writing, publishing a children’s story, Bella and the Witch of Shadowland, in 2011.
In addition to Manning, Elaine’s songs were championed by the baritone Ian Caddy and contralto Pamela Bowden. The soprano Velma Guyer introduced them to audiences in Switzerland, Germany and the US. More recent singers to take up her work have included the soprano Elizabeth Watts, mezzo-soprano Fiona Kimm, tenor James Gilchrist and baritone Roderick Williams. Guyer included songs by Elaine on a CD of music and/or poetry by women, and Kimm and the baritone Jeremy Huw Williams on first world war anthology recordings.
Iain Burnside’s Ludlow English Song Weekend has programmed them, as have the Welsh College of Music and Drama and Bangor University.
For her later survey Vocal Repertoire for the Twenty-First Century (Vol 2, 2021), published shortly before her death, Manning highlighted Two Night Songs (2000-01), setting The Starlight Night by Gerard Manley Hopkins and The Nightingale Near the House by Harold Monro. She pointed to the music’s potential for “freedom to obey dramatic and expressive impulses without disturbing the flow”.
In 2007, already aware of Elaine’s music, I met her by chance. We became friends, and in 2014 established the Caradoc Press to publish her music. Elaine sustained a wide circle of friends and loved her dogs, garden and collection of vivid flowers, especially amaryllis.
She is survived by her cousins Rima, Jenny and Michael.
• Dorothy Elaine Hugh-Jones, composer and pianist, born 14 June 1927; died 29 March 2021
