Ed Hughes (born Bristol 1968) studied at Cambridge (UK) with Robin Holloway and Alexander Goehr, and at Southampton (UK) with Michael Finnissy.
Commissions include City of London Festival (an opera to a libretto by Glyn Maxwell, The Birds, for The Opera Group and I Fagiolini), Brighton Festival, Bath Camerata, Glyndebourne/Photoworks, Tacet Ensemble and London Sinfonietta.
Performances have included City of London Festival, Buxton Opera House, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Linbury Studio Theatre, Jerusalem Music Centre, Salamanca Festival, Sydney Festival and a number of BBC Radio 3 live broadcasts.
Auditorium (2007) for Glyndebourne and Photoworks, an orchestral and electronics score arising from a collaboration with the distinguished visual artist Sophy Rickett, was performed live at Glyndebourne in November 2007, and continues to tour internationally as an integral part of the audiovisual installation.
Recent work includes Chamber Concerto (2010) for the New Music Players, the ensemble he founded and directs, at Kings Place London (Out Hear series).
He has written several ensemble scores for iconic silent films of the early twentieth century including Ivens’s Regen, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Strike (Tartan Video 2007) and a series of scores for the BFI’s Ozu Collection.
He has been shortlisted twice for the British Composer Awards (categories New Media 2005; and Sonic Art 2008).
He is currently working on When The Flame Dies, a chamber opera, in collaboration with the writer Roger Morris.
His music is published by University of York Music Press.
He is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Sussex.