Ed Hughes, founder and Artistic Director of New Music Players, studied music at Cambridge University, including composition with Robin Holloway and Alexander Goehr, and at Southampton University with Michael Finnissy.
Commissions include The Opera Group, London Sinfonietta, Glyndebourne, I Fagiolini, and, for the Brighton Festival, Brighton: Symphony of a City (2016), Battleship Potemkin (2005) and Memory of Colour (2004) which transferred to the Sydney Festival in 2005; performances include BBC Singers, BBC Symphony Orchestra and many ensembles and soloists. His choral work, A Buried Flame (2010), was selected for performance at the 2012 ISCM World Music Days in Antwerp by Aquarius. When the Flame Dies, a chamber opera, was premiered at the 2012 Canterbury Festival.
His work has been recorded on two discs for Metier Records and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and internationally. The New Music Players, an ensemble he founded and directs, recorded his original music to silent films by Sergei Eisenstein and Yasujiro Ozu for release by Tartan and BFI. He won a British Composer Award for Chaconne for Jonathan Harvey.
Ed Hughes founded the Orchestra of Sound and Light in 2015 to explore and enhance ensemble music-making and has been touring schools, HE and FE in Sussex with specially written ‘expandable scores’ and networked iPads. He was commissioned by the Brighton Festival 2016 to write ‘Brighton: Symphony of a City’, a collaboration with film maker Lizzie Thynne, for an expanded Orchestra of Sound and Light; the world premiere performance on 12 May 2016 sold out Brighton Dome. He is currently Professor of Composition at Sussex University