For almost half a century Michael Hurd, an internationally respected composer, author and broadcaster, devoted much of his time and energy to music in Petersfield and the surrounding area. There were few organisations, from Farnham and Alton in the north to Fareham in the south, which were untouched by his influence Michael was born in Gloucester on 19 December 1928, and was educated at the Crypt School. Though a leading light in the school’s cultural life, he received no formal musical training. He taught himself to play the piano and to compose, and was sufficiently versed in the subject to read music at Oxford on completion of his National Service. In 1953 he joined the staff of the Royal Marines School of Music at Deal, and in 1960 settled in Liss to begin a career as a freelance musician.

He was encouraged by Kathleen Merritt, who conducted his Sinfonia Concertante at a S.O.C.S. Concert in 1973, and his association with the Festival began in 1966, when he was an adjudicator. Two years later he became Music Adviser for the Youth Day and began the urgent task of revitalising it. Two-part songs about daffodils dancing in the breeze were no longer likely to engage their attention, he reasoned, and began to introduce pop cantatas and instrumental works with great success, conducting the Youth Nights for the next ten years.

He joined the Festival Committee and the Music Committee in 1971 and succeeded Alan Lunt as Chairman in 1985. Six years later he became President, a position he held until his death. During this time several of his works were heard at the Festival, most recently his gently lyrical choral symphony A Shepherd’s Calendar, whilst in 1984 the Festival commissioned Mrs Beeton’s Book, a music-hall guide to Victorian living, for the Ladies’ Choirs. There were privately, however, times when he was disenchanted by the standard of performance, and together with the conductor Mark Deller and Ann Pinhey he devised a plan to modernise the Festival. It was firmly rejected, but he was pleased that over the years some of his suggestions had been incorporated as a matter of course. Such was his vision.

In 1970 he began a 28 year association with producer Michael Harding as conductor of the Petersfield Operatic Society, during which time all thirteen Gilbert and Sullivan operettas were performed. He missed just one year, when he was in Australia in 1995 directing his opera The Aspern Papers at the Port Fairy Spring Music Festival, which he had founded in 1990. He returned to conduct The Gondoliers in 2004.

From 1979 until 1999 he was musical director of the Hi-Lights, and he took the opportunity to revive several forgotten English musicals of an earlier era, The Arcadians, The Quaker Girl and A Country Girl, as well as Johann Strauss, Offenbach and the usual Broadway blockbusters.

Michael’s abiding passion was for English music, and he soon became an acknowledged authority on Rutland Boughton and Ivor Gurney, both of whom were the subject of his pioneering biographies. As a young composer he was encouraged by Boughton, whom he repaid by conducting several of his near-forgotten works, including Bethlehem and The Lily Maid. He also wrote short monographs on Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Britten and Tippett and several books on music aimed at young people.

Michael greatly admired the music of Puccini and Korngold, and their gift of melody permeates his own work. He had no time for the over-intellectual obscurity of much 20th century music, but composed for the pleasure of his performers and the delight of his audiences. “Why write two tenor parts?” he asked. “It’s hard enough to hear one sung properly!” His sensitivity to poetry made it inevitable that choral music should dominate his output, though his orchestral works are greatly admired by those who know them, particularly his Concerto da Camera, for oboe and orchestra, which was written for Geoffrey Bridge and the Havant Chamber Orchestra in 1979

Perhaps he is best remembered for his jazz cantatas for children, which generated an instant appeal even to non-musical pupils, with their witty lyrics and catchy tunes. It was at a performance of one of these, Jonah-Man Jazz, at the Bordon Schools Music Festival in 1972, that I first met Michael, and he told me that it was simply the product of a mis-spent Christmas. He was the master of such under-statement, as Hi-Lights producer Roger Wettone recalls. At the end of another triumphant week of performances his first words would be, “Well, that’s another one we got away with!”

A final, and very pertinent, memory comes from Kenneth Hick. On one occasion Michael addressed a rowdy section of the Operatic Society chorus, “If you listen very carefully, you may hear something to your advantage.”


Tom Muckley, March 2007

This article first appeared in the Programme for the 2007 Petersfield Musical Festival.

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