Elaine Hugh-Jones: started writing each song by experimenting at the piano with random notes and musical fragments
Elaine Hugh-Jones, who has died aged 93, was a pianist and composer known for her powerful yet sensitive and tuneful songs; she was also a stalwart of BBC radio and television, working as official accompanist on countless programmes from the postwar years until 1983.
Of her several song cycles the best known are the seven Walter de la Mare Songs, written between 1966 and 1988, which blend the French influence of Gabriel Fauré with the English romanticism she inherited from her teacher Lennox Berkeley. The cycle was broadcast several times on Radio 3 and was followed by several more including the powerful Songs of War, settings of Wilfred Owen’s poetry, and arrangements of verses by Frances Cornford and Gerard Manley Hopkins.