Hubert Hughes (1882-1937), born in Belfast, was a composer, journalist, and song collector. The subtitle "Irish Songs by Herbert Hughes" is ambivalent, and intentionally so -- the music heard on this disc has remained obscure in comparison with other British collections of Irish song probably because what Hughes did with his Irish source material is difficult to classify. "Is arrangement . . . the right word?" asks annotator Philip Lancaster. "At what point do they become compositions? This CD clearly has examples of both, together with many delicious hybrids." The appeal of the music lies not only in the surpassingly lovely tunes of songs like "She Lived Beside the Anner" (track 20) but also in the nature of Hughes' experiment -- he seems to have tried to create an art that was firmly rooted in folk practices but could also extend beyond that realm. The songs are a sort of miscellany intended to depict a range of Irish attitudes (sort of an Irish counterpart to Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch, says Lancaster), and a few of them are widely known. "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye" is the song known to Americans as "When Johnny Comes Marching Home"; also familiar as an encore item, but really one that's ready for retirement, is "The Stuttering Lovers" (track 21). Within the slight confines of these songs, some as short as 30 seconds long, lie various combinations of elements, from lightly harmonized folk songs to full-fledged art songs with original texts (James Joyce wrote the words to She Weeps over Rahoon); some of the songs (like "The Spanish Lady," track 24) would seem to have vaudevillian origins, but there's a very Irish feel to all of them, defined among other things by a near-total avoidance of the leading tone and melodic shapes that point to origins outside the tonal system. The language is English, only slightly Irish-inflected. This said, the booklet (in English only) will enhance the listening experience; soprano Ailish Tynan is fully intelligible when she lets herself sound down to earth, but that doesn't happen all the way through. Still, here's quite a fascinating disc for lovers of things Irish, and for those generally interested in the meeting of folk culture and concert music.
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