Andrew Hughes

Hughes, Andrew

Andrew Hughes. Musicologist, b London 3 Aug 1937; MA (Oxford) 1964, PH D (Oxford) 1964. An authority on medieval liturgy and music, Hughes has taught at Queen's University, Belfast 1962-4, the University of Illinois 1964-7, and the University of North Carolina 1967-9. In 1969 he began teaching at the University of Toronto where in 1971 he organized a Medieval Music Group which has performed 12th- and 14th-century liturgical music and which staged the 13th-century musical drama Samson and Delilah in 1976. In 1973 Hughes received a Guggenheim Fellowship to investigate and photograph medieval manuscripts in Europe. In 1987 he became a fellow of the Mediaeval Academy of America. He has presented numerous papers at congresses and conferences in Canada, the USA and Europe. He has contributed articles to Music and Letters, Acta musicologica, Notes, The New Grove Dictionary, MGG, and other publications and was music editor for The Dictionary of the Middle Ages. He has made three videotapes: Liturgical Manuscripts of the Middle Ages (University of Toronto, 1982), The Coronation of Henry V of England (University of Toronto, 1973 and 1985), and Easter Matins, Harrowing of Hell, and Visit to the Sepulchre (University of Toronto, 1990). Hughes has also organized, edited and directed tenor re-enactments of historical events including, in 1990, 'A regal reception and Monastic lauds at Bingen,' an authentic reconstruction of the ceremonies with music by Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).

Hughes' major research activity is the Rhymed Office Project which began officially in 1976. The project has involved a computer-assisted study of this repertory of some 50,000 poems which were sung to plainsong in church services between ca 1000 and 1600. Hughes intends to produce a catalogue identifying some 1300 offices using the poems with indices of geographical names, a microfiche word-concordance, a concordance of musical 'words,' and a catalogue of manuscript sources.