Michael Hurd (composer)

Michael John Hurd (19 December 1928 – 8 August 2006) was a composer, teacher and author, principally known for his dramatic cantatas for schools and for his choral music. Life Michael Hurd was born in Gloucester on 19 December 1928 and educated at The Crypt School, Gloucester, He was also a composition pupil of Lennox Berkeley. After National Service he taught at the Royal Marines Band School at Deal, (1953–59) before settling as a freelance composer in East Hampshire, where he took a leading role in the area’s music-making. He bought the terraced, two-bedroom cottage at 4, Church Street, West Liss in 1961 and lived there for the rest of his life. Like his fellow Petersfield resident, the tenor Wilfred Brown, Hurd championed the memory of Gerald Finzi (co-editing the composer’s correspondence with Howard Ferguson), as well as Rutland Boughton (he was music advisor to the Rutland Boughton Music Trust from 1978 to 2006), Ivor Gurney and Cyril Scott. Stephen Banfield, unimpressed by the critical stance of his 1962 biography of Boughton (“Hurd seemed unable to accept the poverty of Boughton’s musical imagination - it would perhaps have been difficult to justify the biography had he don