Robert Hughes (composer, born 1912)

Like other composers of his generation, including Dorian Le Gallienne, Raymond Hanson and Margaret Sutherland, Hughes has been considered by musicologists[who?]

After moving to Australia, he worked as a costing clerk in a Melbourne clothing factory to support himself, while attending as many concerts as possible.

[1] A number of Hughes' orchestral works were performed at public concerts from 1939 but his enlistment in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) following the outbreak of World War II put an end to his compositional activity for the next few years.

He resumed his job as costing clerk, but subsequently accepted the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's offer of a position as an assistant music librarian and writer.

[1] In October 1950, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Federation, the Prime Minister of Australia, Robert Menzies, announced a Jubilee Symphony Competition "open to all natural-born and naturalised British subjects", with a prize of £1000.

Barbirolli invited Hughes to write a Sinfonietta for the 1957 centenary of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester – the most important international commission offered to an Australian composer during the 1950s.

It demonstrates Hughes' mastery of the orchestra; it has strong themes, a fluent and convincing harmonic style, logical, concise form and a tremendous sense of continuity and power.

To an uninitiated listener, the work sounds like a conflation of Elgar, Walton, Bax, with interesting melodies derived from unorthodox scalic forms".

[This quote needs a citation] He also won the prize for Instrumental Composition in the National Council of Women Jubilee Competition (1952).

In his 30 years with what became the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Hughes witnessed the gradual building of a world-class ensemble under the sustained stewardship of two conductors, Willem van Otterloo and Hiroyuki Iwaki.

By 1954, Hughes had been offered two overseas scholarships, but again the need for financial security to support his family prevented him from taking up these opportunities.

"We wanted to show him what a composer had to go through, the costs involved with buying paper and ink, and particularly copying scores and parts" Hughes once recalled.

In 1989 his orchestral composition Fantasia was nominated in the Most Performed Australasian Serious Work category of the 1989 APRA Music Awards.