Alun Hoddinott

He was professor of music at Cardiff, a founder of the Cardiff Festival of Twentieth Century Music, and the composer whose name the BBC Hoddinott Hall carries: a 350-seat hall inside the Wales Millennium Centre, opened in 2009, which is the home of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

Bargoed, Cardiff, and a concerto that started a career

Hoddinott grew up in a mining valley and learned the violin, then read music at University College Cardiff, graduating in 1949, and studied privately with the Australian-born composer Arthur Benjamin. His public career effectively began in 1954, when his Clarinet Concerto was performed at the Cheltenham Festival with Gervase de Peyer as soloist and Sir John Barbirolli conducting. A concerto played by that soloist under that conductor at that festival was, in the Britain of the 1950s, the fastest available introduction to the profession.

The Clarinet Concerto also sets a pattern he never abandoned. Hoddinott was a concerto composer above all: he liked a soloist against a body of sound, and he wrote concertos for instruments that rarely get them. The euphonium concerto is the clearest case. The euphonium is a brass band instrument, central to the band tradition of the south Wales valleys and almost invisible in the orchestral repertoire, and writing a concerto for it takes an instrument with a large amateur following and gives it a piece to play with an orchestra behind it.

The Cardiff years, and the festival

He taught at the Cardiff College of Music and Drama from 1951, moved to University College Cardiff in 1959, and became professor of music there in 1967, a post he held until 1987. In the same period he helped found the Cardiff Festival of Twentieth Century Music, which ran from 1967 and brought contemporary composers and their music to Cardiff on a regular basis rather than as an occasional visit.

The importance of that festival is easy to underrate. Before it, a Welsh audience encountered new music mostly through the BBC, and a Welsh composer followed what was happening in Europe by post and by score. The festival put Witold Lutosławski and other visiting composers in Cardiff, and it gave Hoddinott's own students a reason to think of Wales as a place where new music happened rather than a place new music passed by.

How the music works

Hoddinott's idiom is chromatic and tightly argued, closer to the European mainstream of his generation than to the folk-derived British tradition, but he never adopted serialism as a system. He works with small intervallic cells that are transformed continuously, so that a movement grows out of very little material. The textures are dark and the scoring is often low, with heavy use of the bass instruments, and the rhythmic writing is angular. A listener coming from William Mathias, whose music is bright and hammered, will find Hoddinott a good deal denser.

He wrote quickly and in quantity. Ten symphonies is an unusual number for a British composer after 1945, when the form was widely thought exhausted, and he added to them a stream of concertos, chamber works, piano sonatas, song cycles and operas. Four operas were staged, including The Beach of Falesá, written for Welsh National Opera and given at the New Theatre in Cardiff in 1974, which was the first full-length opera the company had commissioned from a Welsh composer.

Works

The hall that carries his name

The BBC Hoddinott Hall opened in 2009, the year after his death, as the second phase of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay. It seats 350 and was built as a rehearsal, recording and concert space for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, which had previously worked in studio accommodation not designed for public concerts. The orchestra records there, broadcasts from there and plays concerts there, and the room was tuned for microphones as much as for an audience.

Naming it after a composer rather than a donor or a monarch was a deliberate statement about what the building was for. Hoddinott spent forty years arguing that Wales needed the ordinary infrastructure of a musical country: a festival, a university department that took composition seriously, a professional orchestra with somewhere to work and new scores to play. He was appointed CBE in 1983 and continued composing until the year of his death. The hall is the part of that argument that is made of concrete.

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• The eisteddfodWhat an eisteddfod is, and how the music competition works
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