Hughes de Courson is one of the most adventurous musician/producers from France. Dropping out of the family business (as in the militairy), when he was 18 wrote his first songs.As a self taught musician, he specialised in French folk music, then in what is now called "world music." He met Gabriel Yacoub in the army, they were both trying to escape by pretending to be mentally ill. We really did became mad and also very good friends. Once set free (to despair of my heroic families!), Hughes produced his first album "Pierre de Grenoble," and then formed Malicorne with Yacoub.

In 1973, with Gabriel Yacoub, Hughes de Courson founded the group Malicorne that very successfully paved the way for a new musical trend of folk music from all over Europe. A few years later he set up his own label “Ballon Noir” and signed a large number of artists such as Dan Ar Braz, Kolinda, Akendengué and La Bamboche. During a 10 year period between 1972-1985, French Folk, in France, was not a marginal field but a main musical stream, selling between 30.000 and 300.000 copies. After Malicorne broke up, ten years after its debut, and the folk movement began to wind down, de Courson composed scores for modern dance and film soundtracks, and embarked upon a fascinating series of inter-cultural collisions. The most successful of these was "Lambarena," where he and the Gabonese singer-composer Pierre Akendengue mixed traditional African sources with the music of JS Bach. In 1992, he won the Leonardo da Vinci prize, which permitted him to spend three years studying music in Egypt, Israel, Syria, Yemen, Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, and Macedonia. Among his typically polyglot and diverse recent projects are a theme for the Mediterranian Olympic Games, a cycle of dialogues between childrens' voices and assorted ethnicities called "Songs Of Innocence" (co-produced and composed with Tomas Gubitsch), and a chart-topping album by the Finnish female supergroup, Värttinä.

Hughes' albums are all large-scale works. He is an arranger rather than a soloist. On many he combines electronic effects with medieval or baroque instruments. Mozart in Egypt takes works by Mozart and emphasises the oriental elements in them. The 25th symphony is played with a much-enlarged orchestra. Autumn 2001 saw the release, again on Virgin Classics, in the same cross-over trend as Lambarena and Mozart in Egypt, of O’Stravaganza, a “Fantasy on Vivaldi and the Celtic music of Ireland”. And in 2003, after having released Lux Obscura, an ‘electro-mediaeval’ album, inspired by sacred music of the 12th century, Hughes de Courson composed the music to Philippe Découflé’s show’ Tricodex’, performed at the Opéra de Lyon, the Théâtre du Châtelet, in Paris, and later toured in the USA. In 2005, Hughes de Courson released on Virgin Classics a sequel to the best-seller Mozart in Egypt, and has recently been commissioned to write rearrangements on the national anthem of Qatar.