He served for thirteen years as Organist & Choirmaster at St. Mary’s Church in Norwalk, Connecticut, where he developed a program of seven choirs, including the professional St. Mary’s Schola Cantorum, the volunteer St. Mary’s Choir, and the St. Mary’s Student Schola, a comprehensive program of musical education for children. He directs Viri Galilæi, an ensemble of men from the tristate New York area who gather weekly to sing Vespers and medieval polyphony from facsimiles of original manuscripts. Hughes is Director of Music at St. John Fisher Seminary in Stamford, Connecticut, and serves as a consultant to several parishes in Connecticut looking to expand their musical programs. A board member of the Church Music Association of America, he serves on the faculty of its annual Sacred Music Colloquium, teaching chant, composition, and organ improvisation. He is Director of Music for the Roman Forum’s annual two-week Summer Symposium at Lake Garda in Italy, where he directs a choir for daily Masses, a large volunteer choir for nightly Vespers, and coordinates performances and recitals with local groups. He was named Chant Instructor for St. Benedict’s Abbey in Still River, Massachusetts, which he visits every few weeks for musical consultation with the monks. He also travels frequently to give workshops, clinics, and recitals, in locales as varied as Ecuador, Italy, France, Estonia, Spain, and Canada.

Hughes has written extensively for choir and organ. Recent composition projects include a suite for organ, Nuestra Señora de Apocalipsis, which received its premiere in Guayaquil, Ecuador in August 2019, and an alternatim Mass, Missa Rex splendens, premiered in Ottawa in November 2019. Film scoring credits include Navis Pictures’ St. Bernadette of Lourdes and several documentaries.

Hughes’s composition teachers have included Ruth Schonthal and John Halle, and he has studied organ with Paul Jacobs and Daniel Sullivan. He is a graduate of Yale College.