‘The justification lies not just in the humour – welcome in this area of music – but in the final poetry of the Cloud Music, miles away from Fraser Simpson. With Knussen you really feel how sweet it is to be a cloud’
Edward Greenfield (The Guardian) 15 June 1983

‘The idea is whimsical to the point of coyness: the musical realisation, Knussen being the vividly imaginative listener and meticulous craftsman that he is, is lucid and seductive.’
Hilary Finch (Times Educational Supplement), 24 June 1983

‘Like all Knussen’s music, Hums and Songs is written with a marvellously exact and imaginative ear… it is poised, charming, and amusing: a happy blend of miniature tone poem and tiny song cycle, with deliberately blurred narrative.’
Andrew Porter (The New Yorker), 14 May 1984

‘Knussen’s evocations of childhood, tender and briskly, unsentimentally humorous, distinguish him among the younger British composers even more than the very evident mastery of his craft.’
Max Loppert (Financial Times), 16 October 1984

'taking the word Hum literally, Knussen has subjected A.A.Milne to some lighthearted by intense expressionist treatment, even developing a series of aphorisms which present such incidents as Piglet meeting the Heffalump with an economy and compression that Weebern might have envied.'
Edward Greenfield, The Guardian, 15 June 1983

'...one of Knussen's most delightful inspirations'
Max Loppoert, Financial Times, 16 October 1984