by Margaret Fisher, Ph.D.
Bob Hughes (1933 – 2022), composer, conductor, bassoonist, and author, is remembered for bringing new voices to the public ear, promoting voices at risk for being overlooked or undervalued, and for staging his own and others’ adventures across media and disciplines. For the past quarter century he composed the music he wanted to hear, with all practicalities, niceties, and deadlines set aside. He sought to liberate himself from the constraints of the stage and from maintaining an appearance of relevance to institutions that were themselves becoming less and less relevant. At the time of his death, however, no one had heard any of the music of this fecund period; no parts for the players had been extracted, though his musical and textual intentions were scored to near-completion. Bob hoped to initiate a facsimile publication of his hand-drawn score, Silenus’ Antiphonary – a first step toward realizing the work’s visual, textual, and sonic elements. As technology catches up to a hermit’s meditations, the prospect becomes less daunting.
The problem facing composers in our twenty-first century, according to Bob, was that it is no longer possible to compose music at a scale matching that of Stravinsky and Bernstein, whose extraordinary output and appeal defined an era. Part of the problem, he explained, is that the composer working at this scale must do everything in the public eye, and must attend to the increasingly complex business of music. Lacking those skills, one solution was to turn inwardly, as William Blake had done.
Working in seclusion, Bob devoted the 2000s to finding a suitable form for a music score that would encompass a “multi-perceptual work” (his words), to best represent a life immersed in music, literature, and art. Drawing on Ovid’s Book 1 of The Metamorphoses, an account of the beginning of time out of chaos (Arthur Golding’s 1575 translation, aka “Shakespeare’s Ovid”), Bob adapted Ovid’s account of the Seasons. While each season excites our senses in new ways, as a cyclical form they shape our humanity by giving context to religion, culture, economy, and agriculture, and religion.
For a protagonist, he chose Silenus, one-time Mentor to Dionysus. Debauched. Second-tier. A past-prime, Olympian lecher married to Drink and Drunken Dances, Silenus was also associated with Musical Creativity. Bob embeds this demigod throughout the project’s layers and overlaps of acculturated time, from proto-time to present time, represented by the many textual quotations integral to the score – texts set to music and texts for the page view only. Silenus’ responses – the antiphons – recall Blake’s use of text and image in his Songs of Innocence and Experience, one of several foundational texts for Silenus’ Antiphonary. Bob noted, “Blake should not be read without his graphic page—it makes you stop and think what it means.”
Bob also makes clear in his notes that he is not Silenus; he is an interpreter of Silenus. That said, the graphical and acoustical notations of Silenus’ Antiphonary do offer a window onto the cultural memory of the composer. Should you believe that the personality and actions of the artist contaminate the art, this graphic score may back you up, but with Bob’s caveat “Music is the memory of what never happened” (Jack Gilbert, Great Fires).
If erudite, Bob is also playful. He introduces his protagonist with a bit of mischief, a clever misquote from Alexander Pope:
“The pow’r of Music all our hearts allow / what Timotheus was, is Silenus now.”
(No matter that Pope intended not Silenus but John Dryden, who memorialized the emotional powers of Timotheus’ ancient lyre...) Bob chose the Greek name to title this opening section, “Timotheos Unfolds,” and gives the ancient Kithara a long chromatic leash to pluck temporal symmetry from the chaos of prehistory.
Time, space, the natural world and humanity survive but never conquer the underlying Chaos (Metamorphoses, Book 2). For that ever-present Chaos, an electronic drone sounds from first to last page, save where a choir sings the Latin refrain of the Pervigilium Veneris, “Let the one love tomorrow who has never loved, and let the one who has loved love tomorrow.” The sentiment echoes the title of Bob’s 1974 choral work, “Amo Ergo Sum,” with texts by Ezra Pound.
Throughout the Christian age, Silenus was the incorrigible Sinner, bereft of manners but never evil. When the Kithara, associated with the beginning of time, gives way to Winter and to a song setting of Whittier’s poem “Snow-Bound,” Bob has us bear witness to Silenus’ sinful ways—he sits in front of the hearth, his garments bespattered with semen (SA p. 21; text: Hesiodos, Works and Days; image: Limbourg Brothers, Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry). Surely, this is “News that stays news,” to quote Pound, and proof of the inexhaustible rewards of the classics, to paraphrase Italo Calvino.
Bob read the classics in the morning. Rarely on the shelf, the books lay open in active intercourse one atop the other, on table, chair, and bed wide with promise, tattered, dusty, dog- eared, inked-up lovers, and in multiple translations.
The score pursues a few other themes: the movement of water, the delight in natural beauty, excess in love. The overarching theme, True Innocence, first comes into focus with the score’s mixed-media presentation on page 12 of an eye-to-eye encounter between William Blake and Giuseppe Arcimboldo, painter of the Mannerist confabulation “Winter.” When Silenus quotes Blake late in the score, “You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough,” he also sends the conductor or player, viewer or reader back to page 12. This is not a Da Capo, but a variant of hypertext that creates an echo of the source.
Below: p. 115 of the score, all brass building to “You never know what is enough, . . .” MM = c. 40. The bottom staff in blue is a drone that continues throughout the work.
The music is through-composed (without repetition). “Autumn,” unfinished at the time of the composer’s death, arrives with a song setting of Hester Storm’s poem, “My fading sight.” Storm, a neglected San Francisco poet of the Beat Generation, appeared frequently with her cohort at the legendary Old Spaghetti Factory in North Beach, where this song setting was first performed. Bob revised several earlier works for the Antiphonary.
He also brings the music of others into his vortex, such as the Spanish 13th-century “Cantiga 125” (di Gioia) by Alfonso X, or when he pairs the Gregorian chant “Rosa Vernans,” associated with the Trappist monks in Kentucky, to the opening theme of Roy Harris’ Third Symphony. Literary voices populating the work are even more numerous, offering us a Silenus-inflected ABC of Reading, one drawn from all epochs and inclusive of poets of our time, such as Mary Oliver, Linda Pastan, Jack Gilbert, and Charles Bukowski.
The composer employs synaesthesia to navigate what he perceived as shifting relationships between music and color. Rejecting symbolism, he puts his colors to work to make salient the nuances of tone and texture, to attend the drama of the work, to distinguish the voices, “I strive to make the Antiphonary look like it sounds, sound like it looks.”
Examples of synaesthesia in the seasons, details from pages 5-6, pre-history going into winter:
The originality of Silenus’ Antiphonary lies in both the music and the method. It is a visual and written prototype of accumulation and excess that the composer could write only after a full career of composing, conducting, and performing. In the visual arts, the “mature” period often eschews complexity for directness and simplicity of line. Bob insisted on complexity and innocence both, as in this passage of Spring:
(above) Page 40: Spring, detail
Bob may be counted among the last of his generation of American composers to hold the Western canon, literature, music and art, from Homer to present time, in mind, in encyclopedic detail, every day, as did his mentor and lifelong partner in music, Lou Harrison. Bob’s cultural cachet might have been out of sync with the times were he not also immersed in the countercultures of the 1960s forward. His love of literature and art history only strengthened when paired with rebellion against the establishment, with the preparation of conceptual and graphic music scores by others, with participation in performance art, wild spectacle, and experimentation across disciplines. Like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, he was an accumulator. And he was also one who synthesizes. Instead of divining impending catastrophe in the inexorable march forward into a toxic future, as Benjamin had, Bob sensed opportunity. He trail-blazed a path for contemporary music that was inclusive of the Black composer in America, of music of the Pacific Rim, of poets’ music, of music from the California Gold Rush era, of overlooked and lost and rediscovered music, so that it might enter the lingua franca of future generations. And he composed.
One generation’s cachet is another’s disdain; the response, or antiphon, comes in cycles like the seasons. Let it be said, then, that Silenus’ Antiphonary sets torch flare and the wind’s force to that which is neglected by the Angel of History – the memory of what never happened.
(below) Page 69: “Newness Strutting Around as if it were Significant” from the Spring season.
This is a revised section of a larger work commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony in 1977.
The Document
Media: hand-drawn music score with mixed media mounted on art paper, 19 x 24 inches, with transparent mylar overlay, clipped to acid-free foam-core boards
Page count: 145 pages, plus 1 interpolated music score titled Uutiqtut, 61 pages, 11 x 17 inches. The pages have their genesis in the large antiphonal music scores used in the Middle Ages.
Comments
Though unfinished, Silenus’ Antiphonary contains music that is complete and through-composed for the entirety of 145 pages. The musical themes are Pre-history, Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn, the latter thematic section left incomplete. The musical notation is hand-drawn, including staff lines, with a set of 130 Prismacolor pencils. The music staves may bend, disappear and reappear. The assignment of colors coordinate a synaesthesia between the sonic and the visual presentation of the music. There are multiple systems of color assignment.
Intended to be a constellation of many lodestars, the work’s philosophical reach is mirrored in its gamut of performing forces, which Bob did not limit. The range consists of solo voice, a cappella, small, medium, and full choruses, small ensembles, and oversize orchestra with Western, Eastern and electronic instruments. One passage for viola is marked:
per la mente – non suoni!
Visual elements include hand-drawn images, transparencies, and paper collage. The images are drawn directly on the page or are superimposed as film transparencies, through which one views the music underneath by lifting the overlay. Hand-written quotations, inserted as intertextual matter to enhance an understanding of the music, are not set to music. Their role in performance is not specified by the composer.
With the music near completion and the visuals pasted up, this is a working model for a “multi-perceptual” score. On page 133 the music, after a riotous Bacchanal, succumbs to a finished image drawn by Bob in lush purples and violets to accompany Ezra Pound’s line from Drafts and Fragments, “God’s Eye art ’ou, do not surrender perception.”
(above) image © 2020 by Bob Hughes
A Selection of Pages from Silenus' Antiphonary
The Antiphonary begins before Time with homage paid to the great lyricist Timotheos. The first season is Winter according to Ovid’s account in The Metamorphoses, Book 2. Following Ovid’s description of Jove’s creation of the earth, the composer makes water a recurring motif that will run through the Summer season. On page 25 of the Antiphonary, we find Winter’s ice changing form into the great thaw. Here, the composer borrows words and ideas from Ezra Pound’s words in Canto 2 regarding water:
"Ovid tossed in sea-change; the sinewed twists of wave gripping him, naviform... RH via EP”
With a setting of William Blake’s “Song by an Old Shepherd,” the composer hints at the effect of the seasons on Silenus’ peregrinations throughout the Antiphonary: “Innocence is a winter’s gown. So clad, we’ll abide Life’s pelting storm. . .”
Silenus was a Greek demi-god, a companion to Dionysus. Rubens famously painted him as a fleshy, old and lecherous. Images of him across the ages show him in a state of drunken undress. Any gown, much less that of Innocence, would be hard to imagine on a form such as Silenus. Blake also wrote, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” The composer offers William Blake as Silenus’s guide among mortals on earth.
The drone at the bottom of the page, the underlying reminder of chaos that according to Ovid attaches to nature's order and life itself, continues from the first to last page of the Antiphonary.
Page 25: The Creation of Water
Page 30: Interlude 1: The Great Thaw
This is the great roar preceding the great melt of Winter ice that will lead to Spring. The composer dispenses with staff lines in a nod (or wink) to the nature of water, which could not sustain the line.
The composer said of the Antiphonary, "The music looks like it sounds and sounds like it looks."
Page 36: Vera (Spring)
The season begins with song settings of poems by Robert Browning, Thomas Carew, and Percy Blythe Shelley, followed by a setting of the first scene from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel Il Gattopardo is followed by a staging of instruments, Left Right and Center, for Francesco Petrarca’s “Zefiro Torna.”
The pages of Spring are composed in full synaesthetic detail of color and gesture and form.
Page 63: Spring: Le Quattro Volte (The Four Seasons)
One of the few passages for chamber ensemble within the Antiphonary, “Le Quattro Volte” is scored for Koto, 2 flutes, 2 horns.
The interlaced-circle diagrams of the Trinitarian are by the Catholic abbot and original theologian Gioacchino da Fiore (d. 1202)
Page 71: Spring: Silenus appears
The number “Newness Strutting Around...”, seen in the above article (ostinati for flutes and harps) concludes with the only image of Silenus to be found in “his” Antiphonary. The golden horn and other artwork on the page is by the composer.
Page 74: Spring: “Pervigilium Veneris”
This anonymous poem of the 4th century (?), set for “female voices” (i.e.,, the untrained voices of villagers), SATB and large ensemble, offers the composer a chance to enter the philological debates that surround the manuscript tradition. As the leading twentieth-century scholar and publisher of Ezra Pound’s music and prose concerning the setting of words to music, Hughes is in a position to test Pound’s argument that music composition is a viable form of criticism.
Page 80: Spring: “Pervigilium Veneris”
Having progressed further into the number, we can see the composer setting up for the highpoint in the text with an equally dramatic presentation on the page. To emphasize this moment, the composer pauses the electronic drone at the words “Facta Cypridis” and reduces the music on the page to one staff in purple and gray, with a pickup bar appended below. Ten female voices sing a cappella. Eight tenors join them, indicated by the pickup bar, at the first of two instances of disputed lyrics.
The first instance concerns the word, as the composer writes it, “pupuris” (clean, clear, or shining). The alternate, and more favored tradition would have the word be “purpuris” (purple).
The composer’s preference translates as: “Born of Cypriot blood, of breezes, and of the shining sun.”
A second instance of disputed words appears immediately on the next page: “uvido marita nodo.” The favored tradition has “unico marita voto.”
According to the composer, who chooses the former, the bride and groom have literally and physically consummated their love. In colloquial speech, they have “tied the knot” (nodo = knot).
The drone then rejoins the voices for a final celebratory iteration of the refrain, “Cras amet, qui nunquam, amavit quique amavit cras amet.” Thomas Parnell memorably translated these lines as, “Let those love now who never loved before, Let those who always lov'd, now love the more.”
Page 100: Summer: “Love Scene”
What would Silenus’s Love Scene be without Cleopatra? The composer revised an earlier ballet for this scene, "Music for the Kama Sutra," composed for the San Francisco Ballet in 1966. This number features a very large percussion ensemble, Western and Asian instruments (the cheng, a Miguk piri (a variation of the Korean oboe built by Lou Harrison and tuned to the A440 of a Western orchestra), and water gongs, as three household items, a metal pitcher, knife, and broiler plate.
Page 127: Summer: Gran’ Bacchanal
This number, announced by the Fanfare on page 114 (seen in the above article), and developed into a scene of revelry brings us to the end of Summer. Silenus will have an epiphany in the midst of Bacchanalian festivities, and his quest for Innocence will be realized.
Page 133: Summer: Silenus’s epiphany
The music again reduces to a minimum, this time the contrabassi and electronic drone at the bottom of the page continue through the upcoming drama. The composer’s drawing of “God’s eye,” illustrates Ezra Pound’s lines from Canto 113, “. . . do not surrender perception.” The first part of Pound’s verse, “God’s eye art ‘ou, . . .” appears on the previous page. Subsequent pages replace the music notation with textual citations on the subject of innocence, foolery and experience from Dante, Blake, Auden, and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Silenus, too, adds to the wisdom, “…true innocence occurs after experience, never before. . . ”
The Antiphonary treads water through fifty-one measures of music, giving the reader and listener time to reflect on the meaning of the words.
The music picks up once more, and comes to a conclusion with eighty seconds of long tones distributed sparsely throughout the performing forces, as if to say, “I thought I could go return to the bacchanal and go on; but I can’t go on.”
Page 139: Autumn
A melody cited from Roy Harris’s “Third Symphony” leads into the “Rosa Vernans” brought forward from the Trappist monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky. And the theme of water gives way to Autumn light.
Silenus' Antiphonary at ACA
The complete score edition of Silenus' Antiphonary includes the engraved scores for each of the four Suites, numerous holographic reproductions of the original multicolor graphic scores, and extensive program, production, and editorial notes.
The Uutiqtut & Ublarpaluk orchestral suite and Music for the Kama Sutra for thirteen players, from the Summer section of the Antiphonary, are available in stand-alone editions.