Robert Hughes

koto, 2 flutes, 2 horns, drone

Robert Hughes, “Le Quattro Volte” (Four Changes)
for Koto, 2 Flutes, 2 French Horns, Drone
from Silenus’ Antiphonary

Le Quattro Volte takes for its theme the four seasons, with the emphasis on the changes from one season to the next. The Italian word volte means to turn or change. The importance of the seasons to culture is that they never cease to influence the experience of living and non-living forms. They continually excite all of our senses. As a recurring cycle, they shape our humanity by giving context to religion, culture, economy, and agriculture, and religion. The work is both drawn into and drawn from the composer’s magnum opus Silenus’ Antiphonary, a “summation project” of lifelong pursuits, hand-written and hand-drawn in color pencil, to score the intersection of visual art, literature, and music. The earlier iteration of Le Quattro Volte was scored for the 1970 Amazing Life Games film Four Changes and released on CD under that title on the Second Evening Art label (#AG1964), with Yuriko Smiley on koto. Le Quattro Volte received its concert premiere as a standalone work from the Antiphonary on February 22, 2025 by New Music Works at the University of California Santa Cruz Music Center with Yuki Yasuda on koto, and Michael McGushin conducting. During an extended stay in 2008 at the American Academy in Rome, the composer reworked his musical materials in a temporary studio at the Academy’s Casa Rustica, the very site where, in 1611, Galileo first introduced his telescope to an erudite Roman audience. The coincidence highlights the contrast between these two very different approaches to nature—the telescope enables a particularized and direct perspective of nature through vision; the music abstracts the perception of nature through the particularized sounds and tonal colors.