Robert Hughes

Large orchestra, choral voices, kithara, cheng, koto, electronic drone, synthesizer, multi media projection.

Initiated in the early 1980s as a response to the potential afforded by new technologies, cross-disciplinary performance and performance art, Silenus’ Antiphonary was originally conceived as a rich assemblage of music with multi-image animations and video media. The project took shape in the 2000s with hand-drawn score pages augmented by inter-texts, color drawings, favorite images selected from illustrated manuscripts, sculpture and painting throughout the history of art, often resembling the Italian scrapbook or zibaldone assembled by medieval scholars and scribes.

The music is through-composed (without repetition). “Autumn,” unfinished at the time of the composer’s death, arrives with a song setting of the poem, “My fading sight” by Hester Glory Storm (the pen name of Ann Rivington), the words bearing the culminating philosophical insight of the Antiphonary, the unity of all things. Though now overlooked, this 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. She inscribed many of her chapbooks to the composer as “My Brother-in-Music.”

Winter Suite
1. Timotheos Unfolds Chaos into Time “Adam is in his Earth” James Agee
2. Winter Hibernus Hibernus: “Snowbound” John Greenleaf Whittier Hibernus: “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” James Agee Hibernus: “Snowflakes” Henry Longfellow Hibernus: “Song by an Old Shepherd” William Blake “On a Gentlewoman walking in the Snowe” William Strode “Winter tames man, woman, and beast” William Shakespeare “Song by an Old Shepherd” (resumes, toward a conclusion) Whittier, Agee, Longfellow, Blake texts
3. Interlude I (Water)

SPRING Suite 
4. Vera “At Chiusi, some happy morn,” Robert Browning “Pippa passes” Robert Browning “The Spring” Thomas Carew “Zefiro torna” Francesco Petrarca “The Leopard” Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa “And by the beach run, Tyro” Canto II, Ezra Pound “Zefiro torna” resumes
5. Le Quattro Volte Le Quattro Volte (Four Changes) Newness strutting around as if it were significant Reproductions from Holograph Score
6. Pervigilium Veneris “Cras amet qui nunquam” Anonymous, 4th c. text
7. Interlude II Leafy Treviso L'estate, “Cantiga de Gioia de Santa Maria” de Alfonso El Sabio

SUMMER suite
8. Uutiqtut (The chase)
9. Love Scene The Kama Sutra Ecstatic Dance of Display Return to Kama Sutra
10. Fanfare Reproduction from Holograph Score
11.Prelude to Gran’ Bacchanal
12.Gran’ Bacchanal Dithyrambe Satyr’s Prelude Pentheus Returns Gran’ Bacchanal
13.Interlude III (In Umbram)

AUTUMN
14.My Fading Sight “My fading sight . . .” Hester Glory Storm text
15.Ublarpaluk (Flowing, Alba)