Robert Hughes

Voice, Keyboard, and Contrabassoon

Bob Hughes set these poems two years after arriving in Aptos CA to study with Lou Harrison. Within a short time, Harrison left for Asia on a Rockefeller Grant, not to return until July; so that Hughes began a concert series at the local coffee and book shop The Sticky Wicket. He programmed many contemporary music and music-theater works, including those of Harrison and himself. Songs for the Palatine Anthology had its premiere in this series.

Dudley Fitts referred to his translations as English paraphrase, remarking in his Commentary to the volume One Hundred Poems from the Palatine Anthology, that “there is scarcely a single adequate translation into English verse,” and, “I have deliberately chosen a system of irregular cadence, assonance, and the broken line.”

The composer’s choice of poems suggests Harrison’s influence and milieu, with its turn of attention away from violence to nonviolence, and to the “two noble virtues.” These would be Lust and Greed, as described in a 1980 ode by Harrison, “Love is made of lust, of lust and tender prizing. And the thrust of love is born of beauty rising in a trust of joy.”

(Lou Harrison, Joys and Perplexities, 1992).