Robert Hughes

Mexican clay flute, 5 coffee cans, and jhalaturanga

     A native of Buffalo, New York, Robert Hughes received a traditional and excellent music education at the University of Buffalo, expressed a preference for contemporary music early in his career, and traveled to Florence, Italy on a Baird fellowship to study with the eminent twelve-tone composer Luigi Dallapiccola. A photo taken at the grand piano before his departure shows a thin, short-haired serious young man in suit and tie, pencil in hand and music paper at the ready for his next big, Apollonian, but as yet reticent, idea. The trajectory, however, did not hold.

     Hughes truncated his Italian studies to come to California to study with composer Lou Harrison. A photo taken soon after in his Aptos apartment above the Sticky Wicket Coffee Shop shows a somewhat heavier shirtless long-haired composer seated on the floor beating five coffee cans with pencils, several tuned bowls at his left, and a box of wine behind him. His next delightful composition, Trio, for Mexican clay flute, coffee cans, and tuned bowls, was in the can, so to speak.

     The composer reminisces, “I bought a small baked clay flute, picked out from a bushel basket of similar cheap tourist souvenirs. Its three indiscriminately punched holes emitted a series of eight exotic pitches. Five metal coffee cans struck with the rubber eraser ends of two pencils, and six Pyrex bowls tuned with water (the traditional Indian ‘Jhalaturanga’’) to the pitches of the clay flute, completed my ensemble” (liner notes, audio CD, Second Evening Art, #AG1964).

     Trio had its premiere in concert version on October 6, 1963 at the legendary Old Spaghetti Factory in North Beach, San Francisco, with the composer on Mexican clay flute. In a rare music review written after leaving New York, Lou Harrison wrote of the Aptos performance that took place a month later, “It is fascinating to hear Hughes’ natural concert professionalism commingling in this work with the earlier wild-and-woolyness of the West-Coast percussion school of the thirties and forties (Cowell, Cage, Strang, and myself) to which it seems to owe a little of its impulse” (Lou Harrison, “Coffee Can Concert in Aptos,” music review, San Francisco Chronicle, Saturday Nov. 9, 1963).

     The work also premiered as a ballet for the San Francisco Ballet re-titled Sancho on June 26, 1964, choreographed by Thatcher Clarke, the Ballet's lead male dancer.