Robert Hughes

children's choir or treble choir, and keyboard (Synthesizer)

– Choral setting of Ezra Pound’s Canto XLV
by Robert Grove Hughes

American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972), wrote The Cantos, an epic poem that is one of the major literary works of the twentieth century. The song setting of Canto XLV by Robert Hughes, with its incipit “With usura,” was part of a larger collaboration with choreographer and director Margaret Fisher for a hybrid work of dance theater and performance art with the title “Ag Nature” (against nature), which had its premiere at New York’s Dance Theatre Workshop in 1985.

The idea behind setting the song for children’s choir (adapted here with the option of an alternative treble choir) builds on the tradition of children’s nursery rhymes with dark themes. For example, the words of “Ring Around the Rosie” concern the Black Plague. The songs “Rock-a-bye Baby,” “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary,” “Three Blind Mice,” and “London Bridge is Falling Down” transmit a history of violence through children’s song: the persecution of Protestants or Catholics, or of medieval child sacrifice. 

Canto LXV, one of Pound's most lyrical cantos, transmits a moral tale about money and
economic policy, turned artful through its biblical cadence. It is often reputed to be, arguably with justification, Pound's anti-Semitic canto. While sympathetic to this interpretation, Fisher and Hughes use performance art to trouble what is a particularly American and particularly stubborn refusal on the part of the public to address the issue of usury itself. The ubiquity of the practice of usury in the second half of the twentieth century, practiced by banks, corporations and individuals of all stripes, had become, and still is, an urgent matter, fraught by the separate legal and colloquial treatments of the word in our time. The colloquial use— which still associates the word to people of the Jewish faith thereby becoming an anti-Semitic stance in itself—is no longer tenable. It ignores the clear and present dangers inadequately addressed by American laws.