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 thenext. The Italian word volte means to turn or change. The importance of the seasons to culture is that they never ceaseto influence the experience of living and non-living forms. They continually excite all of our senses. As a recurringcycle, 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 composers magnum opus Silenus Antiphonary, asummation project of lifelong pursuits, hand-written and hand-drawn in color pencil, to score the intersection ofvisual art, literature, and music. The earlier iteration of Le Quattro Volte was scored for the 1970 Amazing Life Gamesfilm Four Changes and released on CD under that title on the Second Evening Art label (#AG1964), with YurikoSmiley on koto. Le Quattro Volte received its concert premiere as a standalone work from the Antiphonary on February22, 2025 by New Music Works at the University of California Santa Cruz Music Center with Yuki Yasuda on koto, andMichael McGushin conducting.During an extended stay in 2008 at the American Academy in Rome, the composer reworked his musicalmaterials in a temporary studio at the Academys Casa Rustica, the very site where, in 1611, Galileo first introduced histelescope to an erudite Roman audience. The coincidence highlights the contrast between these two very differentapproaches to naturethe telescope enables a particularized and direct perspective of nature through vision; the musicabstracts the perception of nature through the particularized sounds and tonal colors.