Robert Grove Hughes (1933–2022) was an American composer, conductor, bassoonist and music scholar based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was known for his wide-ranging artistic interests—extending to poetry, performance art and social commentary—and advocacy of contemporary, often experimental music. San Francisco Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman described Hughes as a visionary and "musical Zelig" who "played a key role in a vast range of ambitious and influential musical projects." In the 1960s, Hughes co-founded the long-running Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music and co-founded and led the award-winning Oakland Symphony Youth Orchestra. In subsequent decades he co-founded and led the Arch Ensemble for Experimental Music with baritone vocalist Thomas Buckner and co-directed the performance group MA FISH CO with his wife, artist Margaret Fisher.
In his work as a composer and conductor, critics noted Hughes's fluency in an array of different styles, from overtly avant-garde to accessible, and his ambitious, adventurous programs. He wrote commissioned works for the San Francisco Symphony, Oakland Symphony, Cabrillo Festival and San Francisco Ballet and contributed scores to the Hollywood movie Never Cry Wolf and to James Broughton's The Golden Positions. Hughes collaborated with diverse artists including Lou Harrison, Laurie Anderson, Frank Zappa and Ezra Pound, and for more than three decades was a bassoonist in various Bay Area orchestras and groups. He died in Emeryville, California at age 88 on August 11, 2022.
Education and career summary
Hughes was born in Amherst, New York, near Buffalo, in 1933. He began composing music while in high school and attended the University of Buffalo (BA, 1956), where he studied composition with Aaron Copland, Carlos Chávez and Leon Kirchner. After serving as a graduate teaching fellow there, he used a Baird Foundation Fellowship to study composition with Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence in 1959–60.
In 1961, Hughes relocated to Aptos, California to study intonation systems privately with Lou Harrison, beginning a long-time association during which he premiered, arranged, conducted and recorded Harrison's works. That same year they established a musical and theater performance series at a local coffeehouse called the Sticky Wicket; two years later, the series evolved into the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, an initially informal event that championed their eclectic interests, including chamber music, Stravinsky, aleatoric (or "chance") music and performance art. The still-active, now-two-week event has developed into an internationally recognized venue for experimental and new music. During his long involvement with the festival, Hughes composed, conducted, performed and recruited figures such as Gerhard Samuel and Carlos Chávez as music directors. Hughes joined the Oakland Symphony as a bassoonist in 1962, becoming the orchestra's assistant conductor the following year. In 1964 he co-founded its Youth Chamber Orchestra (YCO, later Oakland Symphony Youth Orchestra or OSYO), serving as conductor until 1970 and again in 1979–80.
While continuing to compose, perform and conduct for various west coast orchestras, Hughes co-founded the Arch Ensemble with baritone vocalist Thomas Buckner in 1972. Under his co-direction, the large chamber group of younger musicians (many former YCO and OSYO members) focused on experimental music within an international and multimedia context into the 1980s. In 1978, Oakland Tribune critic Paul Hertelendy recognized the group for "filling a yawning gap" in Bay Area presentations of contemporary music, while Stereo Review later described their catalog as "almost a map of what is going on in new music, not just out west but in the U.S. as a whole."
In 1974, Hughes met choreographer and dancer Margaret Fisher at the Cabrillo Festival, where both were working on the experimental opera Joan by Beth Anderson. They would become lifelong artistic collaborators, as co-directors of the multimedia group MA FISH CO in the 1980s and 1990s, and later as scholars. They married in 1996. Their work appeared at venues including New Music America, Dance Theater Workshop, the San Francisco Exploratorium and the Venice Biennale. In the 2000s, Hughes continued his scholarship begun in 1958 on the musical works of Ezra Pound with Fisher and began composing his multi-perceptual work, Silenus' Antiphonary.