Civitella is pleased to announce the inauguration of the Robert Grove Hughes Music Composition Fellowship. Beginning in 2027, the Fellowship will support one composer-in-residence each year who excels in writing for Western and Asian instruments, often with extensions into electronics and/or cross-disciplinary performance and media.
The award is named for Robert Hughes (1933-2022), an American composer and conductor who exerted an outsized influence on Northern California music. With Lou Harrison he co-founded the Cabrillo Music Festival (now the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music) and with Thomas Buckner he co-founded and conducted the Arch Ensemble for Experimental Music. He shaped a generation of musicians in the 1960s through the Youth Chamber Orchestra (now the Oakland Symphony Youth Orchestra), a commissioning, touring, and recording ensemble whose outstanding talent, combined with a prescient and historic embrace of new music, world music, and sociopolitical activism, produced a vision for music’s future and an impressive discography that was unparalleled in its time.
Bob was a 2015 Director’s Guest at Civitella, where he composed one section of his large work Silenus’ Antiphonary. The fellowship has been created to extend his deep appreciation for Civitella’s role in gathering artists from all corners of the world. These artists, who otherwise might have never met, bring language, culture, aesthetics, world views, diurnal practice and insight to the friendships, collaborations, and networks formed as a result of their residencies.