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Artist Sarah Davis Hughes had always loved music, but after winning an accordion from the New England Accordion Connection and Museum in Canaan, that love became a musical journey, ultimately leading to her book “The Colorways and the Circle of Fifths.”
Hughes explained that the idea for the book came after studying with Paul Ramunni of the Accordion Connection for a year. “He introduced a piece of music that I knew well by ear but had never seen written down.” Upon seeing the music, Hughes described a sense of blindness. “The chords looked like thorny blueberry bushes on the page,” she said.
Determined to figure it out, Hughes said, “I knew color systems, design and theory, so it was simply a matter of organization. If I could assign a color to each note and color that black-and-white score, I would instantly recognize the notes.”
She set out to create a system. “The colors that I assign to each note should make sense together like the notes make sense together,” she said.
She recalled the color wheel, which illustrates the harmonic structure of color, and the Circle of Fifths, which shows the harmonic structure of music. Both serve as foundational systems —one for color, the other for music. “What if I simply superimposed a classic color wheel onto the Circle of Fifths?”
She began by placing the primary colors — red, yellow and blue — then set the note C at the top. The next primary color, yellow, aligned with E, followed by blue at A-flat/G-sharp.
“I was very surprised to see that all of the hot colors — blood red, vermilion, orange, gold, hot yellow, chartreuse — fell on the white notes C, G, D, A and B,” Hughes said. “The cool colors — green, teal, blue, lavender and purple — are black notes.”
Once the colors were mapped onto a miniature keyboard, Hughes saw clear correlations. “For instance, there are two oranges: G, vermilion, and D, orange,” she said. “The notes are diatonic partners” and harmonize with one another. She found similar relationships between the two yellows — hot yellow and gold, corresponding to E and A — as well as chartreuse and green, B and F-sharp.
She also observed that the triangular relationships among primary, secondary and tertiary colors mirrored musical thirds, or counterbass notes. Mixing all three primary colors produces “mud,” she said, just as playing all the notes in the triangle creates dissonance. But pairing two colors, such as yellow and blue, produces green, while their corresponding notes — E and A-flat — form part of a major chord. “Add B, chartreuse, as the fifth — E, A-flat, B — and you get a beautiful chord,” she said.
In songs that move upward by thirds — from C to E to A-flat, as in “The Impossible Dream” — she said the effect is a vertiginous sense of ascent. Compositions built on the three primary colors, she added, are similarly bold and striking, citing Mondrian’s circus paintings as examples.
“Everything was about setting it up so that I could look at a color and immediately know what to play,” Hughes said. “I practiced chords and scales on the keyboard, fixing my eye on each color as I played it. It worked.”
“At that point, Paul and I started to plan how we could share it with people and wondered if it might help others enter music,” Hughes said.
The result is “The Colorways and the Circle of Fifths,” a guide for students, teachers and musicians of all levels to help them understand, play and compose music. The book includes worksheets to support learning.
“The Colorways and the Circle of Fifths” is available at Oblong Books and Music in Millerton. Hughes is artist in residence at the Accordion Connection and Museum, where her pastels, prints and original artwork from the book are on view upstairs.
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Open studios
Feb 04, 2026
Nathan Miller
Artists welcomed visitors into their studios at the Wassaic Project's first open studio day of 2026 on Saturday, Jan. 31. Below, Tilly Strauss of North East visits Ernesto Cabral's studio where he has been a part of the art organization's January 2026 residency program.
Nathan Miller
Stissing Center opens its 2026 season
Feb 04, 2026
Rosanne Cash and John Leventhal performed to a sold-out crowd Saturday, Jan. 31, at the Stissing Center in Pine Plains for the Spark! gala, marking the opening of the center’s 2026 season. For upcoming shows in the main room and the center’s new venue, The Grace Note, visit stissingcenter.org.
The case for tenkara
Feb 04, 2026
The author wrestles a Housatonic trout with a reel-less Tenkara rod.
Gary Dodson
I have been fishing with tenkara rods for about 10 years now, ever since my cousin’s husband, Gilligan, sent me a weird rod that telescoped out and had no reel, or even a place to put one. That was in February, so I had to wait until summer for my little buddy to show me how it worked.
I was extremely skeptical until I caught a decent Housatonic rainbow on the thing.
It was not an exceptional fish, but the fight was a lot of fun, more than it would have been with a regular fly rod.
Tenkara is a Japanese word that does a lot of lifting in translation. “Fixed-line rod” is probably better, but it doesn’t sound as cool.
Your basic tenkara rod is about 12 feet long, weighs almost nothing and is two feet long or less when collapsed.
At the tip of the rod is a piece of cord or string called a lillian. I don’t know why it’s called that.
What most people do is tie an overhand knot near the end of the lillian to act as a stopper. Then they attach a line with a girth hitch and add tippet material and a fly to the other end of the line.
A good rule of thumb is to start out with a line that is as long as the rod, give or take a couple of feet, depending on whether you’re in a wide-open river or a squirrelly stream.
The casting motion is very similar to that of a fly rod, but because you’ve only got the fixed length of line plus the length of the rod to work with, you’ve got to fish with your feet.
This is the critical distinction.
As I got better at using the tenkara rod, I realized how lazy I had become with the Western fly rod. Rather than considering a section of stream and mapping out my moves like a golfer assessing an approach, I had gotten into the habit of chucking a longer line or adding a tricky mend.
These are legitimate tactics, but smarter wading often eliminates the need for a longer cast.
It’s also better exercise and keeps the pores open.
So naturally, I started amassing tenkara rods and now have several in different lengths and actions.
What I really like to do is carry both a Western fly rod and a tenkara rod, and with some of these things, that’s easy to do. I have one 10-footer that, when collapsed, is about a foot long. It literally fits in my pocket or in the waist pack I use these days.
When I get bored with one method, I switch to the other.
One question I get a lot, other than “what the heck is that thing,” is, “What happens when the fish bolts?”
Same thing that happens with a Western rig. Either the fish stops or the fish breaks off.
The hardest part of fixed-line fishing is landing the fish. For those of us who do not have five-foot Extendo Arms (as seen in “Master of the Flying Guillotine”), getting the fish into scooping distance of the net requires dexterity, exquisite cunning and, inevitably, grabbing the line by hand.
This is where bad things happen, because once you give up the leverage of the rod, the dynamic changes completely, and the fish — no fools — sense this immediately.
If this intrigues you, I recommend starting out with Dragontail Tenkara in Idaho. The proprietor, Brent Auger, runs a tight ship and responds quickly to emails.
I also advise starting out with a furled line, which feels more like a fly line. Once you’re comfortable with that, you can move into level lines and other esoterica.
People often say, “That’s just like a cane pole.” No, it isn’t. A good tenkara rod is a lightweight precision tool. A cane pole is a heavy, blunt instrument by comparison. Think conductor’s baton vs. an old, splintery broomstick.
A final note: What ultimately sold me on tenkara wasn’t the simplicity or the novelty. It was catching a decent fish with a tenkara rod, as noted above.
The rod sang. It made a high, humming sound as I struggled with the fish.
“Dang,” I said. (This is a family newspaper.) “You don’t hear that every day.”
But you’ll hear it often enough if you go down the fixed-line road.
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