Composed in 1947 on commission from soprano Eleanor Steber, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 sets to music a text by James Agee chosen from a collection of prose and poetry, The Partisan Reader: Ten Years of “Partisan Review,”1934-1944: An Anthology. Agee’s text subsequently became the prologue to his autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family, which was published posthumously and awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
Agee describes an idyllic scene from his childhood: the sights, sounds and smells on a lazy summer afternoon and evening while he was sitting on the porch or lying in the backyard of his family's home in Knoxville, Tennessee. Barber set Agee’s prose text as poetry, adjusting it into lines that clarify the rhythmic pattern. He wrote to his uncle and mentor, the composer Sidney Homer: “…the summer evening he describes in his native southern town reminded me so much of similar evenings when I was a child at home…it expresses a child’s feeling of loneliness, wonder and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep.” Shortly after he had finished the work, Barber met Agee, and the two discovered numerous coincidences in their lives, starting with the fact that they were born in the same year.
Barber gives the text a simple syllabic setting, appropriate to the character of childhood. Although it is Agee’s reverie, Barber composed Knoxville for a high tessitura more readily imitative of the young boy’s voice. Knoxville is more than a set of fleeting images; rather, it comprises a small but intense drama as the child passes from innocence to a realization of the sorrows of life.
After a short instrumental introduction, the meter shifts to a rocking melody that becomes the unifying musical element in the monologue. The idyll, however, is suddenly interrupted by the excitement of the modern world of automobiles and streetcars, their horns and bells imitated in the orchestra. As the boy’s attention turns back to the intimacy of the family and his own backyard, the opening theme returns but blends into a new lyrical melody as he lovingly describes his family. The reverie is again interrupted upon a sudden intuition of the cares and dangers of adulthood. He mouths an anxious prayer to God for his family. As he describes the ritual of bedtime, the opening theme returns, almost as if lulling him out of his fears and into sleep. Yet, once touched by the image of sorrow, he is permanently changed as he falls asleep questioning his own fate and identity.
Knoxville: Summer of 1915
by James Agee
We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in that time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.
...It has become that time of evening
when people sit on their porches,
rocking gently and talking gently
and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds' hung havens, hangars.
People go by; things go by.
A horse, drawing a buggy,
breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt;
a loud auto; a quiet auto;
people in pairs, not in a hurry,
scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body,
talking casually, the taste hovering over them
of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard and starched milk,
the image upon them of lovers and horsemen,
squared with clowns in hueless amber.
A streetcar raising its iron moan;
stopping, belling and starting; stertorous;
rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan
and swimming its gold windows and straw seats
on past and past and past,
the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it
like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks;
the iron whine rises on rising speed;
still risen, faints; halts;
the faint stinging bell;
rises again, still fainter,
fainting, lifting, lifts, faints foregone:
forgotten.
Now is the night one blue dew.
Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose.
Low on the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes....
Parents on porches: rock and rock. From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces.
The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.
On the rough wet grass of the backyard
my father and mother have spread quilts.
We all lie there,
my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt,
and I too am lying there....
They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet,
of nothing in particular,
of nothing at all in particular,
of nothing at all.
The stars are wide and alive,
they seem each like a smile of great sweetness,
and they seem very near.
All my people are larger bodies than mine,...
with voices gentle and meaningless
like the voices of sleeping birds.
One is an artist, he is living at home.
One is a musician, she is living at home.
One is my mother who is good to me.
One is my father who is good to me.
By some chance, here they are, all on this earth;
and who shall ever tell the sorrow
of being on this earth,
lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening,
among the sounds of the night.
May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble;
and in the hour of their taking away.
After a little I am taken in and put to bed.
Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her;
and those receive me, who quietly treat me,
as one familiar and well-beloved in that home:
but will not, oh, will not,
not now, not ever;
but will not ever tell me who I am.
Program notes by: Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn