SAMUEL BARBER
Born March 9, 1910 in West Chester, PA.
Died January 23, 1981 in New York City, NY
Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (about 15-16’)
First performance by the Wichita Symphony.
I begin these notes with a suggestion. Print out the text of Knoxville: Summer of 1915 that follows these notes. Bring them along to the concert or grab a handout at the performance. Following the text during the music will enhance your enjoyment of this quintessentially American work. The composer recommended that listeners do this. Better yet, take fifteen minutes to pull up one of the many fine performances on YouTube and familiarize yourself with the music before coming to the concert.
James Agee (1909-1955), the author of the text for Knoxville, was one of America’s leading writers of the mid-20th century. Film connoisseurs will remember him as the screenwriter for The African Queen (1951) with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn and Night of the Hunter (1955) starring Robert Mitchum, Lillian Gish, and Shelley Winters. With photographer Walker Evans, Agee wrote a photo-journalist account of Alabama during the depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Death in the Family, was published posthumously in 1958.
Agee wrote Knoxville: Summer of 1915 as an experiment in improvisatory prose, which he completed in about ninety minutes in 1938. With the world on the brink of World War II, Agee’s thoughts reflect backward on his childhood memories in Knoxville, Tennessee, one year before his father died in an auto accident and the family’s subsequent departure from Knoxville. Calling his work “strictly autobiographical,” The text is considered by some to be the most ecstatic piece ever written about an American summer. Agee’s prose touches upon themes of nostalgia, loss, mortality, and self-identity. The work was published in a literary journal and eventually appeared as the prologue to Agee’s A Death in the Family.
Samuel Barber previously set Agee’s poem Sure on This Shining Night to music in 1938 and had a deep respect for Agee’s work. In the spring of 1947, Barber was dealing with the deteriorating health of his beloved aunt, the singer Louise Homer, and his father, both of whom would pass before the end of that summer. The themes of Agee’s prose inspired Barber’s musical response. Barber set only a portion of Agee’s complete Knoxville, taking most of the last third or so and eliminating a few sentences.
Agee’s prose spoke to Barber’s childhood memories and the summer evenings in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Those were times before air-conditioning when people spent time rocking on their front porches or lying on blankets in the backyard to escape the heat. Barber wrote, “Mr. Agee and I are the same age, and the year he described was 1915 when we were both five. You see, [the text] expresses a child’s feelings of loneliness, wonder, and lack of identity in the marginal world between twilight and sleep.”
Barber composed Knoxville quickly and finished the work on April 4, 1947, dedicating it to his father and writing the music for the American soprano Eleanor Steber. The work premiered on April 9, 1948, with Steber and the Boston Symphony conducted by Serge Koussevitzky. Unable to attend the concert due to commitments in Italy, Barber received a telegram from Koussevitzky informing him that Knoxville was “an outstanding success and made a deep impression on all.”
James Agee could not attend the premiere either, but when he finally heard the work, his remark that “Barber’s music is self-sufficient” was his only comment. While author and composer became good friends, and Barber pressed Agee for another text, none was forthcoming.
Barber subsequently made some edits and reduced the orchestration of Knoxville. That version, the one we hear tonight, premiered on April 1, 1950, at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, with William Strickland conducting soprano Eileen Farrell and a small chamber orchestra.
While Agee’s text speaks of his childhood in Knoxville, the city is a placeholder for Every Town, USA. Just as the text reminded Barber of his Pennsylvania childhood, Eleanor Steber, who grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia, declared that Knoxville was “exactly my childhood!” Leontyne Price, who sung the work many times and recorded it in the mid-1950s, said: “As a southerner, it expresses everything I know about my roots and about my mama and father . . . my hometown . . . You can smell the South in it.” Knoxville is beloved by sopranos, and even tenors will occasionally perform it. Recordings of Knoxville by Steber, Farrell, Price, and others can be found on YouTube.
Barber described his Knoxville as “a lyrical rhapsody.” There are three main sections, with the opening section returning twice to give the work a rondo structure of A – B - (transition) – A – C – A. The music is sung without pause between sections and lasts approximately fifteen or sixteen minutes.
Listen throughout for how the music depicts the words of the text. This process is called word painting, and composers have used this technique for centuries. Barber’s perfect and exquisite rendition of the text is both musical and visual and stands out as one of the greatest achievements of musical Americana from the mid-20th century.
As the music begins, the woodwinds play a brief introduction to set the mood before the music settles on a gentle andante rocking motion between two chords with a triplet motion that accompanies the soprano entrance. We can hear “people rocking gently and talking gently.” The melodic line ascends to depict “and the standing up.” It’s a quiet street scene interrupted by a “loud auto” with a mildly dissonant crunch and a “gentle auto.” People stroll by, talking and not in a hurry. The soprano’s voice weaves around the orchestral accompaniment.
Suddenly, the music interrupts with an agitated allegro (the B section). We visualize a busy street scene. It’s rush hour, and the music becomes more dissonant. Chromatic scales and chord clusters evoke the “iron moan” of a streetcar’s wheels against the tracks and the electric sparks “cracking and cursing above it.” The alliteration of “s” sounds in the text capture the friction of the wheels against the tracks. Gradually, the streetcar drives off (“fainting”) into the distance as the music becomes softer.
The vocal line reaches its highest note on a B-flat in the phrase “one blue dew,” announcing the arrival of twilight. A transitional passage, still with the sound of distant horns, turns to rising arpeggios that bring us back to the family’s yard where “father drains and coils the hose.” Once again, the rocking motion of the opening (Section A) returns. Only now, instead of unspecified people rocking, it’s parents who are rocking, and the text and music convey a more intimate scene.
This repeat of the opening section is shorter, and the music shifts into a pastoral allegretto (slightly faster) that introduces us to the child’s mother and father with the family lying on quilts spread over the “wet grass” in the backyard (Section C). The music captures the quietness of the scene and the conversation “about nothing in particular.” Amid this simplicity, note how the harmony becomes enriched as the child gazes up in amazement to “the stars wide and alive” before returning to a rather matter-of-fact description of the child’s family. This family could be almost anyone’s family, and Samuel Barber and others saw their own lives and memories in the descriptive words.
The music turns serious with a sighing motive in a minor key as the text touches upon the “sorrow of being on this earth.” The contrast between “sorrow” and the imagery of “lying on the grass in a summer evening” is one of the work’s most striking moments. Finally, the child asks for God’s blessing of his family “in their time of trouble and in the hour of their taking away.” In the sighing motive accompaniment, we can almost hear their heartbeats. At this climax, the music achieves fortissimo dynamics for the first time, and the brass instruments return us to the opening introductory passage with their stentorian chords.
As the child is put to bed, the music returns to the gentle rocking of Section A. In a final moment of self-awareness, the child wonders about who he is as the music rocks him to sleep, ending on enriched A-major arpeggios.
Barber scored Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for solo soprano, flute doubling on piccolo, oboe doubling on English horn, clarinet, bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, harp, and strings. There is even a single triangle strike, which is sometimes omitted, as it is in this concert.
Notes by Don Reinhold, ©2022
Knoxville: Summer of 1915 - Text
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 horsement,
Squared with clowns in hueless amber.
A streetcar raising into 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;
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.
The stars are wide and alive,
They all seem 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.