Looking back at Knoxville
Gran Wilson introduced me to Knoxville: Summer of 1915, when I returned to school after a year-and-a-half hiatus. I was eager to get back into the swing of things, get involved, and jump-start my growth. Prof is a well-known wordsmith with a soft spot for brilliant American authors and storied Southern towns; I loved the piece before I heard it, just from listening to him describe it. I couldn’t get the music out of my head for the majority of junior year, and I spent as much time dragging out sections of it in the practice room, long after the competition I had been preparing it for had come and gone. The sting of not advancing had no effect on my love for the music, and, more novel for me at the time, the desire to say something with it.
Fast forward to my final recital at the University of Maryland, and I was preparing to move to, as fate would have it, Knoxville for graduate school. Naturally, the piece was on my mind again. I was already knee-deep in an ambitious recital: 45 minutes of art song and a Bach cantata on the docket already, but I just knew it would make the perfect transitional piece for this phase in my life. I recruited my fellow students and created a chamber orchestra. I asked Katy Hilton to conduct, and she worked with me to schedule sectionals and put it all together. I asked my mom to choreograph and perform a solo piece alongside me to underscore Agee’s themes. Prof came to our final orchestra rehearsal with a beautifully prepared speech (no, really, he took the time to write out a whole speech for his harebared student’s recital) about the piece, the meaning of the text, and its impact. To this day, I don’t know how so many folks let me get away with all this, but I am so grateful for the beauty and the experience.
When I had the opportunity to revisit this piece six years later, I was thrilled. Unearthing, rephrasing, and reimagining this piece alongside Michael for my last WFMT with Ryan Opera Center was really more than I could have asked for. I am so, so proud of this project - and, in that, for opportunities to come back to what I love, better all the time.
Please take a listen on YouTube:
I managed to find my program notes from 2019 when I performed this the first time; why not give them another run?
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PROGRAM NOTE:
Samuel Barber (1910 – 1981) – was one of the most frequently performed American composers of his generation from the 1940s to the 1960s. He enjoyed early fame and enduring acclaim as a composer, and he lived to see virtually all his music recorded. His music is characterized by typical American directness and simplicity, making it appealing and easy to understand. Barber’s songs have a lyric grace and romantic drama that attract international audiences. Barber was a careful craftsman and paid specific attention to each poem he set. In the case of Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Barber set James Agee’s introductory essay from his novel A Death in the Family. Agee’s poignant look back at his childhood struck a chord with Barber, and when soprano Eleanor Steber commissioned a work from him in February, he immediately decided to set it to music. The piece came quickly and was completed on April 4, 1947.
James Agee’s essay is a dreamy, conversational, almost improvisatory piece of prose reflecting on summers spent with his family at their home in Tennessee. The author claimed he wrote the stream-of-consciousness text in less than 90 minutes and made only minor revisions once it was complete. Throughout the essay, Agee shifts between viewing the world as an adult and seeing it through the eyes of his five-year-old self. He affectionately describes his parents and his artist uncle and musician aunt, both of whom were very close to him. While the text superficially yearns for the “golden years”, it is suffused with an inescapable adult knowledge of the frailty of life. Written in 1938, with the world on the verge of WWII, and reflecting back to 1915, when the nation was struggling to avoid WWI, Agee seems eager to cling to innocence as long as possible, even while recognizing the inevitability of its loss.
For his part, Barber was struck by the uncanny similarity between his and Agee’s childhood: both were five years old in 1915 and were raised by loving parents and an artistic aunt and uncle (for Barber, the composer Sidney Homer and contralto Louise Homer). The composer later wrote to his uncle, “It reminded me so much of summer evenings in West Chester, now very far away, and all of you are in it.” Barber’s Aunt Louise would pass away on May 6, 1947. His father, to whom the composer dedicated Knoxville, followed on August 12.
