This weekend many across America will be celebrating the centennialization of Samuel Barber, a West Chester native and (only secondary in importance to Philadelphians) two-time Pulitzer prize winner. Barber is one of my favorite American composers. His Knoxville: Summer of 1915, especially when sung by the glorious Dawn Upshaw, completes any summer soundtrack. With the poetic prose of James Agee as his muse, Barber crafted a simultaneously idyllic and chaotic tribute to his father with “lyric rhapsody.”
We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the 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, squaring 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.
–James Agee, Knoxville (appearing as an introduction in his Pulitzer-prize winning novel, A Death in the Family)
