Saturday, April 10, 2010

Knoxville Summer of 1915

Last night I played a concert with The Prairie Ensemble that included a performance of Samuel Barber's "Knoxville Summer of 1915." The text of the piece is by James Agee. With Barber and Agee on the brain (though I should be thinking about other things today), I found the above picture of his childhood home in Knoxville in an article in the journal of the American Geographical Society.

4 comments:

Michael Leddy said...

"Shortly before the house was razed": it seems as though such a house would have to no longer be standing. Too good to be true if it were.

Elaine Fine said...

The house no longer stands, but it is exactly the house I imagined in the piece! Isn't it interesting that houses can be built and torn down, but they can still live in a work of art (as in art, music, and writing).

Michael Leddy said...

The last words of Swann's Way: "The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions which formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years."

Translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002).

Richard Lewis said...

I thought you might be interested in a recent video I made for Barber's Knoxville. Ever since I first heard Eleanor Steber's recording many years ago I have wanted to make slide show to go with it as it brought to mind the photos of the period in my parent's photo albums. I used many of those photos in this video and it stands as a memory to my parents as well as to Barber and Agee.

http://youtu.be/bXlLJbOPHNc