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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
"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.
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).
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).
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
Post a Comment