I first heard it as a freshman in college, at a fellow voice student’s recital. It wasn’t like anything I had heard before…
“It has become the 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.”
Who were these people, this composer, this poet? How could they reach into my soul like this? I was lost in time, in space, in beauty.
I soon learned the piece was called “Knoxville, Summer of 1915”; the music by Samuel Barber and the words by James Agee, part of the prologue to his last novel, “A Death in the Family”.
This marriage of music and text – Barber’s rocking lullaby, becoming an angular belch of streetcars, ending with a gentle yet aching peace; and Agee’s tender reminiscence of the summer when he was six years old, warm in his family’s love, yet accepting the inevitability of change, questioning, and even death – seems seamless and complete. A feeling bathed in warm light, floating in - and stopping - time.
Since then, over the years I’ve had the privilege of performing it more than once, but never without holding back tears. And even though I have heard it many, many times over the past decades, when it comes on the radio, I stop everything and listen yet again. For fifteen wonderful minutes, I am again six, and spreading quilts in the backyard, safe in the arms of my family, but realizing that they will not ever tell me who I am.
My name is Leslie Chadbourne, I live in Portland, Maine, and this is music that moves me.