This piece is so touching with the child talking about being alive in Knoxville in the summer of 1915. This was just before the U.S. entered WWI (that wasn't until 1917). It evokes a lulling and lyrical sense of peace and beauty, even the loud auto. But there is one line in the poem that sets off this idyllic time presented in the text. It's when the narrator says "By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth..." This line is very different from the rest of Aggee's text. It is a child who is narrating the piece, but there is a timelessness in the acknowledgment and poignancy of loss and sorrow, especially told with a child's voice., that makes everything else in the text special and precious.
the late year lies down the north, all is healed , all is health. High summer holds the earth ,hearts all whole. Another wonerful pairing of Agee and Barber
As I drive slowly ,this summertime, past houses with old fashioned gardens, i remember sitting on my back porch in St Louis with my neighbor, stringing beans, extracting honey from hives and , all the time , this piece is singing in my mind
Thank you all for your kind comments. I visualized making this video for many years, ever since I first heard the piece and I'm very glad it has touched those who have viewed it.
The music may have been written for Eleanor Steber, a wonderful, powerful soprano, but her recording is more a tribute to the power of her voice than to the tenderness of the prose. Dawn Upshaw's delivery of the material is fully in keeping with the sentiment of James Agee. Her sweetness of tone gathers the music and the listener into the intimate love expressed in the lyric.
Thank you, Hugh, for your wonderful comments. I feel very close to the Barber piece since so many of the photos were taken by my my father around 1915 and for many years I wanted to combine the two.
Thank you, Richard Lewis, for introducing this art to Everyman. At times, it is so poignant that it's sweetly painful. It elicits the sweet pain of being human. I agree with Howard Chasnoff: "Thanks for including photographs and the text along with the music. It is extremely effective." Until this morning, I didn't know much about Samuel Barber, James Agree or Knoxville in 1915. My brother-in-law introduced me to your RU-vid by writing: "Well, I saw some neighbors sitting on their porch in the pleasant evening air. It reminded me of this [link to your page]. It is Dawn Upshaw singing Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915. I just love it..." My brother-in-law chooses his words and his renditions carefully, so I had to play it immediately. I, too, have fallen in love with it, and with your photographs.
Probably the most touching and inspiring American works. Thanks for including photographs and the text along with the music. It is extremely effective.
Thank you so much. I've loved this piece for 40 years, both for Agee's amazing prose and for Barber's incomparable music (I'm glad that, 35 years after his death, he is finally being granted his rightful place among the greatest of U.S. composers). And thank you for your carefully collected and arranged photographs, which add even more. When I see photos of nameless, or even well-know, persons who have died, I always wonder about them and hope that they had good lives, and that God has blessed them. That goes too for Agee and Barber, who both died disappointed alcoholics.
I've added this to my best memories playlist because of my experience accompanying the piece in recital, and because I have poignant memories of Sunday morning worship at First Presbyterian Church, Knoxville.
I'll check out that version. You may be right about it being possibly the most beautiful American vocal piece. I was captivated from the very first time I heard it more than fifty years ago and also convinced that someday I had to do a visual to go with it. And it's a beautifully structured pice of music as well. A true Barber gem.
Thank you from the depths of my heart. My tears for the loss of this once familiar world is my simple and straightforward tribute to your gift of posting this..
Richard Lewis I thought of your video on a recent nightly bike ride. The one thing I miss more than anything else are "the front porches". That magical mystical moment in the evening, when all the grown-ups are sitting on the front porch , the quiet assured voices like soothing ebbing tides, and all us kids are running around, trying to keep the fading light to stay and the fireflies to fall into our hands. Your video, Agree's "Death in a Family", Barber's "Knoxville", Thornton Wilder's "Our Town"......soothe and serenade ("serene" is the apt word).the memory...Thank you, again. .
Alan Hill If I understand you correctly, I totally agree with you. Your quoted words are exactly what I would like to see more represented in this video, as it is how I see this wonderful music, and the images that I get from it. The urban scenes for me are quite jarring, and I do not pick that up in the music at all, regardless of whether James Agee has referred to it in his poem. I've scrolled through RU-vid for other postings that might offer more of these "rural porch scenes" and other things rural, but it seems that it is quite difficult to find one that closely matches this music, so elusive is it. I've known this piece for over 55 years, and I will mention that my voice and piano copy of it is autographed by Eleanor Steber, who originally commissioned this work.
Alan Hill If I understand you correctly, I totally agree with you. Your quoted words are exactly what I would like to see more represented in this video, as it is how I see this wonderful music, and the images that I get from it. The urban scenes for me are quite jarring, and I do not pick that up in the music at all, regardless of whether James Agee has referred to it in his poem. I've scrolled through RU-vid for other postings that might offer more of these "rural porch scenes" and other things rural, but it seems that it is quite difficult to find one that closely matches this music, so elusive is it. I've known this piece for over 55 years, and I will mention that my voice and piano copy of it is autographed by Eleanor Steber, who originally commissioned this work.
***** You understand me correctly, alger3041. And I envy you tremendously for having Eleanor Steber's autograph. My favorite recording of hers is the incandescent version of Les Nuits d`été by Berlioz. Another elusive and poignant work that can only be adequately "completed" by the open heart willing to remember and receive it.
To Richard Lewis: I must have looked at your marvelous presentation at least 25 or more times; and this past semester I showed it on a large screen to my Music Analysis class at the Belmont University School of Music here in Nashville. I am an Eastman School alumnus who studied composition with Howard Hanson many more years ago than I would like to admit, but it was there that I first heard this wonderful music of Sam Barber. His students (from Curtis) were very evident at the Composition Symposiums that were held every year at different music schools. The reason for this message is to say that the sensitivity in choosing these old (of another time) photographs is so evident here. It is very moving. Thank you so much, and I will be viewing it again from time to time. William Pursell, Belmont Composition Faculty
Thank you, Richard. I've loved this piece too ever since I first heard it back in the early 1960s and almost immediately thought of it in relation to my parents photo albums. It was only with the advent of the internet that I found it practical to put something together. Before that I sometimes thought of making a slide show and playing a recording with it but that always seemed too difficult to deal with.
Also to Richard Lewis: I teach retired people through a thing called the Osher program. While I don’t have anyone alive in 1915, there are several old enough to remember America between the wars. After I showed this yesterday, quite a few were in tears, and one man said that seeing it had transformed his life. Agee’s word and Barber’s music work their magic, of course, but it is your careful and sensitive choice of images that packages them with such quiet power. Thank you!
Yes Megan, that comes across beautifully; its so summer-like. The photo of the house I used just before that was where Barber grew up and it's followed by an early shot of him and his family at the piano. Thanks for your comment.
Check out Sylvia McNair's version. I worship Dawn but think McNair captures a couple key moments just a hair more effectively (now is the night, one blue dew + will not ever tell me who I am). Both are aces. The most beautiful vocal piece by a U.S. composer?
By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.
Ms. Upshaw blows this work out of the water, my absolute favorite version of my second most favorite piece of composed music. (that said, the youtube video from Russell Thomas intrigues me)
Thank you for this. I like this version. You don't say who the soprano is. My favorite recording of this piece is by Sylvia McNair. Thank you for sharing this. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-WG8_nLJ6238.html
I disagree about the poetry. I've never heard of aestival, pasteboard, what are they? He could have used different words, it's supposed to be descriptive and yet it's language nobody has ever heard before.
Clowns in hueless amber? What clown have u ever seen that has anything hueless? I have no idea what he's even describing. Clowns always have louder colors than anything of a regular person. It's infuriating, the poetry.
Stertorous. Another unbelievably horrible choice of words. It's already imperceptible because of the tempo of the piece at that point, and another word I've never heard in my life.
Torn between hating this piece and liking it. The language in the fast sections is ALWAYS imperceptible no matter how crisp the singer's diction is. It's sloppy poetry to be sung that quickly. Everybody says such wonderful things about this piece but if u can't even understand what the fuck they're saying, it's frustrating. It's English..you shouldn't have to listen to 4 or 5 different singers to try and understand it and STILL have to go to the actual written lyrics to do so.
Entire fast section NEVER perceptible, terrible, absolutely horrible music making, people will say just look at the lyrics but one NEVER knows what the hell the singer is singing because it's too fast and they get drowned out by the orchestra and the word IRON never is heard no matter where it's placed.
