Knoxville: Summer of 1915 Op 24 by Samuel Barber
Greer Lyle, Soprano
JJ Penna, Piano
Recital at Yale University, Sprague Morse Recital Hall, April 20th, 2022
Music by Samuel Barber
Text by James Agee:
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.
Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose.
Low in the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes...
Parents on porches: rock and rock. From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces.
The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.
On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there,
my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there.…They are not talking much,
and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The
stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All
my people are larger bodies than mine,...with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of
sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is
my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. 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.
After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive
me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not,
not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.
*I do not own the rights to this music*
