Ravinia 2024 Issue 2

They had to get orchestral effects, sound harmo- nies, and all the techniques of European con- cert pianists who were playing their music all over the city. New York ‘ticklers’ developed the orchestral piano—full, round, big, widespread chords in tenths, a heavy bass moving against the right hand.” These keyboard techniques soon became hall- marks of Johnson’s unique approach to ragtime. A wide-leaping left hand, adapted from Cho- pin and other 19th-century pianist-composers, earned this style the nickname “stride” piano. Though not the only stride pianist of the era, Johnson was unquestionably the most recogniz- able figure and came to be known as the “Father of Stride.” Living in the artistic hotbed of New York City in the 1920s, the young musician also made a mark as a Tin Pan Alley songwriter and musical theater composer. His two-act Runnin’ Wild opened October 29, 1923, at the New Colonial Theater, a vaudeville on the corner of Broadway and 62nd Street and closed after 213 performances on June 28, 1924. Critics singled out “Old Fashioned Love” as the show’s hit song, but audiences gravitated to a number that quickly became the dance rage of the decade: “Charleston.” Its infectious rhythms de- scended from the “ring shouts” of Johnson’s youth and were adapted to a modern audience with choreography by Elida (“Lida”) Webb with vocal interpretation by 19-year-old Elisabeth Welch. Johnson then entered a period of semi-retire- ment, moving to St. Albans, Queens, where he could study music, focus more time on com- position, and recuperate from persistent health conditions. There were occasional gigs in Har- lem, but Johnson became less connected with the swing jazz craze he helped launch. Instead, he grew as an unheralded leader of the emerg- ing concert jazz movement. This proved a most difficult path, as Johnson lacked the formal training and credentials of other, mostly white, musicians writing “serious” compositions. His quest for legitimacy as a Black composer mir- rored the aspirations of the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson twice pursued one of the preeminent markers of success as a composer—a Guggenheim Fellowship (1937 and 1942)—but his applications apparently received little meaningful consideration. SAMUEL BARBER (1910–1981) Knoxville: Summer of 1915 , op. 24 Scored for flute and piccolo, oboe and English horn, clarinet, bassoon, two horns, trumpet, triangle, harp, strings, and solo soprano Samuel Barber did not encounter novelist, film critic, and screenwriter James Agee until after composing his one-movement orchestral song Knoxville: Summer of 1915 on April 4, 1947. Their first meeting uncovered amazing similarities of background. They were born only months apart, Agee November 27, 1909 and Barber the follow- ing March 9. According to the composer, both men retained memories of “backyards where our families used to lie in the long summer evenings, we each had an aunt who was a mu- sician.” Such common experiences explained his instantaneous attraction to the childhood recol- lections portrayed in Agee’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” This essay first appeared in the Partisan Review (1938) and was reprinted in the antholo- gy The Partisan Reader (1946). Cherished recollections of growing up in Ten- nessee inspired several of Agee’s other literary works, including the novels The Morning Watch (1950) and A Death in the Family . The latter was published posthumously in 1957—Agee had died two years before—and received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Tad Mosel transformed A Death in the Family into his 1960 play All the Way Home , which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Agee documented the plight of white tenant farmers during the Depression in the ac- claimed book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) with photographs by Walker Evans. His film reviews appeared in Time and The Nation during the 1940s. Agee produced several screen- plays, including The African Queen (1951) and The Night of the Hunter (1955). “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” represents a turn- ing point in Agee’s creative approach. Jazz im- provisation, which he first encountered while living in Florida during the mid-1930s, offered a model for a straight-ahead writing process instead of the typical multiple-draft approach. Nostalgia fueled by contemplation of an autobi- ographical novel furnished material for this im- provisatory writing experiment. Agee recalled his unusually rapid progress: “The writing was easier than most I have managed. It took an hour and a half; on revision, I stayed about 98 percent faithful to my rule, for these ‘improvised’ exper- iments, against any revision whatever.” The writer and composer both described the literary result as “lyrical.” Barber heard poetry James Agee in this nostalgic prose narrative. In order “to make the rhythm clear,” he converted the final third of Agee’s essay into verse in a letter to his uncle Sydney Homer (April 15, 1947). The com- poser formulated a text-sensitive vocal part that simultaneously embraces declamatory (prose) and lyrical (poetic) styles. These qualities suited the voice of American soprano Eleanor Steber, who commissioned Knoxville: Summer of 1915 — although not formally until after its comple- tion—and gave the world premiere. Barber dedicated the published score to the memory of his father, Roy Barber, who passed away on August 12, 1947. His mother, Louise, preceded her husband in death on May 6. The grave illnesses of both parents only magnified the composer’s own sense of nostalgia. Remark- ably, in the midst of this trying period, Barber created a cohesive musical score from Agee’s freeform text. An arch-like structure deter- mined by tempo changes (moderately slow at the beginning and end; fast and agitated in the middle) contributes one level of formal order. Further unity arises from the threefold appear- ance of the opening vocal phrases as an inno- cent, sentimental refrain. A descriptive epigraph from Agee’s prose-poem stands at the head of the score: “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennes- see, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.” After a brief or- chestral introduction, the soprano begins sing- ing in Barber’s versified text: 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, hangers. 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, squared 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. RAVINIAMAGAZINE • JULY 1 – JULY 21, 2024 74