This is a piece built from Americana, horses and buggies, images of streetcars with their “bleak spark crackling and cursing above like a small malignant spirit set to dog tracks,” and “parents on porches” who “rock and rock.” It’s a collection of raw sense memory, unrevised. It’s experimental in how it marries music with a non-rhyming tone poem, yet serene, even traditional in execution. ![]() It’s less of a “story,” even, than a melting of words into a golden recollection of a Tennessee summer. The story itself, such as it is, is not exactly challenging material. “Their response to loss, to something awful,” says Artistic Director Ryan Turner during his recorded conversation afterward with Sarah Moyer, “is nostalgia.” Composer Samuel Barber, too, was dealing with the passing of a parent. In the introduction, Moyer talks about how James Agee wrote this piece in 1938, setting it the year before his father’s untimely death. Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is performed as part of a series called Summer Sessions from Emmanuel Music. You are inside a refuge of the mind, the kind Knoxville: Summer of 1915 invokes with Sarah Moyer’s voice and the parred down instrumentation of Timothy Steele. ![]() But you’re also encapsulated in your memories. You’re in your body, living through a strange time and a terrifying plague, simultaneously overwhelmed and bored while sitting in your room for the ninth hour in a row, feeling the spray from the showerhead, or sitting as far as you can from other masked people on the T, some of whom let their masks sit beneath their nostrils because, apparently, the smell of the train is that important. It’s been months since you’ve seen your family all in one place. ![]() Simultaneously, your mind is thinking about your family road trips to Iowa, the raucous laughter of your friends in eighth grade, and traveling, once, to Paris. You are waiting in your bedroom for your next Zoom meeting to start, you are in the shower taking fifteen minutes for yourself away from your kids, or you are putting on your mask, ready to head into work where you’re considered essential staff, but not essential enough for customers to remember to wear their masks when you take their order. ZOOM - You are here and you are not here.
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