Knoxvillians have generally approached Knoxville: Summer of 1915—both the prose poem by James Agee and the Samuel Barber work for voice and orchestra that was based on Agee’s text—with a fair measure of affection and pride. We’ve also felt a certain detachment from them. Both works depict a Knoxville that exists for us almost exclusively in the muted colors of old photographs and in hazy images we’ve constructed with wishful thinking. On the other hand, what might a new work about the Knoxville of today suggest about our current lives?
This new work, Knoxville: Summer of 2015, by composer Ellen Reid and librettist Royce Vavrek, receives its academic premiere this week, back to back with the Barber piece, in a Knoxville-centric concert at the Tennessee Theatre. The concert is a result of a special collaboration between the University of Tennessee Symphony Orchestra and the UT Department of Theatre. The Reid/Vavreck Knoxville: Summer of 2015 was commissioned by the New York-based Beth Morrison Projects and Vision Into Art.
Reid was born in Oak Ridge and lived there through high school. She earned an undergraduate degree in musicology at Columbia University and a master’s at the California Institute of the Arts. However, it was in those formative high school years in Oak Ridge that another connection was made—Katy Wolfe, now a voice faculty member in UT’s theater department, was her voice teacher. Wolfe subsequently spearheaded this concert collaboration and will be the vocalist in the performance of Reid’s work.
“The story of the piece is that a person returns to Knoxville for their great-grandfather’s 100th birthday,” Reid says. “And the story deals with the difference between the two lives.
“My own great-grandmother lived to be 106. She was born when people were still riding horses. She lived through Model Ts, modern cars, and Google. That collapsing of intense technical progress creates a distance and disconnect that is specific to our time. … The piece deals with that conflict between modernity and nostalgia that I think Knoxville definitely has.”
This week’s audience has the opportunity to feel that conflict between nostalgia and modernity as well. Reid’s work uses the same instrumentation as Barber’s piece, but in a musical context that is undeniably modern. Yet there are connections to the Barber work that influenced Reid’s.
“The instrumentation alone creates similar colors,” Reid says. “The image I get is golden, like the golden hour when the sun is setting. So just by using the same instruments, you get the same colors. … The Barber is much more pastoral than the Knoxville I see and know, so I wanted to reflect more complexity in my piece.”
The concert will also include the orchestra and the UT Chamber Singers in a performance of music from Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land and Knoxville history-derived readings from local historians and guest speakers.
The University of Tennessee Symphony Orchestra and the UT Department of Theatre will present Knoxville: Summers of 1915 and 2015 at the Tennessee Theatre (604 S. Gay St.) on Friday, Oct. 30, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $20, with discounts for seniors and students.
Alan Sherrod has been writing about Knoxville’s vibrant classical music scene since 2007. In 2010, he won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts—the Arts Journalism Institute in Classical Music and Opera—under the auspices of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He also operates his own blogs, Classical Journal and Arts Knoxville.
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