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Barber Puzzler. Define the following words and use them in ONE COHERENT sentence. aestival belling stertorous malignant frailing. Samuel Barber Career. born West Chester, Pennsylvania, 3/9/1910 began composing at age 7 organist at Westminster Presbyterian Church while in High School
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Barber Puzzler • Define the following words and use them in ONE COHERENT sentence. • aestival • belling • stertorous • malignant • frailing
Samuel BarberCareer • born West Chester, Pennsylvania, 3/9/1910 • began composing at age 7 • organist at Westminster Presbyterian Church while in High School • entered Curtis Institute at age 14 as a member of its first class (1924) • a. Curtis founded by Mary Louise Curtis Bok • studied piano, composition, conducting and voice•
Samuel BarberCareer • sang in Vienna in 1935, heard on NBC radio and recorded his own Dover Beach • spent 8 years at Curtis and composed two songs from Op. 2, Serenade for String Quartet, Dover Beach and the Cello Sonata - these works are standards in American repertoire•
Samuel BarberCareer • won many awards: • a. Berns Prize in 1928 for the Violin Sonata • b. Bearns Prize in 1933 for The School for Scandal • c. Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship in 1935 • d. Rome Prize in 1936 • the First Symphony, composed in Rome, was performed at the Salzburg Festival under the direction of Rodzinski and was the first American work to be performed there • e. National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1941 • f. American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1958 • g. Guggenheim Fellowship in 1945•
Samuel BarberCareer • h. consultant to the American Academy in Rome in 1948 • i. New York Music Critic's Circle Award in 1947 for the Cello Concerto • j. Opera Vanessa won Pulitzer Prize in 1958 • k. Piano Concerto won second Pulitzer Prize in 1962 • met Toscanini in 1935 • Toscanini and the NBC SO premiered the First Essay and the Adagio for Strings (orchestral transcription) in 1938 • the Adagio was recorded by Toscanini and became Barber's most popular work•
Samuel BarberCareer • taught at Curtis from 1939 - 1942 • drafted in 1943 - Army Air Force • composed Commando March for band and the Second Symphony (he destroyed score and performance parts in 1968) • second mvt. exists as Night Flight • commissioned by the Ditson Fund, Lincoln Kirstein, Eleanor Steber, the Coolidge Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the league of Composers, G. Schirmer, the Metropolitan Opera•
Samuel BarberCareer • re-set Adagio for Strings as a choral work Agnus Dei in 1967 • died in New York of cancer, January 23, 1981 • opera Antony and Cleopatra (1966 - opening of Met in Lincoln Center)a failure due to the production and direction of Zeffirelli•
Samuel BarberStyle • an expression of personal emotion • lyric and dramatic • 19th century harmonic language • classicist•
Samuel BarberCompositions • 7 stage • 22 orchestral • 16 choral • 9 chamber • 28 solo instrumental • 58 songs • principal publisher: G. Schirmer•
Samuel BarberAdagio for Strings • composed in 1936 • slow mvt of string quartet, Op. 11 • came to world attention in 1938 as performed by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra•
Samuel BarberKnoxville: Summer of 1915 • composed in 1947, revised in 1950 • set to an autobiographical text by James Agee which appeared in The Partisan Review and later in his book “A Death in the Family” • scored for soprano and orchestra • premiere in April 1948 by the BSO under Koussevitsky with Eleanor Steber, soprano (she comm. the work)•
Knoxville: Summer of 1915 • 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 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; raises 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 on 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. • James Agee