Sound Diary: Robert Maggio
Composer ROBERT MAGGIO is a Professor and Chairman of the Department of Music Theory and Composition in the School of Music at West Chester University. His newest work, “Summer: 2 AM,” scored for soprano and orchestra, was conceived as a companion piece to Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” and commissioned by James Freeman for soprano Laura Heimes and Orchestra 2001. On Saturday, May 22, 2010, Orchestra 2001 will premiere the piece as part of its Samuel Barber Centennial program.
Here are Maggio’s reflections on Barber and the process of writing “Summer: 2 AM” with librettist Mary Liz McNamara.
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Trying Not To Think About “Knoxville: Summer of 1915”
or: How Mary Liz and I wrote “Summer: 2 AM”
by Robert Maggio
Maggio with his mother and daughter. "Summer: 2 AM" is dedicated to them.
In 1982, I bought a recording of Eleanor Steber singing Barber’s “Knoxville” at the Yale Co-op on the recommendation of my first composition teacher, who sensed in my own “young” music a spirit kindred to Barber’s. Along with Copland’s, Bernstein’s and Ives’ music, Barber’s compositions became beacons of light for me amidst the overwhelming variety of 20th Century music I was immersed in as a student. Barber’s idyllic, moving and nostalgic picture of writer James Agee’s native Knoxville, Tennessee haunted me with its simple, dreamlike depiction of an evening in the American South, narrated by a child who seems, at times, to transform into an adult of profound wisdom. I wore out that recording of “Knoxville,” secretly wishing I had written it.
Thus it was something of a dream come true to have been commissioned to create a companion piece to “Knoxville” to celebrate the Barber Centennial and yet, the shadow of anxiety cast by Barber’s music was something I was eager to step out of. I immediately decided that my new piece could be nothing like Barber’s.
To this end, my very first call was to enlist Mary Liz McNamara to write the words for this new “song cycle.” Mary Liz is a talented singer-songwriter, a mother of two self-assured young men, and a good friend. We met through the BMI musical theater workshop in New York and have collaborated on three concert music projects over the past four years. She’s both hilarious and soulful, and I knew that collaborating with her would lead me out of “Knoxville’s” shadow into funnier, less nostalgic musical and dramatic territory.
In approaching the writing of the piece, Mary Liz and I discussed all sorts of ways to complement Barber’s “Knoxville,” and some musical and lyrical ideas kept surfacing, such as the image of a rocking chair on a summer night, and the inevitability of change coupled with a yearning for constancy. In fact, the opening of “Summer” is a paraphrase of “Knoxville,” in which the soprano attempts to use Barber’s music as a lullaby for her restless child.
“Our” soprano, the wonderful Laurie Heimes, is a new mother herself, and when we met her at her home to discuss ideas for the piece on a hot, summer day, she hurried in and out of the room, gracefully and with great humor juggling the demands of a newborn with our free-wheeling discussion, all on very little sleep. There was the hot summer day and the rocking chair of the Barber piece, but the point of view was not of a child, as it is in “Knoxville,” but of this very new parent.
It seemed a natural, logical pursuit for us: write about this very personal, idiosyncratic and yet almost universal experience. How does a person realize, not just with the mind, but with every part of their exhausted being, that everything, the whole world, has changed? And so, in a series of eight short songs, “Summer: 2 AM” charts the dizzying, stupefying, awful and wonderful transformation of a person into a parent.
When Barber was writing “Knoxville,” his father, Roy Barber, was losing his health and rapidly approaching death. Barber dedicated the work with the inscription “In memory of my Father,” suggesting that his father’s deteriorating health had something to do with his identification with the piece. I dedicate “Summer: 2 AM” to my mother, whose own memory has been fading far too quickly over the years, and to my daughter, now age 9, who is blossoming more and more each day, much to my amazement and delight. In trying not to think about “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” I found a way to remember my own summers, past and future.
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Orchestra 2001: Samuel Barber Centennial. Saturday, May 22. 8 PM. Kimmel Center, Perelman Theater. 300 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102.
Second performance (FREE): Sunday, May 23. 3 PM. Swarthmore College, Lang Concert Hall, Swarthmore, PA 19081.
Tickets: Buy online (May 22 only) or call 215-893-1999
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