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<i>Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute</i> (review)

2011; Music Library Association; Volume: 67; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2011.0028

1534-150X

Luke Howard,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Reviewed by: Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute Luke Howard Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute. Edited by Peter Dickinson. (Eastman Studies in Music.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010. [xv, 198 p. ISBN 9781580463508. $49.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. The Samuel Barber centenary was bound to encourage a profusion of new publications about the composer, supplementing Barbara Heyman's authoritative Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), which will soon appear in a new edition. But perhaps the most useful anniversary homage is Peter Dickinson's Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute, an insightful collection of interviews with Barber and his friends and associates (mostly conducted by Dickinson himself) that are here transcribed and published in full for the first time. Most of these interviews took place in 1981 as Dickinson was preparing a radio [End Page 527] documentary on Barber for the BBC, which was broadcast in 1982 on the first anniversary of the composer's death. They are combined in this volume with short essays by Dickinson on Barber's early childhood and the British reception of his music. In terms of factual information about Barber, there are almost no surprises here. The details of his life and music, Dickinson notes, have already been covered at length in Heyman's biography and her forthcoming Comprehensive Catalog of the Complete Works of Samuel Barber. These transcripts, however, give insight, opinions, and anecdotes not available anywhere else, and the essays provide an alternate lens through which to view his career, making this volume indispensible to the music scholar as its vivifies the Barber biography. Dickinson begins with a brief chapter outlining Barber's youth in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and his early years at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute. But instead of simply cribbing Heyman's biography, Dickinson has used a series of interviews with Barber's former neighbors and friends in West Chester conducted by then-student Brent D. Fegley soon after Barber's death. From these interviews, Dickinson creates a mosaic image of the young musician as seen through the eyes of the communities in which he grew and developed. At first, the reminiscences seemed (to me, at least) occasionally trivial or irrelevant. Some of his former neighbors, for example, offered generic thoughts about Sam Barber being a quiet boy, naturally musical, coming from a "good family." But when those apparently innocuous memories are paired with comments by Virgil Thompson on Barber's social status, "luck," and privileged upbringing, and how they affected his later relations with composers and critics, then those innocent reflections from West Chester take on added significance. Dickinson then gives a more substantial summary of the reception of Barber's music in England. Much of the chapter is a recitation of dates, performances, and quotes from newspaper critics—not always thrilling reading, but the overall picture it creates is a crucial one. As Dickinson notes, the international reception of Barber's music was not so beholden to "the assumptions of genius" (p. 16) that often attended Barber's music in the United States. And since the interviews that make up the bulk of this volume were conducted in preparation for a BBC Radio 3 documentary, it makes sense to create a British context for those interviews. There is a minimum of commentary in this chapter, though Dickin son does observe that Barber's critical reputation in England grew steadily through the 1940s and 1950s, dipped in the 1960s when the modernist avant-garde was dominant, and then improved again, finally vindicating the composer's personal romantic style. Transcripts of fourteen interviews make up the remainder of the book. First are the interviews with Barber himself, conducted respectively by James Fassett in 1949, Robert Sherman in 1978, and Allan Kozinn in 1979. Fassett's interview is relatively short—it took place during intermission at the premiere of Knoxville: Summer of 1915—but Sherman's and Kozinn's are more wide-ranging, obviously coming much later in the composer's career. Barber gave few interviews during his lifetime—these are valuable, rare sources of insight into the composer's mind and aesthetic, and collecting them together in this volume is...