In the latter half of the twentieth century, the ravages and long, painful aftermath of World War II were undoubtedly the most potent catalyst in changing the face of artistic thought. Certainly, World War II affected many composers of divergent inclinations, resulting in changing aesthetics and modes of musical expression. This war was in part responsible for music newly and especially concerned with and informed by technology and tragedy, rationality and remorse.

While never explicitly explained as such by the composer, it is tempting to view Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1947) as an expression of one facet of his reactions to World War II. While portions of Barber's wartime Symphony No. 2 (1944-1947) are clearly cast in an overtly patriotic mode, Knoxville finds at its center an urgently intense, almost overwhelming nostalgia, free of unrest though characterized by a pervasively sensuous immediacy.

This latter aspect of both music and text is a crucial element in the dynamics of the work. It is an ardent and sincere—rather than merely sentimental—nostalgia Barber evokes, informed by a sense and realization of loss. Much of the appeal that James Agee's text (which Barber had discovered in an anthology drawn from Partisan Review) must have had for the composer came not only from the inherent qualities of the prose, but also in the similarity in the ages of author and composer as well as the shared experience of the idyllic childhood expressed in Agee's warm, vivid tones. "It has become that time of evening," begins Barber's setting, characterized in its most serene moments by supple, liquid vocal lines, uncomplicated, often diatonic harmony, and the regular lilt of triplet rhythms. The pictorial sense of Barber's orchestration is fully equal to that of the text, emerging in subtle instrumental characterizations of both the more languid aspects of the Knoxville twilight—nocturnal insects, the gentle spray of a garden hose, the subdued rocking of "parents on porches"—and momentary disturbances such as a passing streetcar, its overhead spark "crackling and cursing...like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks."

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