Loading the Canon

Libby Larsen has an athleticism and youthfulness that’s unusual for her fifty-four years. Her tiny, five-foot frame is lithe and wiry like a marathon runner’s. And she talks as fast as it looks like she can run. From the moment she walked into the D’Amico & Sons café near her South Minneapolis home, she was holding forth passionately on such varied topics as the restaurant’s dessert display, the addition to the Walker Art Center, and the broken institution of classical music criticism. (“He’s okay,” was the best compliment she could offer on Alex Ross, the esteemed critic for The New Yorker.) Sometimes, Larsen can’t keep up with her thoughts, and will interrupt herself to explore a new,

parenthetical notion. As she does so, she gestures dramatically—waving her thin arms or cutting her long fingers through the air, her straight brown hair spilling over her sharp collarbone and shoulders. The Current, the station Minnesota Public Radio launched last spring, also came up in polite conversation, along with Radiohead and Björk. But what Larsen went on about with the most enthusiasm was jazz and orchestral music, her two favorite genres, and how she’s been trying to marry these in some compositions she’s been writing in the past few years.

Just as Brahms drew on contemporary gypsy melodies and Verdi was inspired by Neapolitan folk music, Larsen’s compositions borrow from jazz, gospel, and pop—not unlike the work of Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. And if critics so far haven’t elevated her to the status of those two, that’s not for a lack of work to assess. Having produced more than two hundred pieces in all, including sixteen operas and fifty recordings, Larsen is one of the most prolific and often-performed living American composers. She’s awfully busy. Why? “I’m trying so hard to communicate what it’s like to be alive—right now,” she explained.

As someone born in the United States in 1950—sixty-two years after the invention of the gramophone, and in the middle of a century during which the U.S. utterly transformed both music and the ways we listen to it—what she’s talking about is plugging in. “My ears have been trained on music that’s been mixed, recorded, and played through speakers,” she explained. “I love the concert hall. I love live music. But I also love the produced sonic experience where there’s compression and bass boosting.”

Larsen has long been interested in combining acoustic, classical instruments—even operatic voice—with prerecorded, studio-produced sound. In 1991, for example, she wrote Schoenberg, Schenker, and Schillinger, a synthesizer-meets-symphony honoring Mozart. For the most part, she wrote straightforward acoustic music for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s set ensemble. One section, though, consisting entirely of prerecorded sounds, was to be played on a sampler. Unfortunately, the orchestra’s pianist had never touched such an instrument. Just before the concert, she approached Larsen backstage. “She said to me, ‘I was out there testing and the sampler doesn’t work.’” Larsen tried to go have a look, but was prevented from doing so by a union stagehand—only union members were allowed onstage at that highly regulated moment between songs. The stagehand investigated and reported back with the same grim news: The sampler was not functioning.

“To make a long story short, they played the piece without the sampler,” said Larsen, rolling her eyes. “The problem was that the power was off. It didn’t occur to the pianist or the stagehand to turn the power on,” she said solemnly. Suddenly, she threw back her head and laughed. “It was hilarious and wonderful,” she said between chuckles.

Larsen’s music, like her personality, is highly likeable—both friendly and visceral. “She’s just so irresistible as a person. You want to engage with her,” said Robert Neu, general manager of the Minnesota Orchestra and an admirer of Larsen’s who has commissioned her music. A range of other heavy hitters from classical music world have commissioned her work, from the Minnesota Opera and the esteemed British men’s choir the King’s Singers to pretty much every major American symphony. A number of works, such as Parachute Dancing and Water Music, pieces for full orchestras, went on to become near-standard in the American orchestral repertoire.

Even so, many devotees of modern classical music can’t identify her music by ear—perhaps because it doesn’t challenge the ear, per se. Larsen’s work seems unconcerned with twelve-tone composing, for example, a contemporary technique made famous by the twentieth-century composer Arnold Schoenberg (which, according to Neu, “has never resonated with the audience and never will”). Nor is Larsen a minimalist along the lines of Philip Glass and John Adams. It “sounds like music to the average listener,” said Sam Bergman, a Minnesota Orchestra violist and an editor for

ArtsJournal.com. But it does have a certain playful ring. Sometimes, the sounds feel improvised. In one of her art songs, for example, an operatic soprano suddenly compromises her pitch to dig up a bluesy snarl. In All Around Sound, which the Minnesota Orchestra commissioned for its Young People’s Series, Larsen instructs the percussionist to dribble a basketball. Along those lines, her scores often get musicians clapping, slapping knees, or even stomping their feet.

Larsen is well known for her “programmatic,” or narrative music, operas and song cycles that borrow from such literary sources as E.B. White, Emily Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams, as well as historical figures like P.T. Barnum and Eleanor Roosevelt. “Her work has an American feel—a sort of Coplandesque, open sound,” is how Stephen Paulus, Larsen’s colleague and longtime friend, encapsulated her oeuvre. It’s airy. Melodic. Your ears hang on its heavy jazz and street drum influences. Her pieces for orchestra, like Parachute Dancing, also follow a storyteller’s slope. They feel almost cinematic.

“The flow and pitch set of a melody, the rhythm, really comes from the language of the culture it comes from,” said Larsen of her music last spring, when she gave a lecture at the Minnesota History Center. To demonstrate, she played Bright Rails, a song for soprano and piano; set to a poem by Willa Cather, it mimics the choo-choo of a nineteenth-century locomotive trundling over the prairie. Then she played Salute to Louis Armstrong, a work she calls “a fully notated jam session for chorus.” For this song, she asked the VocalEssence singers to shoop-shoop, scat, and doo-wop.

“She’s really brave to do it,” said Abbie Betinis, a burgeoning young composer whom Larsen has mentored, of Larsen’s penchant for injecting opera, orchestra music, and art songs with jazz and other American influences. “It could mean writing herself out of a job, because the more she goes outside the realm of classical music, the less classical musicians feel akin to it.”

Betinis, who is a composer-in-residence at the Schubert Club in St. Paul, may be onto something. In an environment where minimalist, almost mathematical music is highly in vogue, the “openness” of Larsen’s music, to some erudite ears, sounds embarrassingly basic—and, to be fair, Copland’s music suffered some of these same criticisms in his day. “That’s where there’s been some backlash against Libby,” said Bergman. “Her music is never difficult. And we’ve reached a point in this industry where that’s seen as a derogatory thing.”

So why, then, does a comprehensive survey of hundreds of critical reviews of Larsen’s work, published in major American newspapers during the past five years, turn up nary a single column-inch of negativism? By and large, classical music critics see themselves as champions of new music, said Bergman; at the same time, orchestras and opera companies tend to focus on the classics. He believes that in some cases, whispered backstage criticism might be attributable to orchestra musicians’ hostility toward new music—after all, if Larsen’s music challenges anything, it’s the way these musicians regard the concert hall and their own instruments.

Larsen’s unorthodox views about the institution of classical music can be traced back to her graduate school years, in the early seventies, when she was studying at the University of Minnesota under another renowned Minnesotan composer, Dominick Argento. One day Larsen and her then-classmate Stephen Paulus had the radical notion that their music should be heard. “We were sitting on the steps of Scott Hall, the old music building,” said Paulus, “and we said, ‘Here we’re writing all these pieces for our music composition classes. What a shame we don’t get to hear our music played!’”

This compelled the pair to found the Minnesota Composers Forum, an organization dedicated to producing contemporary classical music concerts, in 1973. But neither Larsen nor Paulus was selfish about programming those first shows. “We always made sure we had just one work in each of the concerts,” said Paulus. “We’d say, ‘What do you got?’ ‘I’ve got a piece for guitar.’ ‘Well, I’ve got a piece for soprano and piano,’ and we filled other people’s work in for everything else.” While Larsen and Paulus are no longer involved, they helped the organization grow into the American Composers Forum, a national group dedicated to helping composers get their work performed.

If finding an audience was a concern in the seventies, by the eighties, Larsen was engaged with new questions. In 1984, as a composer-in-residence at the Minnesota Orchestra, she began to wonder why people her own age were not coming to concerts—and why non-European composers weren’t integrated into the orchestra’s programming. “I started studying classical music in America and its intrinsic value [to American culture]. It’s a very hard thing to study because the question of its value is a new frontier—it’s yet to be explored,” she said, slapping her palm against the café table for emphasis.

Several awkward seconds passed. For someone so deeply connected to the concert hall experience, rumors of its demise are painful. Larsen looked down at her hand, now pressed flat against the tabletop. “The first thing that came into my mind is that we’re all in our cars.”

That flash of inspiration about car culture and classical music was borne out many years later, when the McKnight Foundation published its landmark study, A New Angle: Arts Development in the Suburbs. The 2002 study hinted that the foundation might, in the future, direct more of its funding toward suburban arts centers. To say the least, the study put urban artists and arts institutions on alert, especially those like Minnesota Orchestra and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, who regularly received McKnight funding and subscribed to the notion that suburbanites must drive to the city for serious art.

Intrigued by the McKnight study, Larsen applied for an “educational chairwomanship” with the Library of Congress—basically a grant that allowed her to study issues surrounding American orchestral music, such as the ongoing battle to sell tickets, the resistance to performing works by American composers, and the withering social status of the concert hall. She will recount her findings in The Concert Hall that Fell Asleep and Woke Up as a Car Radio, a book she plans to finish in the coming months.

Through her research, Larsen has come to believe that 1902 is a key date in the evolution of orchestral music in the United States. That’s when the Victor Talking Machine Company launched a simple marketing effort, packaging its gramophones with Red Seal Records. The recordings included works by Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms—the basic German canon. “It was very avant-garde because no one had records,” Larsen said. “Then once people heard the recording, they wanted to hear it live.”

Around that same time, railroad transportation was burgeoning, too, which not only led to the construction of more concert halls, but also allowed full orchestras to embark on cross-country tours. Suddenly, fans everywhere had a chance to hear their Red Seal recordings performed live. Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, Brahms’s Symphony No. 1—these were among the first hits of the recording age.

In 1929, the Radio Corporation of America bought the Victor Talking Machine Company and used its catalog of recorded orchestra, opera, and oratorio songs to develop music appreciation courses for radio broadcast. The courses were designed to indoctrinate the masses with classical music and, perhaps, get a catchy waltz or two stuck in their heads. Though RCA discontinued them in 1944, their legacy lives on. “That’s where the core of our classical music canon comes from,” said Larsen. “That’s what we’re dealing with, even today.” As a testament to her point, she pointed out that Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 is being played this season by major orchestras in New York, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Seattle, Dallas, and Phoenix.

Since 1944, of course, the way we listen to music has changed. The rich textures of vinyl records have given way to reels, cassettes, CDs, and MP3s. The static of AM broadcasting was displaced by the crisp, clear hum of the FM airwaves. Our ears grew accustomed to music that’s recorded, studio-produced, and, above all, pristine. This doesn’t bode well for the concert hall, where the slightest sniffle or cough, or even just shifting in your seat can pollute your neighbor’s appreciation of the unamplified sound. “It finally hit me—this isn’t any fun!” Larsen wailed about concert hall performances. “I cannot be in my body! I can’t let my body respond to the music!”

At the same time, the burgeoning popularity of jazz, country, and rock ’n’ roll created venues where concertgoers can, as Larsen said, “be themselves.” Clanking beer bottles, loud conversations, or even a brawl are no match for the sound systems at, say, First Avenue or the Dakota Bar and Grill. Larsen likes the no-holds-barred quality of music heard in rock and jazz clubs, where the experience is not dispelled by the shuffling feet and commentary of listeners (and often is diffused with earplugs). But even with all that, and even though she can’t fully explain it and it puts her body in a stiff, awkward place, she loves, above all, the concert hall and its gentle wall of acoustic sound that washes over her ears. She loves how concert hall music sounds.

The founding of the Composers’ Forum, along with Larsen’s epiphany about how the fate of the concert hall and all the rest of her scholarly work, have spawned something of a secondary career—that of a contemporary classical music thinker, educator, and author. Larsen is entrenched in many rather philosophical projects. (“I’m very bored,” she joked at a recent lecture. “I spend a lot of time alone so I do all this thinking.”) She has an appointment at the Department of Defense, of all places, to develop new musical curricula for schools on military bases. And in addition to working on The Concert Hall that Fell Asleep and Woke Up as a Car Radio, she’s been approached, by a publisher about updating What to Listen for in Music, a classic written by Aaron Copland in 1957.

Has Larsen become more a scholar or figurehead than a composer? “She’s got her fingers in a lot of pots,” said Paulus. “It’d be difficult to be involved in all those things and write music the way she had.” Larsen concedes that side projects may have interfered with composition, but says that’s soon to change. “I’m completely done with my work for the government,” she said with a laugh during a conversation last month. “My life, by design, will be composing and writing.” She’s slated to begin two new operas; one of them, Every Man Jack, is based on the last twelve hours of Jack London’s life and was commissioned by Sonoma City Opera in California. She described the piece as “combining standard operatic techniques with electronic techniques in the orchestra.” The popular American music reference will come from an original player piano from the early twentieth century. “I’ve collected a number of piano rolls [London] would have heard during his time,” she said.

If there’s a single musician with whom Larsen feels the greatest kinship, it’s Louis Armstrong. “I should have dedicated my third symphony to him. I think I will now,” said Larsen. “It was my first challenge to an orchestra. In the third movement, I asked the orchestra to tightly play bebop.”

We were talking in teh living room of Larsen’s spacious, three-story Tudor just off Lake of the Isles, which she shares with her husband, James Reece, an attorney. Shoes were off, so as not to soil the rugs. The grand piano was shining and spotless. The place is impressive and elegant; it hardly looks like Larsen’s chief workspace. But in fact, much of her composing is done, pencil-to-paper, at the dining room table. Upstairs, in a carpeted, loft-like office, an assistant, Brad, worked on the business side of Libby Larsen operations.

Armstrong and his swing ensemble, Larsen said, had the amazing ability to rigidly follow their musical scores, which were often very complicated and densely arranged, and yet still give one another license to leave the score, once the music compelled them to riff on their own.

Those unscripted jams embody what Larsen calls “groove” (and, yes, for all her love of popular music, she managed to sound rather prim pronouncing that word, ensconced in an oversized Provençal armchair in her living room). Groove, she said, is an indescribable energy that emanates from jazz, honky-tonk, blues, and rock. It’s something that musician and listener feel together; it both feeds and is fed by the audience. As the basis for beauty in African music, groove is, by extension, in American music, too. European music, on the other hand, is more concerned with pitch, traditionally valuing high pitches above all else.

Armstrong was unique in that he recognized the beauty of both groove and pitch, of improvisation and exactitude. He quoted Mozart and Brahms in the midst of his own jazz and swing compositions, for example. He spoke many musical languages and, as a result, attracted listeners with varied, sometimes opposing musical histories and tastes. Larsen aims for her music to do something similar. She wants to bridge the schism between popular and classical music. This reflects her own experience of music: When songs form in her head, she often hears classical elements ringing with pop influences. But it’s also her contribution to reinvigorating—and in the long term perhaps even preserving—the acoustic concert hall experience.

Armstrong’s music was embraced by Europeans long before it found an audience at home. Similarly, Larsen finds herself working in the “old world” more often these days, even though much of her music continues to get off the ground in the United States, where it is written and most often premiered. For example, the Armstrong-inspired doo-wop-wop she wrote for the VocalEssence choir has since become popular in France and Spain. Furthermore, because American orchestra unions command such steep recording royalties on behalf of their musicians, Larsen is forced to do most of her recording abroad. “This is a real frustration for me. The music that I write pushes through the language of jazz and rock ’n’ roll. American musicians can play it because they live it,” she said. “In Europe, the musicians are fabulous, but they don’t sing gospel. They don’t breathe the same musical air.”

Some of America’s popular contemporary composers—John Adams and Philip Glass, for example—continue to experiment with minimalism, and others emulate the European masters; Larsen, however, has kept her ears tuned to folksy, hookier influences—not just Armstrong, but also jazz pianist Art Tatum, Leonard Bernstein, and blues singer Bessie Smith. Like them, she finds herself increasingly concerned with blues, boogie-woogie, and the kind of beats that give American music its kick. Sometimes that means borrowing from the rhythm of basketball, or mimicking the cadence of a preacher or auctioneer. Larsen has a soft spot for the Old West, too; besides the work inspired by Willa Cather and Jack London, she’s also penned odes to Calamity Jane and Billy the Kid. And she likes cars, too—fast ones. “Four on the Floor,” a dense, almost impossibly fast piece for violin, cello, bass, and piano, is about joyriding in her dad’s 1957 red Thunderbird convertible. In it, you can hear the crank of the V-8, the open road rushing underneath. Finger-picked notes race past one another. Apparently, Larsen has a lead foot.