Author: Christy DeSmith

The spring collections usually lend levity to our wardrobe, but this year, that’s not necessarily the case. Many of the season’s prettiest party dresses and tissue tops are coming fully loaded with all manner of heavy metal hardware. Surely you noticed such chains, charms, pendants, and toggles stitched onto last season’s winter things. Now the gossamer fabrics of spring—the chiffon, the linen, the silk—must also bear this burden of alloy. We were wondering how the featherweights might hold up, until, at one of the Twin Cities’ most exclusive boutiques, we spotted a light cotton neckline drooping with bullet casings.

This metal fetish is not so surprising, of course. We’ve had years of frothy gauze, ribbons, ruffles, and lace. Gold, nickel, and bronze seem only

a natural progression. But if trend reports are to be believed, the fashion capitals are growing tired of such fripperies, and design houses will be circling back to nineties-style minimalism shortly. A few designers are applying pleats and bandaging to shirts and dresses, offering angular contrast to all the curlicue finishes we’ve grown accustomed to. Pantsuits aren’t far behind.

Yet there’s no shortage of femininity in the spring fashions. Openwork crochet; skirts and dresses in layered mesh; frayed edges; elaborate, almost Elizabethan collars; and floppy, over-sized bows play the season’s other central characters. Vibrant colors inspire a bounce in our step as we slog through winter’s lingering slush in the strappy wedge heels we simply can’t wait to wear. The indication is that rich hues have drained from the palette as of late, in favor of so-called “naturals” and “organics.” However,

if you insist on contrasting with your muddied, Minnesota-in-March surroundings, as we do, then you’ll favor apple greens, intense yellows, and azures as well as flamboyant, African-style florals

and kimono-inspired acetates.

These are the insurgents against white, buff, and nude.

For most of us upper Midwesterners, occasions that would compel us to slip into that Monique Lhuillier daffodil dress (pictured at left) are rare. Still, there’s good reason why Lhuillier, the Beverly Hills designer whose creations for autumn 2006 caused a modest ripple at New York’s Fashion Week last month, chose to open her second-ever boutique at Fiftieth and France. The two-year-old shop is known for its wedding gowns. But the perennially single will admire her long, bias-cut dresses, done up in an array of cheerful colors and botanical prints.

There are other places to fortify your optimism for Twin Cities fashion; they include Alfred’s Grand Petit Magasin, the Bergdorf Goodman-inspired department store in Edina; the downtown Minneapolis Neiman Marcus (of course); stalwart clothiers Grethen House, in Edina, and Bumbershute, in Wayzata; and some of the new boutiques that have been popping up like crocuses around the metropolitan area: Stephanie’s in Highland Park; Ivy in Uptown;

and Ensemble in Linden Hills,

to name a few.

For the beaus, designers have been thinking Rio de Janeiro, rolled-up trousers, and Panama hats. Of course, most area gents will ignore such impressions, adhering to a Twin Citizen’s night-on-the-town uniform:

a vertically striped dress shirt, often left untucked over distressed jeans or fresh black denim. Note how this favorite look can be updated with simple, bold strokes—and we’re not talking straight up-and-down strokes, mind you. The Italian label Etro, for example, offers adventurous alternatives to such inveterate preppiness with classic-cut shirts in easy floral prints. No pansies here! These shirts lend their wearers a look of sophisticated courage.

—Christy DeSmith

Since Minnesota is not a noted home to the polar bear, one might wonder where the name White Bear Lake comes from. If you believe Mark Twain, it originated with an Indian legend. In his 1883 book, “Life on the Mississippi,” he tells of a Romeo and Juliet type romance between a Sioux maiden and a Chippewa brave. Because the lovers were from quarreling tribes, the story goes, they met secretly on an island in the lake, soon to be known as White Bear Lake. One day, as the brave approached in his canoe, he saw a giant white bear (perhaps an albino) mauling his girlfriend. He rushed to her rescue. “The warrior, with one plunge of the blade of his knife, opened the crimson sluices of death,” wrote Twain, “and the dying bear relaxed his hold.”

So impressed was the maiden’s father with the brave’s deed, that he gave the couple his blessing, and they lived happily ever after with the white bearskin on the floor of their home. The lake, the island, and the town-to-be, on the other hand, would be haunted by the bear’s spirit for all eternity. That’s why the legendary island is named Manitou, which translates from Ojibwa to mean “great spirit.” Sometimes, if you drive down County Road F, the bear can be spotted still, holding a Chevy sign in front of Polar Chevrolet/Mazda. It also occasionally appears as an ornament on neighborhood lawns.

As with many lakeside towns, White Bear Lake had its turn as a fashionable resort community in the late nineteenth century. But then, in the 1890s, the town fell out of favor with the leisure class and an anchored community sprang up. Rows of century-old mansions—once summer homes—still tower above the lakeshore, lending the city an air of import. Just twenty miles north of St. Paul, White Bear Lake has its share of stripmalls, fast food joints, and auto dealerships. But near the lake itself, there is still an old-fashioned, clustered downtown that’s quite pleasant. Next to such precious shops as the Avalon Tearoom, where one can get a macaroon with her cream tea, many old buildings are left in their shabby splendor.

The architecture downtown ranges from Alsatian half-timbering to squat, seventies-era plazas crowned by cedar shake shingles. There are the requisite faux limestone storefronts, of course, but it’s not uncommon to see one-hundred-year-old tin buildings either. The business mix is similarly patch-worked. White Bear Lake has the Twin Cities’ only parrot shop, a Bikram yoga studio, and a store called Needlepoint Cottage. Fifty-year-old Ciresi’s Liquor Store shares its beat-up brownstone with a relatively new Christian bookshop. Boxy, old Hollihan’s Pub looks fortress-like with its dark green façade. The saloon sits kitty corner from Washington Square Bar and Grill, a stylish restaurant and bar housed in an airy, Frank Lloyd Wright-style structure with a low-pitched roof and floor-to-ceiling windows. Here, just as in the old days, we find quarrelling cultures shaking hands.—Christy DeSmith

Republicans know where to find one another, according to Stephen B. Venable, president of CELSIUS, an exclusive new dating service for educated, well-off Minnesota liberals. We were chatting in his office the other day when Venable ventured that conservatives are meeting each other “at work,” “in bars” or “in the parking lot at Vikings games.” But liberals, he said, unless they’re doing “social organizing,” could use a little more help getting together.

Thus was born CELSIUS, an acronym for the Collective for Educated Liberal Singles Interested in Unearthing a Soul Mate, whose slogan, spotted on Venable’s business card, reads, “Improving lives by making extraordinary relationships possible.” The clunkiness is derived, perhaps, from corporate-speak and legalese. Besides Venable, an escapee from corporate law, the founders include another attorney and an M.B.A., so all three are fluent in this particular vernacular. They’re also all single. Venable’s partners are hanging onto their day jobs while he handles the full-time task of uniting lefties in life and love.

Venable’s disdain for Republicans is both ardent and personal. After relating a formative encounter he had with a right-winger—a former boss who tried to enlist his legal aid in sacking an ambitious female colleague—Venable offered the opinion that Republicans tend to be similar in one notable way: They are, he said, “cognitively and emotionally disabled.”

I found myself in Venable’s office after an earnest visit to the CELSIUS website. There, I read that “kind, empathetic, open-minded people tend to prefer other kind, empathetic, open-minded people”—a statement that, despite its accidental hilarity, seemed reasonable in practice. Next, I discovered that I met all seven of the club’s prerequisites. I was well educated, financially secure, politically and ideologically liberal, kind and respectful to others, single, at least thirty years old, and a nonsmoker.

My curiosity mounted as I read about the application process, which is not unlike applying for a job—a resume and cover letter must be submitted before CELSIUS will consider you for a face-to-face entrance interview. Who were these politically correct matchmakers? Practical jokers? Reality TV show producers? Kenwood liberals having trouble getting laid? I was so puzzled, I did something rather devious. I sent Venable my resume, as required, along with a letter about my sordid history of dating Republicans. I did not mention that I did not qualify in one important respect: I did not have the $975 to fork over for the membership fee.

A week later, I was plodding down the thirteenth-floor hallway of a downtown Minneapolis building, passing architecture firms, accounting agencies, and law offices, on the way to my interview at CELSIUS. The company’s one-room digs were sparsely decorated and made ample use of basic office-cubicle gray, but there was a pleasing skyline view. Venable, a fit, attractive man who looked to be in his late thirties, greeted me. He wore shirtsleeves, a necktie, and slacks—very professional.

Only five minutes into our sit-down, we’d already comfortably griped about racism, sexism, and classism. Much nodding went on. Eventually, Venable and I moved onto the topic of our love lives. Both of us fancied ourselves to be reasonably good catches, and agreed that we felt “baffled” to find ourselves single after thirty. Venable loosened his necktie and unbuttoned his collar. He confided to me that back in his Berkeley Law School days, he had to beat the ladies off with a stick. But with those days behind him, he’s now focused on finding the two qualities he most desires in a mate: intelligence and kindness. He assumes both things are inherent in liberal women.

Venable said he’d be composing a full page of notes about me, outlining which types of liberals he sees me meshing with—I came to believe that this meant either a loudmouth activist or a rather timid social service type. Then he’d put me in a speed dating type of situation with suitably matched, dues-paying members, which would be staged at a CELSIUS-appropriate venue—someplace like Lucia’s in Uptown. (But wouldn’t I see all my friends there?) During the one-year membership, he promised, I would be invited to no fewer than six of these happenings. To his credit, Venable vowed not to put me in the same room with much, much older men (I’m only two months past CELSIUS’s minimum age requirement)—a fear I’d harbored ever since I’d heard a friend jokingly speculate on the average age of the club’s male membership. Also, if I’m not mistaken, some flirting went on. Venable called me “sweet”—another trait he finds common in liberal women. Then he complimented my “cute” hair, but not without tagging on the standard liberal regret. “I’m sorry,” he said, “is that inappropriate?”—Christy DeSmith

It’s one month and counting until the Twin Cities release of Factotum, the Minnesota-made film based on a semi-autobiographical book by Charles Bukowski. Since filming of Factotum wrapped late in the summer of 2004, anticipation in the local film community has been eclipsed by other higher profile, more star-studded projects—with the fall release of North Country and last summer’s giddiness about the St. Paul filming of Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, it’s not surprising that the relatively low-key Factotum fell off a few radar screens. But since the film’s mastering, earlier this year, Factotum and its stars—Matt Dillon, Marisa Tomei, and Lili Taylor—have started picking up accolades. The film was warmly received at its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last May and was later selected for the Sundance Film Festival, where it will screen this month.

Locally, the Twin Cities release of Factotum kicks off with a preview screening, hosted by Lili Taylor, at Walker Art Center on February 3. It opens elsewhere on February 24. When they finally see it, Minnesota filmgoers likely won’t be following Factotum’s job-jumping, binge-drinking, womanizing protagonist as closely as they do its characterization of their home state. After all, while Bukowski’s book was set in Los Angeles, the movie version was adapted for a Minnesota setting. The actors speak in the local patois, for example, and one day soon, a jury of Minnesotan film fans will submit its decision on whether that makes the natives look as goony as some thought it did in 1996’s Fargo (which was made by Minnesota natives, unlike Factotum).

Film boosters were successful in luring Factotum’s Norwegian director and New York producer here, at least in part, because of our surfeit of dumpy buildings. Location manager Shelli Ainsworth, a local, sought out area relics—places she likens to “skid row”—to help paint the film’s vintage, slum-bunker aesthetic. Bars, of course, house many of the film’s key scenes, and Ainsworth put them at Nye’s and Cuzzy’s in Minneapolis, as well as the Dubliner in St. Paul, all of which feature an atmosphere similar to that found by Mickey Rourke’s character at Los Angeles’ the Golden Horn in Bukowski’s 1987 film Barfly.

In Factotum, Matt Dillon plays yet another incarnation of Barfly’s main character, Henry Chinaski, the self-styled writer and drunk at the center of four Bukowski novels. Dillon’s version of Chinaski hops between blue-collar jobs at such Minnesota mainstays as Green and White Taxi and Island Cycle Supply, and makes his home, appropriately enough, at Hennepin Avenue’s ramshackle Fairmont Hotel (made famous by the Tom Waits song, “9th & Hennepin”).

Jim Stark, Factotum’s New York screenwriter and co-producer, thinks the film is something of a time capsule for all these old buildings, many of which find themselves at risk of being bulldozed or refurbished into condominiums. Stark, a big Waits fan, was particularly passionate about capturing the Fairmont. “Look at this place! It’s almost gone,” Stark said, with feeling. It was the summer of 2004, and he was standing on Ninth Street just outside the old hotel as scenes for the movie were being filmed inside. (Within weeks of the project’s completion, a giant orange sign appeared along the Fairmont’s Hennepin Avenue façade, announcing that it soon was to be renovated.)

Many concessions were made to adapt Factotum to its new Midwest digs. For example, in the book, Chinaski takes a job as a janitor at a Los Angeles newspaper, where he’s assigned the task of polishing a brass rail. In the movie, however, because the scene was shot at St. Paul City Hall, Dillon instead finds himself polishing the highly visible Vision of Peace statue, which depicts a Native American. And, of course, Bukowski’s version of Chinaski wasn’t fluent in the dialect of our North Star state, nor did he work a stint at the Gedney Pickle Factory in Chaska.—Christy DeSmith

Every holiday season since 1963, a baroque, fairy-tale-inspired display has been assembled on the eighth floor of the original Dayton’s store in downtown Minneapolis, a tradition that began as the Dayton family’s annual “gift to the community.” But earlier this year, when Federated Department Stores became the new parent company of Marshall Field’s and vowed to convert the Nicollet Mall institution into a Macy’s, ugly rumors began circulating about the auditorium show’s inevitable demise. Bloggers and men-on-the-street put its life expectancy at two years; thereafter, they reckoned, the tradition would become so much pixie dust in the memories of generations of Minnesotans.

Department store flacks, however, insist the show will go on—and if history is any indication, their assertions can be believed. Ownership of the store many still stubbornly call “Dayton’s” has changed hands seven times since that first holiday show in the auditorium, and yet insiders and stalwart pilgrims alike claim that it has changed very little over the years. If anything, it has only become more lavish. The scale of the spectacle has increased dramatically since the early days, while technological advancements have made possible stop-motion animation and all manner of smoke-and-mirror wizardry.

The early auditorium shows were an outgrowth of Dayton’s mid-century window displays (which were themselves part of a much older tradition dating back to nineteenth-century Europe), and were based on themes like “Santa’s Enchanted Forest” and “Christmas with the Animals”—static narratives that were purely set pieces for the designers. In 1969, however, the auditorium was transformed into Never Never Land for a show inspired by Peter Pan, and that seems to have launched the enduring trend of bringing to life fairy tales and other storybook classics. In the 1970s the store staged shows based on The Nutcracker, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Babes in Toyland. Productions in the intervening years have included Alice in Wonderland, Pippi Longstocking,

The Wind in the Willows, The Wizard of Oz, and The Twelve Days of Christmas, as well as a couple of more mercenary shows inspired by Santabear, Dayton’s collectible stuffed toy.

The Harry Potter-themed exhibit, in 2000, was considered a coup. Designers worked closely with Warner Bros. to emulate the look and feel of the as-yet-unreleased first film in the blockbuster saga. For the most part, though, the show’s creators have traditionally worked with classic children’s tales, usually material in the public domain, and they have been careful to eschew the sort of showy aesthetics most commonly associated with Disney. Instead, the show’s designers have relied on fine art illustrators to define the look, while allowing a bit of wiggle room to inject some of their own style and sensibilities. For example, last year’s Snow White resembled Audrey Hepburn and carried a Louis Vuitton handbag.

This year’s sparkly, pink, and rigorously floral Cinderella exhibition features seventeen scenes, over the course of which the lead character is rendered in shadow puppets, pencil drawings, and statuettes. On an early visit, a poker-faced, thirty-something man was observed crying out “Cool!” as the fairy godmother turned a pumpkin into Cinderella’s carriage—with fiber optics!

That’s a bit more flash than many of us encountered on our initial visits to the annual eighth-floor wonderland, as wee things clinging to the hands of our parents. Yet year after year, something about these displays always manages to conjure some of the same magic we felt back then, shuffling wide-eyed through that maze of bright lights and animatronic dreams. And even today you’ll still see everybody from young families to older couples and gaggles of teenagers standing in a queue that often stretches all the way down to the elevators—proof that the Dayton family’s gift has helped to define many of our notions of what a Minneapolis holiday, not to mention a downtown department store, should be.

 

"I’ve always found you get more spiritual energy if you have things made by two hands—especially your own two hands,” said Kimber Fiebiger. If so, then her home is coursing with such energy: The entire place was built with her hands, and those of friends. It sits atop Fiebiger’s Joan of Art gallery, which, with its bronze Humpty Dumpty sculptures perched on stone-wall pedestals along Franklin Avenue in the Seward neighborhood, is a colorful Minneapolis landmark. When she purchased the hundred-year-old building, in 2000, it was a wreck. The entire second floor was but a shanty attic, so Fiebiger, along with her kids and friends, “tore it off and built a house. We had about fourteen people in the middle of winter—friends, my kids—and we just framed it up. It was like an old-fashioned barn-raising.”

Windows were the touchstone for Fiebiger’s architectural vision. She bought a handful of one-of-a-kind pieces from the Marvin Windows Outlet in Warroad, Minnesota, and “we just designed the building around the windows,” she said. Her whimsy is on view along the living room’s east wall, where a picture window and three boxy, smaller panes are lined up to keep the room flooded with sunlight. At night, they cast geometric shapes of moonlight all over. “People do drugs to get this effect,” she said with a chuckle.

For home furnishings, Fiebiger headed to dumpsters and alleyways around the city, adopting others’ cast-offs; her kitchen’s retro cupboards were salvaged from the Reuse Center. But Fiebiger mainly creates fixtures and housewares, such as her artsy dishware, in a suite of basement studios equipped for welding, woodworking, potting, and making stained glass (some of which she sells in the gallery). She often makes use of remnant materials from art and building projects; for example, she nailed down—by hand, of course—leftover spalted maple and Brazilian cherrywood strips for flooring. For her son Gabriel—or rather, his collection of Lord of the Rings action figures—she improvised a landscape out of hardened drizzles of insulation foam. The delighted twelve-year-old made it the centerpiece of his bedroom.

Even in a home where every square inch has been lavished with handcrafted care, Fiebiger’s expansive bathroom is extraordinary. Outfitted with both a hot tub and an upright shower, it’s plastered with thousands of black and white tile shards. Curlicues and fiddleheads coil around the floors and walls of what she calls her “homage to insomnia.” The catalyst, apparently, was the end of a long-term relationship. “I was pretty wiped out, so I broke a lot of tile and made an art piece out of it,” she said. Her troubles turned out to be transformative: “This is my favorite thing I’ve ever made.”—Christy DeSmith

Not long after the new Design Collective boutique opened in Uptown, its display window featured a two-tiered, amphibious-looking skirt whose ruffles, shaped with wires, were so impressive they stopped a passerby in her tracks. “It makes me think of a nudibranch,” explained Barrett Johanneson, months later, as he fished the skirt out of the trunk of his Volkswagen, where it had been stored since a fashion show some weeks ago. “It’s a sort of sea snail,” he added, before there was a chance to ask.

Johanneson is the soft-spoken founder and leader of Labrador Style, an ensemble of five friends who are also clothing designers, and who share a fascination with sea life. (They take their name from the coastline-rich northeasternmost province of Canada.) Other one-of-a-kind Labrador designs include a top made from layered and hand-stitched strips of terrycloth and a men’s white dress shirt with hand-painted aqua blue stripes—a watermark, so to speak, of Labrador’s oceanic motifs.

It’s hard to believe all this plum, avant-garde fashion comes out of the unglamorous, garden-level apartment near Cedar Lake that Johanneson shares with his friend Adrianne. “I do feel bad about the times I leave it kinda dirty,” he said, typifying male roommates.

Johanneson and his fellow Labrador designers use the apartment’s spartan, bare-walled living room as their studio space. There’s a sewing machine, a mannequin bust, a tiny cabinet stuffed with notions, a glass-topped worktable, and an overhead projector used to throw patterns onto fabrics and tees, so as to allow hand painting. “When we’re getting ready for a fashion show or photo shoot, we basically all live in this room,” Johanneson said.

He opened up a hallway closet, where some of Labrador’s most interesting creations are stowed. Out came a squid-shaped hand bag, dyed with squid ink and part of a whole line based on a squid motif. “This is a bikini constructed out of East German surgical masks,” he said, holding up a particularly puzzling item from the stock.

While the wire, squids, and medical equipment attest to Johanneson’s avant-garde leanings, he also has a special affection for vintage fabrics, which he acquires from antique stores, thrift shops, and on eBay. He even keeps a few sentimental swatches close at hand, such as a remnant of seafoam silk with gold accents, which his mother used to make her prom dress. He likes busy patterns as much as the next guy, but prefers materials with a softer touch that, again, remind him of the sea. He picked up a rich, azure-colored fabric. “Feel it. It’s watery,” he said. “That’s going to make a fantastic dress someday.”

That dress will have to wait while the designer works through his current obsession with jeans. A couple of just-finished pairs are tossed over an end table, one with a dramatic surf-like curve at the front pockets, the other with wavy panels running along the outside seams. “These are a study in tiny jeans,” said Johanneson, a tall fellow, holding an unfinished pair to his legs. They looked like they’d fit a five-foot fashion model. But oh no, he said. Exuding the sort of whimsy and drama that come through in Labrador’s clothing, he whispered, in all seriousness, “Someday these will be mine.”—Christy DeSmith

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.

Over the summer, as a new orchestra season neared, Minnesota Orchestra Artistic Director Osmo Vänskä started cropping up with more frequency and in interesting places. He fell out of the Sunday New York Times, for example. His smiling face was spotted on a friend’s bookshelf, atop a collectors’ edition bobble-arm, and, in one colorful portrait in a local advertising circular, on his Yamaha motorcycle. His name was pronounced during radio ads and underwriting spots. And when a new orchestra season finally fired up again, in mid-September, concerts bore such names as “Vänskä Opens the Season” and “Osmo at Harriet.”

But the most significant Osmo sighting happened at Orchestra Hall itself, where a massive, building-side photograph of the conductor has risen, printed full-color on weather-resistant vinyl, the same stuff used to bedeck city buses and trains in advertising. The image is “wrapped” around the exterior of the concert hall, alongside candid shots of players and audience members. But Vänskä is the centerpiece. Plastered above the box office and front entry, the sixty-five-foot maestro wields a ten-foot baton and gazes up at the sky with an exalted but slightly dopey smirk, as if he just bumped his head.

The project was inspired, supposedly, in New York City one day last February, when Orchestra president and CEO Tony Woodcock took a stroll through Central Park while Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s monumental public art installation, The Gates, was on display. But, according to marketing director Cindy Grzanowski, Orchestra Hall’s new veneer is not without practical aplomb. The intent, she said, was to “turn Orchestra Hall inside out.” To introduce the orchestra to “people who don’t ordinarily come to concerts.” Yes, that.

Vänskä, it seems, is a powerful new weapon in the old struggle for relevance. He is, after all, something of a people’s conductor. Grzanowski confirmed that he is eager, when compared to his predecessors, to front the orchestra’s more populist offerings; namely, its educational, free, and outdoor concerts. It helps that he also possesses the kind of work ethic Minnesotans find so endearing. In just two years with the orchestra, he has led a European tour and spearheaded a project to record all the Beethoven symphonies. Audiences admire his style on the podium, which is animated and solicitous, demanding but gracious. Some say the orchestra never sounded better. Grzanowski said that Vänskä, a modest guy, found the sight of his giant self “overwhelming.” But, she added, “He’s very understanding of our marketing efforts. He’s very supportive.”

Grzanowski declined to say what the exact cost of this campaign has been. But with two major corporate sponsors involved, Target and 3M, and a press release that compares the scale of the project with “wrapping twenty-five buses or an entire football field,” it’s on par with your average Christo budget line. The “wrap” will remain in place through the spring.

Out on Eleventh Avenue the other day, Vänskä dwarfed his target market—the hundreds of passersby who do not attend orchestra concerts. Among them were a nuclear family, a naval officer, two thirty-somethings who live in a nearby high-rise, and a loiterer who also inquired about the availability of spare change.

In all, people said they thought the motif improved upon things. “I put it as a bland building before. It’s got more character now, I guess,” said the officer.

One resident of Orchestra Hall’s downtown neighborhood, a regular on Eleventh Avenue, had been admiring the project as it progressed. She remarked, “I’ve been walking by every day. At first, only the conductor’s face was on there. I forget his name—?” She snapped her fingers. “I sort of liked that better.”

“I hadn’t noticed it. Who is he?” asked a pixie twenty-year-old, her eyes glacial as she scanned the facade.

“I don’t think he’s as visible as the last guy—what was his name?” said another bystander, who also lives within blocks of the concert hall. She squinted as she looked up at Vänskä’s mammoth head.—Christy DeSmith

When it’s snowing and everything is white, it looks like an Alaskan weather station,” said Chris Lange of his office building on Garfield Avenue South in Minneapolis. Even in balmier weather, the headquarters of Mono, the two-year-old advertising agency co-founded by Lange, is striking enough that people will stop in “at least once a week” to ask about it. Perhaps they’re drawn to the combination of simplicity and shine; the building, erected as a storage shed for a roofing company in the fifties, is clad in corrugated, galvanized steel, which gives it a forbidding look. Then there’s the imposing chain-link and razor-wire fence, which once protected a fleet of heavy machinery and now lends additional mystery.

While the building’s exterior has a certain austere allure, the only office-friendly elements inside (which is basically one sprawling, oblong room) were the hardwood floors and boxy windows installed by the landlord. So two years ago, when Lange and company trucked in mod furniture for their newly established agency, they aimed to warm things up a bit with a palette of soft silvers and whites, and occasional flares of international orange.

With furniture and accessories from Blu Dot and Knoll, it’s clear that Mono wasn’t confined to the modest design budget of most fledgling agencies; indeed, its trio of founders had been heavy hitters at Carmichael Lynch and Fallon. A few signature pieces, like the giant, blown-glass light fixture hanging in the conference room, were commissioned. “Our space and philosophy were very deliberately thought out,” said Lange. “We wanted to make our work space efficient, clean, and open.” Hard-pressed to find cubicles to meet those standards, Lange invested in clusters of A3 “pods,” a sexy line of workstations designed by Knoll—he says he believes Mono is the only business in the Twin Cities to have them. Covered in translucent mesh fabric, the egg-shaped pods are somewhat cradle-like, sparing inhabitants the feeling of being penned-in drones. Together, the sixteen of them give the impression of huddles of giant penguins. Said Lange, “People come in here and think aliens landed.”—Christy DeSmith