LIBBY LARSEN, the American composer from Minneapolis. Founder of the American Composers Forum and first woman resident composer with a major orchestra in America. And a thinker, a speaker, and a mover and shaker in musical circles who always asked the question, What is America’s place in the classical music canon? And set about to make sure that it had one. 74 now, born in Delaware in 1950, she got the music bug by sitting in on her older sisters’ piano lessons before falling in love with Gregorian chant at her Catholic school. One of the nuns used to say, It’s harmonica time! whenever things got a bit unruly and everyone would take out their harmonica and play.
So she plays harmonica as well as piano and electric bass. Studied at the University of Minnesota, co-founding the Composers Forum there way back in 1973 and that’s the city that made her name, the Minnesota Orchestra giving her that composer residency in 1983 and working with Neville Marriner extensively in the 80s. Now with a large body of works including 15 operas, her awards include two honorary doctorates, a Grammy and a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
She says that Music exists in an infinity of sound, in the substance of the air itself: and that it is "the composer’s task to order and make sense of sound, in time and space, in order to communicate what it’s like to be alive"
MUSIC: Parachute Dancing (1984)
Presented by composer Joan Tower for International Women’s Month in March, written and produced by Charlotte Wilson for WMHT
