Composer Libby Larsen’s intense love of music is evident as she listened to a
student’s composition Wednesday.
The composer of more than 400 works, she sat listening to Sarah Modene’s piece, she
gestured briefly as if conducting it, smiled, furrowed her brow in
concentration, each measure seeming to register on her face.
The master class with a dozen undergraduate and graduate composition students is part
of Larsen’s three-day residency at Bowling Green State University as the
McMaster Professor in Vocal and Choral Studies. Her residency will culminate
with a concert of her works Friday at 8 p.m. in Kobacker Hall featuring music
for solo voice and piano and "She piped for us" sung by the Women’s
Chorus.
Larsen’s extensive catalog includes many vocal solo and choral works as well as 12
operas.
USA Today said of her: "She’s the only English-speaking composer since Benjamin
Britten who matches great verse with fine music so intelligently and
expressively."
As busy as Larsen is she loves being with students. "You can feel their passion
for making objects of sound, and I know that passion."
The 61-year-old composer recalls being a voice and music theory major at the
University of Minnesota when noted composers Olivier Messiaen, Lou Harrison and
Donald Martino visited campus. She said such visits "open doors in your
brain. … I feel a responsibility to keep making that possible."
When the native of Minneapolis arrived to begin studying at the University of
Minnesota, she hadn’t decided whether to be a coloratura soprano or a
stockbroker. In the end she found her calling in composition.
"I was restless when I heard new music, unrecognizably restless," Larsen
said. "That was the desire to create."
She sees that in young composers.
In discussing the works presented by Modene, an undergraduate, and graduate students
Evan Williams and Joshua Bryant, she delved into the craft and business of
composing.
Her commentary on the students’ work touched on how to set words to music, and the
subtleties of language, the difficult of engaging listeners in music written
using advanced harmonies and the business of securing permission to set a poem.

She encouraged students to transcribe the rhythms of people talking "Maybe one
way to make a piece accessible that otherwise might not be accessible is to use
the rhythms of human speech," she said. Larsen urged them to gain
familiarity with the natural sounds of instruments. Sit in on instrumentalist’s
practice session. Ask them what they love and what they hate, she said.
Back in 1978, Larsen decided that she would write a solo piece for every instrument.
The most recent was a composition for tuba. What tuba players asked was:
"Would you please write a melody?"
Larsen said a composer "cannot just open their mouths" and have their music
emerge. Having their music play takes a lot of mediating.
Connecting with listeners involves setting up expectations and then either fulfilling
or confounding them, she said.
"What can I build into the piece to help the brain relax," she asks
herself. That’s the state in which the listener becomes open to "listening
in the moment."
American culture has "commodified music," and composers must work against
that trend to categorize and limit it. But "music is infinite," Larsen
said. "For a number of people, myself included, we think in music first.
That’s our natural mode of communication."
The music they create, Larsen added, "communicates what it’s like to be alive in
sound."