AMERICAN MUSIC SERIES                                                                              282 a-c

Libby Larsen

with Vivian Perlis

Sonneck Society

Kansas City, Missouri

February 20, 1998

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Side a                                                                                                                         pp. 1-18

Early years in Wilmington, Delaware and Chicago--move to Minneapolis--family background--early Catholic schooling and musical upbringing--family philosophy about childrearing--early musical training and church tradition--influence of Catholic upbringing on compositional style--high school years: choral tradition--first exposure to Hindemith theory--writing choral arrangements and instrumental music--first compositions--University of Minnesota--discovering the existence of conservatories--audition at Juilliard, Mannes

Side b                                                                                                                                    pp.  18-34

First composition, for guitar and oboe, Circular Rondo--debt to Dominick Argento--the motion of sound--use of rests and breaks from sound--meeting Stephen Paulus (1972) in graduate school at University of Minnesota--ideas behind the formation of the Minnesota Composers’ Forum--reasons for the success of the Forum--early Composers’ Forum programs--early lack of support for and later acceptance of Forum by University of Minnesota faculty--ten-year involvement and subsequent break from Forum--Forum’s new leadership: feelings about shift in Forum’s composition, emphasis, and fundamental philosophical purpose--the end of the Romantic era--Receiving B.A., writing first operas, including Psyche and the Pskyscraper

Side c                                                                                                                         pp.  34-

Acceptance to graduate school at University of Minnesota--natural instinct/tendency for opera--mythology about the difficulty of writing operas--writing chamber operas--success of and problems with master’s thesis opera based on E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, coproduced by Fetler--success of Ph.D. thesis based on Yeats’s The Words upon the Windowpane--The Silver Fox--creation of Tumbledown Dick--creation of Clair de Lune--genesis, importance and success of Frankenstein--composing for orchestra in the 1980s--genesis of Parachute Dancing