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Libby Larsen Interview (2/99)
Richard Kessler, Executive Director of the American Music Center, talks with Libby Larsen.
1. A Musical Upbringing
RK: What led you to become a composer?
LL: A long and deep-seeded desire to communicate through sound. It's my own sense of (...I don't want this to sound corny...) just being alive. That's really what led me to it. The path that led me was a series of lucky self-discoveries, actually, because no one ever encouraged me to be a composer (which is not unusual for composers). Most composers find themselves on their paths. But I've always had great desires to just tell everybody what I see and what I feel, and what's going on. To do that through music seemed to me the most elegant and most deeply communicative way.
I had a very typical Midwestern kid upbringing in terms of music, which means playing an instrument (in my case, piano) and singing in a choir. When I was young, it seemed that all Midwestern kids sang in choirs! It's part of this region's Scandinavian heritage. I also was very lucky in that I learned to read and write music in first grade as did everybody in my grade school. I went to a Catholic grade school before the Vatican II Council, and we all learned to read and write so that we could sing Gregorian chant for daily services.
It didn't really occur to me that not everybody in the world could read and write music for quite some time. Composing for me was very natural, as natural as drawing pictures and writing essays. It was natural for every kid in our school . . . Isn't that interesting?
I had a natural interest in rhythm. When I began to hear rhythms and words that caught my attention, I started writing them down and manipulating them on paper. I had no thought about writing love songs. Some of the more typical paths to composition come through songwriting, through piano playing, or being in a garage band. Mine really came through an interest in words and rhythm and the ability to notate those. It developed really from age 7-on. But it never occurred to me that to be a composer had a definition, or a root, or a path, or a profession until college, when I began to study music theory and just found true beauty in theory. And then the connection was made. I became aware of many, many, ways of constructing pieces to express emotion and energy. And once that happened for me, I knew I was a composer.
RK: So this predisposition towards rhythm was there, right from the very beginning.
LL: From the very beginning, and I think it has to do with the fact that I learned Gregorian Chant which is free of meter. The rhythm has everything to with the flow of the Chant, as it exists in the space in which it is being performed. So I had a very solid grounding in timeless flow -- does that make sense?
RK: Sure -- without bar lines.
LL: Yes. At the same time, when I was 7, I started taking piano. I became really fascinated with real theoretical questions derived from Western notation: How does time function in a finite section called a measure and given a meter? So I became fascinated with rhythm through a natural grounding in Chant.
RK: So, in some sense, the freedom was the first thing that you became immersed in and then the rigor emerged as you started studying the piano. Does that make sense?
LL: That's perfect, thank you!
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Larsen Interview
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Libby Larsen
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Supporting Materials
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