The name is absent

IOO

Introduction to Viola Sonata

On first glance, Larsen’s Viola Sonata has many of the elements one might expect
from a work bearing this title. It is in three movements of alternating speeds and offers
demanding yet balanced parts for the instruments. Larsen works with motives as she did
in her earlier pieces, repeating a handful of important gestures several times within each
movement. Yet, for Larsen, the idea of a “Sonata” is simply a vessel or mechanism to
hold her music, not a piece that follows a particular set of compositional rules. In this
sense it goes back to the original meaning of the word “sonata:” to be sounded or played,
as opposed to “cantata,” to be sung. However, by working with and repeating motives,
Larsen creates a formal structure that in many ways fulfills the expectation of a
traditional sonata.

It is obvious that Larsen is not comfortable with having this work (or any of her
compositions) analyzed for its formal or harmonic structure because she herself does not
conceive of it in this manner. She is adamant that this work is “not to be listened to for its
form. It’s to be listened to for its flow.”²⁰ In fact, just two years before the sonata was
penned, Larsen was quoted in Strings magazine as saying that aside from her violin
concerto Pinions, she has not “written the traditional repertoire for strings, [and, more
specifically feels that] the constraints of the traditional sonata form would be frustrating
to her.”²¹

20

Larsen, interview, 8/2008.

21

Barbieri, 77.

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