The name is absent

Ill

functional harmony. Larsen has addressed the question of how she perceives the
harmonic content of her music with the following statement:

My music is built around tonal areas that are vaguely modal and
reinforced through pedal tones in the bass. The key to my music is to hear
tones that aren't articulated and to be able to listen to low tones. My
approach is NOT four-part voice-leading functional keyboard harmony;
however I would describe tonality for me as pools of 'comfort' around a
fundamental. The way I conceive tonality is horizontal, not vertical,
meaning that the line comes first and the harmonies result. Intervals
generally have a particular significance in my music — I choose the
interval, I like Lydian fourths and major thirds — and develop the
meaning of that interval musically throughout a piece.⁵²

Similarly, Larsen approaches the formal structure of this piece from the less defined
context of the twentieth century. Like all of the works in this study, the sonata is
sectional, built around a series of contrasting motives that do not generally develop
melodically or harmonically but recur throughout each movement, occasionally in a
fragmented form. Thus, it is not difficult to discern a formal layout within each
movement, especially the first. Its motives are arranged in such a way that one can
observe the outline of a eighteenth or nineteenth sonata form movement with an
exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda. This is mostly likely an unconscious
or unintended coincidence, for Larsen writes in the preface of the sonata: “I adopted the
formality of the sonata much in the same way an architect accepts the shell of a building
and rehabilitates the interior.”⁵³

The “shell” in this case would be the fast-slow-fast movement layout, which Larsen
does deliberately re-use, naming her movements Flow, Drift, and Breathless in place of

⁵² Libby Larsen, “FAQ” http://libbylarsen.com/index.php?contentID=230 (accessed 8
February 2010).

53

Larsen, Viola Sonata, preface.

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