114
second movement, Salt Peanuts, that bears resemblance to the above passages from her
2008 string works.
Example 3.3: Blue Third Pieces, Second mvt., m. 62
Furthermore, this movement of Blue Third Pieces is based on Dizzy Gillespie and Kenny
Clarke’s Salt Peanuts (1942), and it openly and frequently borrows the famous “Salt
Peanuts, Salt Peanuts!” exclamation from the jazz standard. Example 3.4 reveals how
Larsen takes the original version of the Gillespie’s tune ∣A∣ reuses it in her own Salt
Peanuts ∣B^∣, and then changes it slightly at the end of her Viola Sonata for a similar
sounding, but not directly quoted gesture ∣C^1-
Example 3.4: Motive Comparison of Salt Peanuts (Gillespie), mm. 23-24; Salt
Peanuts (Larsen), Second mvt., mm. 51-52; Viola Sonata (Larsen), Third mvt.,
mm. 140-142
Similarly, Larsen’s Viola Sonata and her trio Black Birds, Red Hills have two small
but significant shared motives. The chart in Figure 6 outlines both motives, and the way
in which relatively minor melodic figures in an early piece reappeared fourteen years
later as major structural motives.56
56 Although Larsen did not deliberately reuse the trio motives in the sonata, the revision
of the trio is chronologically closer to the sonata, and thus the trio may have been on her
mind as she was conceiving of her Viola Sonata.