The name is absent

131

Schoenberg’s idea of klangfarbenmelodie in a much more subtle manner than she had in
Black Roller, where she had the timbres of eight instruments at her disposal.

Throughout the movement, descriptive words such as sweetly (m. 15), bell-like (m.
26 & 38), or extremely smoothly (m. 35) are used to relate Larsen’s ideas more directly to
the musicians. Wafting, a common term in Larsen’s music, accompanies the swift
arpeggiated piano flourishes several times, including the passage in Example 3.21. This
word is part of Larsen’s compositional vocabulary, and when asked about how and why
she uses it, she remarked, “I try to find descriptive words that cause the performer to
question what the feel of that particular bit of music should be. [It] is a word that I
searched for, in order to find a term that describes that surprised moment of the ruffling
of one’s surface by another force...” ⁷²

Though Larsen is quite clear from the preface to the score that this piece is strictly
about the viola and piano, the water image evoked through the title drifting and the use of
the term ‘wafting’ seem to suggest otherwise. In the context of her Symphony: Water
Music (1984), she remarked:

My identity with water, and especially inland lake water, meant something
in the way that I perceive phrasing, dynamics, color in music, and the form
and shape that my music takes is very much tied to my lifelong
relationship to lakes.⁷³

Larsen uses Wafting as the title for the third movement of this symphony, and it also
appears in her violin concerto Pinions and in the “light rippling wind” section of Black
Roller?⁴ The entire symphony is about water images, and in the Wafting movement she is

72

Cynthia Green, “Interview with Composer Libby Larsen,” ILWC Journal (June 1992):
24.

⁷³ Ibid.

⁷⁴ See discussion in Chapter 1.

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