136
instrumental works by Larsen, yet new to her work with the viola. The title Breathless
not only captures the pace and emotion of the music, but in a subtle way ties together the
“breathing” motives and instructions from the earlier movements. Following the second
movement “quasi attacca,” the third movement has continuous and often manic meter
changes. Unlike the second movement, the pulse is always strong, yet the beat patterns
alternate between 5/16, 6/16, 3/4, 4/4, 5/8, and 2/4. When composing the String
Symphony in 1999, Larsen recalled that she “kept coming upon rhythms that Bemstein
had come upon: alternating 6/8 and 3/4. Non-triple rhythms, non-duple rhythms, mixed
rhythms, 5/8 and 7/8.”77 Although there are no direct references to Bemstein in the viola
sonata, both composers work with a keen awareness of the jazz and popular musics
around them and both have found a way to integrate the rhythms of jazz and pop music
into their concert music, partially through the use of mixed meters.78
The piano voicing in the opening measure of stacked fourths a half step apart,
shown in Example 3.25, creates an ambiguous tonality and open sonority similar to the
first movement. Beginning in the second measure, the “stride piano” technique from the
first movement is again encountered with repeated chords of stacked thirds in alternating
octaves marked slap staccato. The viola begins in m. 5 with a passage of double stop
thirds and fourths, one of just a handful of instances of extended double stop
77
Barbieri, 74.
Larsen notes: “It stumped me actually. Why did Bemstein come across these rhythms?
What made it elegant? I can’t put my finger on it, except that it’s mannerly. It’s got a
little lift, a little lilt. And it’s got that 5/8, but not Dave Bmbeck 5/8, which is more
trafficky, more driven. This thing that Bemstein kept finding and that Copland found and
Schumann found, it’s finding the meters within rather than setting the meter to drive. ...”
(Barbieri, 74).
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