The name is absent

146

The challenge of creating percussive energy on a stringed instrument seems to have
been the largest obstacle for the composer. After writing the String Symphony she
remarked:

We live in a percussive world. Can you imagine American music, all kinds
of American music, without the drum set? The tough thing about writing
for strings is that there’s no percussion. So the challenge is, what do those
strings mean? What do they mean in the flow of life? Why do strings
exist?⁹⁵

Larsen concedes that she was not completely comfortable with the viola when she wrote
the Viola Sonata and that therefore some of her attempts to get a percussive sound out of
the instrument seem unnatural. Eight years after its premiere she now realizes:

I feel that I’m getting to the point where I understand the rhythm enough
so that I can also work within the idiom of the instrument.. .so the
instrument feels comfortable playing the rhythms. For a while I felt that—
like with the Viola Sonata, I know that James [Dunham] has that rhythm
in him, but my attempts to get it to feel fluid on the viola feel forced in
some places for me.” ⁶

Larsen’s preoccupation with trying to replicate the rhythm and sound of American
language and music permeates this piece, and is directly in line with the development of
her current style. However forced some of the rhythms feel, it is nonetheless a valid
example of how she perceives the role of and place for concert music in the twenty first
century. The contradiction in the sonata relates to her statement in the program notes that:
“I often draw influences from extramusical influence. This work is about viola and piano,
nothing more, nothing less.”⁹⁷ Indeed, in the viola sonata there are no direct quotes from
source music as in Cajun Set, no story like that of Black Roller, no subject as in Black
Birds, Red Hills, and no unifying theme given by a descriptive title, yet there are clearly

95         , . .

Barbieri, 71.

96

Larsen, interview, 7/2009.

⁹⁷ Larsen, Viola Sonata, Preface.

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