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PREFACE

As any student learning how to draw, act, or play an instrument knows, being an
artist is not a vocation but a lifelong process. True artists in all genres and mediums seek
to develop their own individual style or voice over the course of their career, and in this
endeavor, often unconsciously, they produce a body of work that relates sequentially, yet
is often wide ranging and diverse in subject and scope when examined as a whole.

Over centuries musicologists and music lovers have studied the musical evolution
of individual composers, delving into the social, political, and personal events of the
artists’ lives and analyzing how these events may have triggered certain changes in a
compositional technique or philosophy. Traditionally this is done retrospectively, when a
body of work can be approached completely, from the first student pieces to the final,
mature works.

This study of selected chamber music by Libby Larsen (b. December 24, 1950,
Wilmington, Delaware) does not in any way attempt to be a retrospective of the entirety
of the composer’s career to date. However, after more than thirty prolific years as a
composer, Larsen has created a substantial body of work in which two gradual but
discernible changes of style can be identified, roughly concurrent with a significant
residency with the Minnesota Orchestra (1983-1987) and the turn of the Millennium.
Although, as with any composer, there are several elements of Larsen’s compositional
language that evolve, this document focuses on her use and incorporation of extramusical
material throughout her career, and it highlights a trend beginning in the representational
and programmatic pieces of her early years, continuing with the suggestive works of the

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