The name is absent

In more practical terms, the Composer’s Foram provided Larsen with a community
or network away from the traditional academic setting where most contemporary

American composers work, and in part allowed her to create a full time career as a

composer. She explains:

We wanted to create an organization which could support us in our old
age. Meaning that, as life went on, the organization would be there as a
touchstone. One could come there for advice, or one could come to give
advice. So that there was a community that existed outside the political
system for composers. We both saw that the political system for
composers in this country had created a situation in the concert hall that
was making what we love, which was to compose, extinct.²

The years between graduation and the Minnesota Orchestra residency marked a
period of exploration and experimentation for Larsen. Still armed with the advice and
encouragement of her principal composition teachers Paul Fetler, Eric Stokes, and
Dominick Argento, she searched in this early part of her career to find her voice among
the diverse landscape of contemporary American composers. Her teachers and the
performers who championed her early works helped to shape her style. From Fetler she
recalls:

He was able to give his students complete confidence that they could make
pieces of music from beginning to end.. .Young composers so often say, “I
don’t know where to go from here.” You have to know where you are
going to end at the beginning. It has to be in the first four measures.. .or
forget it!³

Stokes assured her that listening, studying and enjoying a diverse range of music would
not compromise her unique voice. In addition, she “acknowledges Stokes as the instructor
who brought out the sense of humor and unique sense of the absurd in her writing.”⁴

2

Boyer, 17-18.

³Ibid., 18.

⁴ Ibid.

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