49
other hand, I might write a piece that’s way too hard. This is an ensemble piece.”82
Compositionally this is a simpler and more simplistic piece than Black Roller. Each
movement is basically strophic, with a bit of variation and added material as the
movement progresses. In her entry on Larsen in Contemporary Composers, Pamela
Collins offers the following summary of her music:
Underlying her work is a strong interest in American popular musics, an
interest she combines with elements of freely deployed atonal harmony
and the kinds of repetitive structure often associated with so-called
minimalism but which in her work have an altogether more folkish and
less doctrinaire quality83
This statement is perhaps best applied to Larsen’s music from her Minnesota
Orchestra residency period (1983-1987) onward, yet every assertion Collins makes,
especially “freely deployed atonal harmony” and “repetitive structure” seem to describe
Cajun Set directly.
From a performance standpoint, the most difficult element in the work is not the
notes, rhythms, or ensemble issues which are more straightforward than Black Roller, but
rather the chorography of the stomping and shouting in the last movement, Joe Férail.
Larsen describes performances she has heard of this movement as “scary,” and goes on to
say: “I have always thought maybe it just takes much more practicing.”84 Larsen also
regards the sudden character changes of the stop waltz in the first movement, Gringalet,
as “confounding to string quartets.”85 Part of the difficulty here stems from the fact that
the work attempts to coordinate precisely a practice that was largely extemporized or ad-
libbed in the folk context.
82 Ibid.
83 Pamela Collins, ed., Contemporary Composers (Chicago: St. James Press, 1992), 538.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.