The name is absent

51

Early Career Reflections

In retrospect, Larsen looks back on some of her first compositions like BlackRoller
and Cajun Set with mixed feelings. On the one hand, her earliest experiences led her to
develop a mature technique and philosophy; on the other, she now knows what works and
does not work from a compositional and performance standpoint. Larsen compares Black
Roller to early works of other composers:

It’s young: it’s like young Mendelssohn, or young Mozart. You can hear
in early Mendelssohn and early Mozart where they compose themselves
into a comer, and then their teacher composes them out again, and then
they go back! ⁸⁹

Although Larsen’s main criticism of BlackRoller is its architecture, she does regard
several pieces from this period as architecturally successful. These include Pinions, a
violin concerto also composed in 1981 for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra with Romuald
Tecco as soloist, and Cajun Set. There is quite a bit of experimentation for Larsen in
these early works as well. Both the shouting and stomping in Cajun Set and the aleatoric
section in Black Roller (which also happens to include shouting) are rare elements that
the composer has returned to in only one or two pieces, and they have not become a
hallmark of her music. In general though, both the harmonic language and rhythmic
complexity in her current works is much more developed than these early pieces. She
adds:

It’s all sort of bad Stravinsky and looking at Britten and trying to
understand Schoenberg, you know, which is exactly what you should be
doing in grad school, is really trying to figure out what it is you actually
have to say. But then I was done with grad school, and also beginning to
try to connect with an abstract audience, which is part of the process that

89

Larsen, interview 7/2009.

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