52
many composers never deal with: how to connect with an abstract
audience. Performers deal with it all the time.90
Throughout this early part of her career, Larsen was very aware that her audience
had become an “unknown” in certain respects, no longer made up of fellow students and
professors. By connecting her music with tangible extramusical images, stories, and
sounds, she was reaching out to an unfamiliar population, and providing them with a
concrete concept as a starting point. Thirty years after these first pieces were written she
has the advantage Ofhindsight and remarks, “It really takes mature experience to get
what’s there other than just technique,”91
90
91
Ibid.
Ibid.