58
O’Keeffe seems like a natural subject for Larsen to choose for many reasons.
Larsen already had explored the relationship between visual art and sound earlier in her
career when she used the artwork of another American artist, Morris Louis, as the source
material for a work called Bronze Veils for trombone and two percussionists. Premiered
in 1979, this work is more programmatic and representational than BlackBirds, Red
Hills. In the music she is literally trying to emulate the technique Morris used in applying
layers of color by creating layers of sound. Larsen writes:
The paintings are created by layering soft tints on canvas so that the effect
is that of gazing through, or not gazing through, several veils of color.
That effect inspires the combination of instruments in this work. The
combinations of color should give the idea of penetrating audibly several
veils of sound14
The timbres of the various percussion instruments in Bronze Veils including
vibraphone, cymbals, tam-tam, wind chimes, and triangle capture the mood of these
peaceful and ethereal paintings. The piece begins calmly, marked “slowly, languorously”
and seems to have a sort of beckoning quality that draws the listener into the piece
through its various “veils” of sound colors. There are many alternations between
percussion instruments so the effect is similar to these paintings which study the
variations, and shading possibilities of the color bronze.
For Black Birds, Red Hills, Larsen began by choosing six of O’Keeffe’s paintings
drawn from a retrospective collection published by Viking Press.15 This “comprehensive
volume” contains 108 color plates of O’Keeffe’s artwork from throughout her career. It
includes her famous close-ups of flowers, cityscapes, and other paintings from her life in
14
Libby Larsen, Black Birds, Red Hills, (Oxford: Oxford LFniversity Press, 2005),
preface.
5 Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Studio Book (New York: Viking Press, 1976).