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Wisconsin, Texas, New York, and New Mexico. Larsen deliberately chose six paintings
from New Mexico for the trio, five of which are images of the Pedemal Hills located
around O’Keeffe’s property at Ghost Ranch, outside of Santa Fe. There is much
significance to Larsen’s choice of both O’Keeffe and these particular paintings. In
choosing a collection of O’Keeffe’s New Mexico paintings as the starting point for her
piece, Larsen is able to incorporate many of her favorite subjects in this composition: the
influences of nature, strong female subjects, and the American West.
Larsen’s objective in this trio, subtitled A Portrait of Six Paintings of Georgia
O ’Keeffe, was to “create a portrait of her. Not a full portrait, just the portrait of whatever
it was that drew her to New Mexico.”16 Originally conceived as a multi-media song cycle
with slides, the libretto was fashioned from the narrative O’Keeffe wrote to accompany
the paintings in the Viking collection. In this first version there were also short narrations
between many of the songs made up of additional excerpts from the Viking text. These
interludes were intended to accompany the changing of the slides and create a more
complete portrait of the artist for the audience.17
Larsen, interview, 8/2008. In 1994 Larsen composed a set of seven songs for mezzo-
soprano, solo trombone, and orchestra called Mary Cassatt. In her program note of this
piece, she refers to this work as a portrait of Cassatt. Larsen writes: “I have combined the
mezzo- soprano as the embodied character of Cassatt with the trombone as Cassatt's spirit
to create a fuller understanding of the artist.”
(Libby Larsen “Mary Cassatt”
http://libbylarsen.com/index.php?contentID=241&resourceID=1217, accessed 5 February
2010).
17 Larsen includes the titles of the paintings in the revised score, as it was her initial
intention to have slides of each work shown during live performances. Her opinion has
changed over the years and now she has mixed feelings about their use in live
performance: “What’s going through my mind is visual attention, aural attention. Here’s
how I think [it] would be cool: yes, to see the painting, but then take the painting away,
and let the color remain. Personally, I would not show the paintings. However, people
perceive in so many ways.” (Larsen, interview 7/2009).