The name is absent

69

evoking the feeling of O’Keeffe and her works instead of providing a narrative of the
artist’s life and direct representation of the paintings. Two years after the premiere of the
revised version of the piece Larsen remarked, “Many musical works demand
extramusical context to make them more communicative but what lives on in that part of
us which is universal and perhaps timeless is the music.”⁴¹

First Movement: Pedernal Hills

The first movement of Black Birds, RedHills is based on O’Keeffe’s Pedernal and
Red Hills (1936), the earliest painting in the set Larsen chose, and one that was
completed a few years after O’Keeffe began spending her summers in New Mexico. The
Pedemal Hills are sacred to both the Navajo and Jicarilla people and figure in both tribes’
creation stories.⁴² O’Keeffe was surrounded by these hills in her home at Ghost Ranch,
and painted them numerous times throughout her life. Standing between 6,900 and 7,565
feet tall, the hills have no trails to their summit, the last 20 feet a vertical scramble
through loose rock.⁴³ O’Keeffe spent many days on the hill near her house and later
recalled, “It’s my private mountain.. .It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough
I could have it.”⁴⁴

The title of the painting describes the work very well. In the foreground we see the
red hills with all of their trees removed; the subtle contour and folds in the landscape are

⁴¹ J. Heywood Alexander ed., To Stretch Our Ears, A Documentary of America’s Music
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co.: 2002), 489.

⁴² Lynes, 80.

⁴³ Ibid., 77.

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Ibid., 80.

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