The name is absent

71

very few syllables. It’s as if she’s doing exactly the same thing in her
speech that she does in her paintings. For instance, if you take all the one-
syllable words, ‘that’ ‘makes’ ‘me’ ‘feel’ ‘that’ ‘the’ ‘world’ ‘is’ ‘big,’
‘far’ beyond ‘my’ understanding, you have the horizon line. But
‘unexplainable,’ and ‘understanding’ those become the objects. Not
grammatically: we’re talking about objects of interest. [In real life] these
Pedemal Hills are huge in relationship to these trees, and yet she paints the
trees almost the same height as the Pedemal Hills, which is a perspective
that is quite unusual. If you think of the Hudson Valley painters, where
everything would be in some understandable perspective, she’s painting a
world that really is NOT understandable, far beyond our understanding.⁴⁸

The first movement of Black Birds, Red Hills uses musical timing to capture these
adjustments in perspective. Although notated in triple meter, the movement begins
without any clear sense of pulse or grounding. In this opening section, Larsen is trying to
create “a kind of time and space that is not human.”⁴⁹ The piano, with its ppp half step
trill is just ‘there’ at the beginning. Marked 56 to the quarter note, the opening conveys an
extremely gentle and free atmosphere. A quiet flourish, first introduced by the piano,
occurs throughout the movement, but is most characteristic as a clarinet motive. The
motive in the second measure OfExample 2.1 has a hill-like contour. When it reoccurs as
a clarinet motive it also suggests the movement of air through the hills. In the third
measure, a variant of this flourish appears in the clarinet, marked shadow, wafting.

Larsen, interview, 8/2008.

49

Ibid.

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