LIBBY LARSEN (b. 1950)Songs From Letters: Calamity Jane to Her Daughter Janey, 1880–1902 (1989)

This chapter studies Libby Larsen’s work. It shows that her forthright, accessible style is flexible enough to allow for a sensitive response to words, and a close identification with the subject matter. Her wide musical tastes are reflected clearly here and she is notably responsive to the inherent rhythms of American pronunciation. Moreover, this chapter shows how ‘Jane’ in Larsen’s songs was caricatured and sentimentalized in popular culture, and how historical facts were distorted. The composer’s programme note informs us that ‘Martha Jane Canary Hickock’ (her real name) wrote these letters to her daughter Janey during the time when the child had been sent to live in a ‘normal’ environment. ‘Calamity’ raised the money to support her by taking on often humiliating and dangerous work in the brutal, uncompromising Wild West.

Sounds Real and Imagined:

In a career spanning more than four decades, American composer Libby Larsen has turned to the natural world for inspiration on dozens of occasions: her piece Up Where the Air Gets Thin is just one of the results. Unlike many of her nature-based works which provide primarily aesthetic responses to the sights, sounds, feel, and smells of the natural environment, this 1985 duet for contrabass and cello comments on the limits of non-verbal communication and the impact of climate change. It is simultaneously reflective and didactic. “Sounds Real and Imagined” considers the ways Larsen marshals minimal musical materials and a sonic vocabulary that she associates with stillness and cold, in combination with her commitment to environmental awareness and advocacy. It situates the historic 1953 ascent of Mt. Everest by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay within the context of late-twentieth-century artistic responses and an early twenty-first century musicologist-listener’s consciousness.