Libby Larsen is a modern day composer. Libby’s belief on music is best described by a quote by Libby on her website. “Music exists in an infinity of sound. I think of all music as existing in the substance of the air itself. It is the composer’s task to order and make sense of sound, in time and space, to communicate something about being alive through music.” (Libby Larsen n.d.)
Libby was bon December 24, 1950 to Alice and Robert Larsen. She attended grade school at Christ the King School by the St. Joseph of Carondelet nuns. An important part of the curriculum included learning to read and write music. According to Libby, students were required to sight-read music every day in school from first through eighth grade. She wrote her first piece in the sixth grade (L. Larsen, personal communications, November 7, 2012). Libby attended Southwest High School. During these years, she took piano lessons, sang in the Choir, and joined a garage band.
In college at the University of Minnesota Libby earned the following degrees:
• 1971 Bachelor’s of Arts degree in Theory and Composition.
• 1975 Master’s of Arts in Composition.
• 1978 Ph.D. in Theory and Composition. (Larsen n.d).
During her years at the University of Minnesota, Libby co-founded the Minnesota Composer Forum with Stephen Paulus. Today it is the American Composers Forum with offices in New York, Atlanta, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles. Composers from around the world use these offices to promote understanding of American Composition (Larsen n.d.)
According to Libby L. Larsen, personal communications, November 7, 2012), it is her life’s work to study the flow and dynamics of the English language. She chooses poems that emphasize these dynamics. She also believes that music is one of the cognitive process of the human brain. That public education is poorer for not emphasizing that in the school systems today.
Over the past 40 years, Libby has won numerous awards for her compositions....