Natural Composer

Ecomusicology

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LIBBY LARSEN USES THE LANGUAGE OF MUSIC TO GIVE LISTENERS EMBODIED EXPERIENCES IN NATURE.

Words by Crystal Hammon Photo by Ann Marsden

Writing the music of nature fills Larsen with reverence and humility for living “in a world that snows and burns, and is so rich in its quest for infinite being,” she says. “I feel joy and gratitude for being human, in stewardship with nature. I try to use my music to do what I can to inspire and affirm this feeling in other people,” she says.

Grammy Award-winning composer Libby Larsen has lived on Lake Minnetonka just west of Minneapolis for decades. A marathon athlete and lifelong sailor, the 72-year-old composer spends time outdoors every day, regardless of the weather. “When I was a young girl — there were five girls in our family, no boys — my father bought us a beat-up, old sailboat and joined the Lake Harriet Yacht Club in Minneapolis,” Larsen says. “We raced sailboats all my growing up years. At 7 years old, I was out on Gull Lake, a large lake, racing my sailboat in pea-soup fog, which taught me to be one, or as one as you possibly can, with the elements.” THE MIND OF AN ICONOCLAST

With few female role models to follow, Larsen has invented her own creative life, steering clear of archaic ideologies, hierarchies and power structures, especially those related to religion. Her innovative spirit is evident in pieces like Missa Gaia: Mass for the Earth, a rebuttal to religious theologies that say human beings have dominion over nature.

Composed by Larsen in the early 1990s, this choral composition has six movements that follow a traditional Catholic mass, but the content is anything but traditional. Even the texts are diverse and expansive, including words from Native American animists, the Bible, and authors such as Meister Eckhart, Wendell Berry, M.K. Dean and Joy Harjo.

In Missa Gaia, Larsen celebrates nature’s cycles and expresses her view that humanity and nature are united, and holiness is accessible to everyone. Within the text, she incorporates a line from Berry’s poem Closing the Circle to suggest humanity’s harmonious relationship with the earth:

The Minnesota artist has been composing music since the 1970s, marking herself as one of the most prolific composers of her time with over 500 commissioned works. Although family, religion and place are prominent themes, Larsen’s first compositions and a significant share of her work capture what she knows best: being in nature. Within this oeuvre, Larsen aims to let people “get inside nature and deeply feel what it is to actually be nature—not comment on it, but be it.”

Those intentions resonate in her first symphony, Water Music, composed in four movements: Fresh Breeze; Hot, still; Gale; and Wafting. In that work, “I’m using the forces of the symphony orchestra to make calm or [make] that first day in spring, especially in the Plain States, when the wind changes direction and blows from the south or southwest, and brings this kind of freshness, and you just know ‘Oh, now it’s spring,’” Larsen says. “In the hold of hands and eyes we turn in pairs, that joining joining each to all again.”

Larsen is currently writing music that embodies snow, no small endeavor given the “meager set of tools” a composer has to convey abstract human emotions. “My intention is to make a sonic shape that a person can enter, and then leave transformed,” she says. “I’m not trying to facilitate how, or when, or what kind of transformation.” ■

“Even the puddles are different almost immediately.” Learn more about Libby Larsen at https://libbylarsen.com. Ecomusicology

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