Libby Larsen Format: Paperback

Libby Larsen has composed award-winning music performed around the world. Her works range from chamber pieces and song cycles to operas to large-scale works for orchestra and chorus. At the same time, she has advocated for living composers and new music since cofounding the American Composers Forum in 1973.

Denise Von Glahn’s in-depth examination of Larsen merges traditional biography with a daring scholarly foray: an ethnography of one active artist. Drawing on musical analysis, the composer’s personal archive, and seven years of interviews with Larsen and those in her orbit, Von Glahn illuminates the polyphony of achievements that make up Larsen’s public and private lives. In considering Larsen’s musical impact, Von Glahn delves into how elements of the personal—a 1950s childhood, spiritual seeking, love of nature, and status as an “important woman artist”—inform her work. The result is a portrait of a musical pathfinder who continues to defy expectations and reject labels.

Denise Von Glahn is the Curtis Mayes Orpheus Professor of Musicology at Florida State University, where she is also the coordinator of the Musicology Area and director of the Center for Music of the Americas. She has written three previous books: The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape, which won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 2004; Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices, coauthored with Michael Broyles, which won the Irving S. Lowens Award in 2009; and Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World, which won the Pauline Alderman Award in 2015.