Libby Larsen by Denise Von Glahn

Libby Larsen by Denise Von Glahn

Author:Denise Von Glahn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2017-08-25T16:00:00+00:00


Words by Kathryn Daniels.

Music Copyright © Oxford University Press Inc. 2001. Assigned to Oxford University Press 2010.

Excerpts (Music Only) Reproduced by Permission of Oxford University Press. All Rights Reserved.

Example 6.7. Love after 1950, “Big Sister Says, 1967,” mm. 47–61/beat 1.

Larsen sets the entire poem with the exception of the final line, “when you’re not born beautiful.” Instead she ends with the phrase that began the poem and the song, the simple declarative, “beauty hurts.” This is the message she wants to leave with her listeners. In 1967 when the ultrathin, heavily made-up, chisel-haired, androgynous-looking model Twiggy set the standard for beauty, it is possible that Larsen rejected the idea that any woman was “born beautiful” or recognized as such.83 It might also be that the sounds of Daniels’s final line didn’t serve her musical purposes for the song or the set. The middle song needed to provide contrast, something fast-paced and lighthearted, and momentum to push the set forward. The final hissing sounds of the word hurts made their own comment on the torturous practices that had been enumerated. The fourth and fifth songs would provide time and space for quieter, more introspective reflections. With “Big Sister Says, 1967” the set reaches its rhythmic and dynamic apex; the final two songs complete the arc and end the set in the soft sounds of its beginning, even if they do not return to the emotional state of the first song.

Larsen’s Love after 1950 is a dance suite of songs. It explores women in relation to their own and others’ changing attitudes and locates love inside the era’s most iconic musical styles. The final freely, sensuously, “dazzling” song pays homage to one of the nation’s most notoriously iconic dancers, Isadora Duncan.84 Duncan’s strong, confident, intuitive, self-styled practice situated her outside tradition, a place where Larsen chose to reside herself. Duncan’s insistence upon naturalness challenged inherited aesthetic values in general and balletic disciplines, postures, and poses more specifically. Her copiously draped, barefooted body that simultaneously covered and exposed her in ways antithetical to convention, questioned notions of what constituted beauty and dance. Larsen built her set using the blueprints of traditional multimovement musical architecture complete with its temporal, dynamic, and mood contrasts and thereby delivered the formal unity, logic, and coherence listeners expected. However, her choice to conclude the set with Muriel Rukeyser’s 1973 poem “I Make My Magic” introduces ambiguity to the closed form and possibilities for the new woman, much as Duncan did in the world of dance decades earlier. Rukeyser (1913–80), a poet of optimism, joy, and political conscience, suited Larsen, who possessed the same qualities.

At a colloquium celebrating the centennial of Rukeyser’s birth, the poet Alicia Ostriker commented upon the musical quality, “the profound song” of her words:

Some of Rukeyser’s writing is clear and direct. Much is not. I begin to read and am immediately in danger of drowning. The writing is not merely fluid; it is oceanic. It cannot be paraphrased. At the writing’s surface, I am not



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