welcome to the westminster town hall forum where for thirty two years we have engaged the public in reflection and dialogue on the key issues of our day from an ethical perspective learn more about the forum online at westminster forum dot org you can like us on facebook and follow us on twitter as well my name is tim hart anderson i'm a senior minister at westminster presbyterian church located on nicollet mall in beautiful downtown minneapolis and moderator of the forum it's my pleasure to introduce today's guest speaker levy larson as one of america's most prolific and frequently performed living composers born in wilmington delaware she moved with her family to minneapolis at the age of three she graduated from southwest high school and earned her b a m a and ph d in music composition from the university of minnesota under the tutelage of dominic argento eric stokes and paul fender she was named a composer in residence with the minnesota orchestra achieving the distinction of being the first woman to serve as a resident composer with a major orchestra her catalogue of over five hundred works ranges from intimate vocal and chamber music to our castro works and opera and her music has been sought after for commissions and premier's by major artists ensembles and orchestras around the world she is co founder of the american composers forum which nurtures the creative spirit of living composers and provides services support and information to more than six hundred active composers today she will offer a glimpse into the mind of the composer in a presentation entitled what you hear is what you get a composer composing ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming to the westminster town hall forum dr maybe larson it is true pleasure and a deep honor to be with you for this hour that we're on earth together at the moment i might like to thank the westminster town hall forum for the invitation to speak with you today and also the league heirs of the junior league of minneapolis for the sponsorship of this talk it's really most gracious and most appreciated also i want to thank my two wonderfully talented friends soprano laura hines and pianist grace well i stand here before you as a living american composer oftentimes when i introduce myself this way especially at orchestral concerts i get a laugh and that and i find it  extraordinary that in a world so full of classical music we composers who are making new works for the concert hall are always  amazed when we step out in front of an audience and we understand that so many people who love music so dearly don't know us who are who are living and working among them and so i'm here to tell you we are generous and lovely people and where ever you look i am a composer and i've been writing music since i was a child since the one nine hundred seventy s i've been working professionally with orchestras and opera companies and choruses and choral societies and soloists and chamber musicians and recording companies and publishing companies and all manner of nonprofit organizations who are involved with music in this country it is a wide and strong network of people who absolutely love music and are so very curious about where does it come from i'm pointing to my head for those of you in the radio audience because of course it comes from the minds of composers i'm proud to call minnesota my home and i'm proud to number among my dearest friends the many many musicians who've invested their talent and passion and lives and the lives of their families in our community we must treasure our musicians with all we can now music music is a mediated art form as our plays as are so many art forms but music in particular is mediated because of course if someone comes to me and says we'd like you to write us a string quartet you give it to us in two years and i say yes of course i'll give it to you in two years nobody knows what it sounds like just meet for up until the the premier of the piece and so it's a mediated art form mediated through those who desire to have a piece of music made those who desire to put on a concert those who will perform the piece of music and last but certainly least the audience we have a tremendous amount of music in our community but i write so much music that i travel extensively all over the country and now quite a bit in europe and a little bit in asia lately in fact after the talk today i'm headed down to baylor university in texas for the premier of a work on saturday evening and then after that for a week at de paul university in indiana for a festival of my music week long so i travel and i thank you but that wasn't an ad that it was my  next point that wherever i go i am met by gregarious and heuristic and engaged people who want to know about composing music really want to know about it seems mysterious and it is mysterious because it takes place in the brain and we can't really say to you here's what happens i think it would be flat and then after the b flat i think of a seat it's not the way it happens at least for me if i'm thinking about a piece of music it arrives full blown in my head it's just there and then the work that i do is bringing the piece from inside my head out in a way that you can understand that i'm trying to communicate with you and so i have wonderful conversations with people everywhere i go great conversations here's a good one had a conversation with a lawyer my life is full of lawyers because my husband jim is an attorney and so i love to go to lawyer parties and see if i can get them to understand music i have a great conversation with the really fine litigator we were talking about musical form and so i said to him you know if you studied musical form you could probably present closing arguments in a different way there is a form called the rondo form and that is a form that there were a piece of music is presented and then you take away from it then you come back in to present the same bit of music and you can do that forever odd infinitum and and the lawyer said that's a really interesting idea and by george she tried it and it work well where i go people ask questions all kinds of questions so i thought what we would do is spend some time digging into some of these questions that might loom luminary to a bit as to how we think we composers i get a lot of letters from children lots of them i brought one along this one is from kevin rene blankies dear miss larson how are you i'm fine have you written any new compositions i've always wondering is music life for you this summer i'm going to minnesota so maybe i could visit see a later kevin renee blackie well i wrote him back and i said yes as a matter of fact music is life for me it actually is all of my life goes into the music that i write not as a biography but simply by the fact that i'm alive right now and we'll talk a little bit more about that in in a moment another question from kids that comes up all the time what is your favorite piece you wrote so far and i'd delighted to tell them the one that i'm working on right now right now because it's so in gauging so activating so exciting and you can see their eyes light up because what i'm telling them is that the process of engaging your brain and your passion is always the best moment of your creative life always here's another one they all ask do you have a dog yes i have a dog his name is bosley at the moment but the most famous of our dogs is dave the singing dog who when i would play c sharp on the piano he would just break into operatic singing and howling which is caught on tape and shown in schools quite often i get questions from older students meaning everyone from sixth grade t ninety six here's one what is music wanting to know so here's what i answer i think this music is this it's an order of sound in time and space perceived as music through a particular cultural perspective does that make sense yeah that in fact the only thing about music that is absolute is pitch that's the only thing and everything else is perceived by a culture as to be an order of sound that we can call music oh and we get into marvelous conversations about and around what is music an order of sound in time and space now i was born in one thousand nine hundred fifty which was a particularly interesting time to be born for a kid who hears her way into the world before she smells or taste or touch her way into the world because the air and what's contained in the air has changed tectonically when i was in my youth my youth in music was mostly acoustic mostly acoustic now of course music is mostly mediated through electronics and technology and the air has changed quite a bit but i as a composer can make an order of sound in time and space in order to communicate what it's like to be alive and that's my answer to what is composing so what is composing making an order of sound in time and space in order to communicate what it's like to be alive right now out and it's quite  alive right now than it was in mozart's time or inbox time or beethoven's time or even james brown's time is one of my personal heroes that means that i can combine electronic sound with cellos i can ask a singer to sing acoustically but then turn on a microphone and she can whisper as loud as she can sing the high c and be heard it's  nearly flexible and fluid time for sound in our culture and the composers like myself who are making orders of sound in time and space are making pieces that you may not have heard before because we haven't heard a world like the world that we're in at the moment another question often get this question where does your music come from and my answer is everywhere it comes from everywhere it just comes from being alive for example the rhythm of our lives how we walk how we move how we invent our technology to move example is a piece that are brought quite a while ago it's called for on the floor and it's a piece about driving on the freeway and getting in a group of cars and then passing the cars and then passing the cars again going faster and faster using your peripheral vision to the point of maybe brinksmanship but it's a form and a rhythm that our culture has invented and been invented in my lifetime so i say ok that's a form i'm going to take that form and i'm going to put music to it it's mad buggy but it's a mad buggy piece but it's for the high end most highly skilled or kest players that that can be found so it comes from rhythms of our lives comes from the language we speak i take a lot of rhythmic dictation meaning if i'm with my aunt b j and she is speaking to me in my mind i have a line in a music staff and i'm writing down the rhythms of the way she speaks which i have books and books full of dictation of the way we speak in our own culture feeling that perhaps if i take the rhythms of the way we speak and i incorporate them into a piece of abstract music that you may be able to connect with that music you don't know why it just feels right just sounds right comes from the language as we speak comes from the natural world ideas from our lakes in minnesota from the snow that we know so much about all of these things are temple and texture and energy water music a symphony i wrote which is just about being on minnesota lakes that's all it is but oh does it have the rioting another piece downwind of roses in maine what it's like to stand near a rose hedge in maine with a bus going by fuming away while while the delicate piece orchestra and it's a collage and it's four minutes long and it's urban life that's what it is for in life the world as it concerns us pieces about who we are as human beings and how we're trying to relate to each other a big piece i composed for the vocal essence music series then the plymouth music series called coming forth in today which was a study of tolerance cultural tolerance written in  hundred five at a time when i really thought that peace in the mideast was possible we invent forms to carry our daily lives another piece i wrote holy rollers played a lot for saxophone and piano and what i did was i listen to here's a here's a question that i particularly love why do my teeth hurt when i hear modern music this was asked at a concert of a question answer session and  i thought how can i answer that question why do my teeth hurt when i hear modern music the only thing i could think to say is because you've probably been hearing a certain kind of music you know for most of your lifetime and probably your neurological system has developed in such a way that when you hear sounds that don't quite track in that system that it connects somehow to the nerves in your teeth and here's another one there are only twelve knots hasn't anything everything been done with them already that's always a great deal of fun there are only twelve notes and of course the the answer is not by a long shot because of course music exists in the infinity of what's available in the air the sound waves that are in the air connecting reconnecting reshaping themselves and as what is in the air changes so does the music that's in the air we have twelve notes in our western scale and it feels like everything's been done with them not true i'm writing an op or right now and what i decided to do was to take pai which is an infinite number and then assign a certain pitch class set to it meaning c is one and d is two and then i've created all the melodies in the opera from what is generated by pi there are only twelve tones there but they don't sound like major and minor scales sounds like pie it's really interesting so my time is running short and i think what i'll do is is answered one more question that i'm often asked and usually by kids and they say what made you start composing music because it is kind of mysterious several of my friends are in the audience knew were all nodding at each other that oh yes it's kind of mysterious it's in our heads but here's how it went from for me to find a lot a lot of composers figure out that their composers around age eleven twelve thirteen begin to discover that this is your best language your best way to communicate who you are in the world is somehow by making music somehow that's better than making poetry or making dinner you make music and for me it went this way and i was a very gregarious kid i would say it communicator would be a nice way to put it and so i was always in trouble for talking out of turn all ways and trouble in school at home everywhere in fact it went on all the way through my ph d when the last class i ever took during my doctorate i got short for talking o king schools on fiftieth in new york in minneapolis and at that point in time the the sisters of st joseph of qur'an delay were teaching us and they taught every one of us in first grade to read and write music every one of us and it wasn't necessarily so we would put on performances in fact we didn't start performing till maybe third or fourth grade it was really of a logic of the disciplined might some people didn't get it at all but i loved it i just started writing like talking and by the time i got to sixth grade we were studying a new math and and that was continuous set theory which i just ate up i just loved the new math and i got all involved with it and then it hit me it hit me like  that if we could have set whose members are that set could be pitch harmony rhythm melody any of the elements of music i could put into a my own set and that would make my own piece of music and that is exactly what it is composing is you know all the elements and you put them together and you compose and you hope you hope that what you have said communicate what it's like for you the composer to to be alive all i can tell you is that it has been the most extraordinary life so far i don't know how long i'll be here but i do know i'll keep a keep music ing first even if it gets me into trouble for speaking out  nd wants to bring into your representation of what it does for them by giving you a piece of music it's a great sharing of the abstract essential human emotions the abstract  that make us tick as human beings and relayed us all to each other so fire away with your questions and thank you so very much for allowing me to speak larson you're listening to the westminster title for a broadcast from westminster presbyterian church mall in downtown minneapolis i'm tim hart anderson senior minister of westminster presbyterian church and moderator of the forum our speaker today is composer libby larsen while the ushers collect questions from the in house audience i like to invite the radio audience to join us for our next forum on thursday march fourteenth at noon when sustainable farming and food advocate and lap a will be our guest speaker now dr larson if you would return to the pulpit i will present the questions from our audience you have been a trailblazer in many ways in composing in america particularly in the role of women could you comment on the influence of women in classical music how has the female voice or mind shaped this genre very fine question and one which actually spans about nine hundred years worth of history which is only begun to be uncovered in the last fifty years of a scholarly research to look for and to find music that is composed by brains who live in female bodies about did a lot of research at the library of congress trying to understand where do we get our canon of classical music and and we get it from the victor red seal record box that was sent out with gramophone in one thousand tap and in that box are many wonderful examples of music written classical music some ethnic musics what have you but that box formed what we call the classical music canon are finding ways to introduce new product line shall we say fresh fresh ideas fresh music and among that are many many fine examples of many many women composers what we're doing is where we are supporting each other supporting all of the composers who are alive right now we're really a big community and so you're you're you're hearing more and more music written by just living composers and and also and in particular by women  posers have you encountered biases against women in your work and if so how have you dealt with that these are tough questions yes i have encountered bias in my work that that that we discuss women aren't there i've heard conductor say well there isn't any really good music to program but women have heard that to my face and and so it takes a great deal of knowledge and graciousness and a good sense of humor to say oh well here and i pulled out a laundry list of twenty pieces and said you might want to look at these you know and just to try every place where the benign neglect exists to to shut a bit shed some light and just say no you know met the fact is that there are many of us who are working and it's really fine music you mentioned arbitrary twelve tone western scale this is from a southwest student that has you know southwest students being alum yourself yes you know how sharp they are i guess what ability do we have to appreciate eastern music or are music outside twelve tone western scale that's a excellent question  we have ears and one of the things i love about portable sound is that our ears become democratic so we can we can put our ears on any music that we can put on our i pod today in my day it was the transistor radio but and so it allows us those of us who hear our way into the world and really are interested in why this note goes with this note to hear scales from other cultures and say wow that's so different than the twelve notes that i was given in third grade too to compose music with i'm going to look into that and what's happening of course is that more and more students of more and more different kinds of scales of whatever age are asking each other about the music seeking out masters you know of music that is that is not necessarily western music and learning about that music and it's enriching the world of music just phenomenally it's a very exciting world the world of scales and the way cultures perceive themselves through inventing the musical scale you describe composing as an act of the mind many to speak of their art form as a result of their passions can you describe how passionate your life enters into your composing every day in every way  if you know me you know that i would blurt things out from time to time and oftentimes it's because i have a very curious mind and i'm very passionate about something that takes my mind up and so what i've learned to do is to just just run with my passions and then gain enough technical tools and rigor to translate that passion into something that can live beyond my own passion for it also quite physical i run around the house feeling in my arms about and doing opera calls and all kinds of things just just to activate the music this may be a related question from a southwest student you use the phrase mad bookie what does that term mean well my mother loved and still love stride boogie piano and so  often would have recordings from her collection on the record player while we were doing dishes and and so i would listen of course and then i would go to the piano and i would pick out the notes and and play classical book you describe for us lee influence on your work as a composer from musicians such as that rock funk jazz even metal yeah like yeah i'd be happy to because i listen to the the air literally but also the social air i i have been really really interested in what music's our own culture has generated our own culture considered classical in fact when i started my matriculation in college i didn't have a very good classical repertoire my repertoire really was boogie and rock him and the current boy bands like ricky nelson and things like  meet and so i start i analyze every kind of music i can and james brown is my hero he's one of my heroes as is chuck berry as is little richard but here's why james brown we're talking about this you know in music you go one two three four in western music and i'm conducting as i'm singing this and in western music what happens is we are in ensemble and i get you ready to come in on one by going and we come in together and come in so we hit it so you don't go and the one with james brown james brown will count off and then everybody takes a breath and goes into the one together without a conductor without a drum set no one's driving them people are coming together and that is a cultural statement no one tells you when to come in you just come in together so i study james brown and i studied musicians who know how to move together  and and it's it comes into my music and it drives classical musicians crazy and what is the role of improvisation and composition for you this is from a music teacher at southwest oh thank you southwest always was a great school improvise quite a bit as a matter of fact at the start of my composing sessions i go to the piano i write at the piano but not on the piano i just lay across the piano bench and write things down but to begin the session i improvise at the piano and i might go on for five ten minutes and i just kind of listen and think not necessarily to use what i coming from the improvisation but to free up my brain to move really fast so that i can hear as i'm improvising i can hear the music that i'm making and i can call upon my best critic which you are you really need a good critic good constructive critic with you as you as you're working and that critic will say that's bad don't do that that's good and it hones the my ear and my skills but then when i just lay down on the bench and start writing you know i'm really ready to go i haven't put a lot of roadblocks in the way of my thought process you composers work together in that sense critique one another's work and learn from one another or is it a competitive marketplace yes  admire writing groups well where writers will bring what they're working on and read to each other and critique their work also painting groups composers don't necessarily group around pieces that are being written right at the time they're being written what we do do is we play our music for each other quite a bit and we and we've been very kind of gingerly say  sounds a little long here it there's really there's really not an editing system at work in the composition system the way there is in writing words so we support each other and and we listen to each other's work second part of the question is is it a competitive world then yes and no it certainly isn't competitive to just write music but because the music concert system exists the way it does in our country it's very hard for composers to be heard on the existing system so what we do is we get together and we do concerts of our own music house concerts concerts here concerts there we just did one last night and so we can be so we can be heard so we support each other in lots of ways number of questions from young composers trying to start out in the business who are in our audience today can you say something about entrepreneurship and  composer and composing is this a sustainable career how difficult is it to begin as a composer make a living from it it's a difficult road to walk and one well worth walking it composing is really for me it's not a career it's a profession that's made up of lots of careers lots of skills putting concerts together trying my hand at record production and just all the business skills that you need to have to negotiate contracts to to promote your work to archive your work all the all the products of that you produce as a composer you need to actually know quite a bit about everything around those products now for a young composer that really seems daunting but a profession is a life's work so you know you don't actually arrive at a career point as a composer you just work on pieces piece after piece after piece and and and you gather around you a group of friends and performers who love your music and to perform your music and the way to build to build a profession as a composer is to be friend performers you want to work with and be loyal to them and and every friend you make as a composer because they have to believe in what you hear but nobody else hears so it's a matter of loyalty and trust the more you can gather people around you who really are honest with you and like the music you wri composing in the pre digital age and we are in the digital age now how has that affected you in terms of use of software or decompose electronically how do you see the changing impact on composing with the age of  digital music well i wish we had four hours two to talk about this one in my lifetime i have spanned being taught the ancient calligraphy of  writing music down on the page that was the one that was invented in the monasteries and is taught to composers really up until we had our first software programs notational software programs  so i am much much faster than a computer writing my music down because a computer is very limited in what it can do for you as a notational instrument so i just put a forty stave piece of paper on the on the bench and then i just fill everything in know all the notes everything whether it's loud or soft all of the staccato marks it just goes down on the page whereas computers make you go and pick things out first you put in them notes then you put in the dynamics then you put in the articulation but it's very slow although it seems efficient it's it is not and and so as technology has presented us with the possibility of notation by computer as the first approach to the page i have maintained what i do and also work with a number of students private students who i teach to write by hand because the process of the decision making process is so very different when you when you write by hand and so we're in the covered wagon stages of technology as it relates to music what i fear is that we are so in love with the technology that we throw the baby out with the bathwater  i'm worried about cursive writing for the same reason if you can't read cursive writing how are you going to do research the generations before you know and so these things are heavy on heavy on my mind and i'll stop talking about them at the moment  you said that music a musical piece comes to you as a whole and the question is is it true for longer pieces and how can you manage all of that information at once and could you say more about what you mean it comes to you as a whole yeah i know when i was saying it i thought oh i better not say that but it is true that in my process we're all different so engage us after the talk today because every composer works differently but in my case if i thinking all right i'm going to write a string quartet this is great love strings and i get strings the sound of strings at the front of my brain  and i then i just think i'm not thinking and it's going to be for movements and it's going to one is going to be fast and one is going to be slow i think the shape into being the shape of the piece and and it looks settling just it's there the shape of the piece then i start bringing out all of the of the tools we call it pitch and rhythm in order to fill out that the shape and it sounds mysterious but it's part of the process we don't talk about much called this a terrorist party voice which is part of the brain which is where the figure isis when the figure rises then you can begin to work it's true for chefs true for architects the figure arises whole and then the work of getting it out of that part of the brain and into a recognisable form is what we call compose a number number of questions related to expanding the constituency of classical music if you will and what are the prospects of doing that among young people today who grown up in and the drama of music that it's in many ways is quite different from classical corollary question has come into i've been i have a hard time enjoying new music someone says i'm stuck on the old classics what can i do so two ends of the spectrum there and both of them quite wonderful to consider  i'm stuck on old music too but what i'm stuck on is i love acoustic sound so i do i have a hard time listening to techno music because i my brain that is from even two hundred years after everything else someone will come up and always very eager to shake a hand and shake hands and they'll say your piece was it was interesting lot you know and so i always i've learned to do it to ask a question in response to the old what did you know not did you like it didn't you like it because that doesn't matter what matters is what did you hear in it and and quite often that the person will say you know i just can't listen to anything past beethoven and i understand that no because that's a certain kind of conditioned listening and i'll say it well that's curious because i can't read any books since charles dickens you know i don't i don't say that but but but what we do engage in is a discussion of what is melody know and what is the military to tap your to l and what notes do you like with each other and we just sort of do a therapy session on how to listen to music and then if i get somewhere i'll say you know i can understand why you wouldn't connect my piece because here's how i use melody you know and here's how and you know it and it's quite like actually i was on the subway in new york and i heard this clicking and clacking you know and that became the rhythm and it's not in four four and so i understand totally understand it's a question of stretching the ears to listen to the four basic elements of music always with a new perspective and those four basic melody elements of music are very simple how does a composer use pitch how does a composer use motion how does the composer use shape and what is the emotional connection with the piece in that way you can think about  brahms in the same concert ad take your ears on a walk in the countryside of sound you know and discover what is new and different about the pitch that you heard in rap which makes the pitch you heard in brahms new and different so so that's my way of answering both questions at one time that i do all right very well with that kind of a follow up what do you think are classical composer bach beethoven brahms what were they saying about their lives through their music and what are you saying about your life through your music well i can't answer for bach and beethoven and brahms but i can guess no because they're working with the same elements pitch motion shape and emotion and the fact is is that all of us are human beings and so we move in similar ways and we experience the traffic patterns of our lives in similar ways and the social mores of our lives in similar ways and and the energy of the time and what people are wearing it was so very hard to play during that time and so you will find the whole missive beethoven's world not necessarily what he thought about it but how he reflected it in the way he shaped his music it in we tend to think that we're trying to make some sort of sociological statement and with the pieces that we write but the fact is we each listen uniquely each person in this room hearing a piece of mind will hear it differently than any other person in the room so all we composers can do is to give you as much of the shape and pitch and emotion as we possibly can and let you feel the piece the way it sits on you in your particular life on that particular day at that particular moment as a person who speaks regularly in public which i do as a preacher i'm well aware of the value of silence and a sermon for instance in fact last sunday sermon from the pulpit where you're standing was the importance of silence in our world and then i went on to speak about it for twenty minutes and i felt guilty about that but what can you say about the relationship between silence and music as a composer beautiful question i was thinking as we were waiting for the broadcast to begin our moment of silence was so noisy so noisy to my ears there were some been some click going on i don't know if i was typing or something but it was it was asymmetrical and kind of interesting and i was taking it down in my brain who that's into silence in our world is the rarest of all birds and eventually i think we'll get around to understanding how polluted our areas with sound and in music there can be no music without silence to judge it to hear it if it's silent and then one note begins to sound it moves the air it changes your s it focuses your hearing in your thinking it changes your expectations for what will come next because now there's a sound silence is the thing that is hardest to come by in music it's i don't know if it's impossible i think i think it's i think it is possible i think that you can create music just as you can create moments in your sermons you know where the soul the body that has been slow drawn into what you're saying has a moment to settle and then if you let the silence become even more you move past that fear of being silent and you move into a place that is very hard to  believe especially in a world where we're being yanked out of it all the time we had a former speaker on forgiveness once who argue that for one to be ready to forgive one must be willing to embrace silence and t stand down from the end where you are engaging the world at one point him and be quiet and he invited the audience then to into a period of silence for about three minutes which worked really well on public radio was there will not do that today but tell us a bit about them shifting to a different topic one that you and i spoke of before coming out here we have a number of questions about the current situation with our orchestras in the twin cities and i wonder if you as a composer m  an administrator i can watch and consider the situation i think from a little different perspective though i am a performing musician and i sat in the orchestra lead board of directors for a number of terms and also minnesota orchestra board of directors for a number of terms so i think i see the hundred year situation that is currently afoot here in in the and to only hear about the current business situation of the music is is is really a tragedy and now will it be solved yes it'll be solved one way or another are there sides in my opinion there are no sides it's a huge situation that has gotten out of control not with this orchestra with all orchestras in the country a and it's a it and it needs to find its new footing whatever that is and minnesota is the place where i think we're going to find out we are after all pioneers we love great ideas we love to see how things play out after all we did aleck jesse you know so i have i have high hopes that however the situation plays out it will be played out in the scandinavian collective way we do things here in minnesota and if it plays out well you know which will