Interview by Susan Chastain
as published in the IAWM Journal, February 1996, pp. 4-7.
SC: Libby, how old is your daughter, now?
LL: Almost nine!
SC: Exciting times! With the history of problems women in music have had in trying to have families, I feel like I'm a better performer for having had my family. Even though it's difficult, I wouldn't have traded it for anything.
LL: You know, I feel the same way. I really started on this path of composing thinking that I probably wouldn't be able to find a way to have a child, and then it worked out that I could. We are still pioneering, but I agree with you. I feel I'm a much better artist because of the experience. It brings a wholly different perspective-for me a really healthy perspective.
SC: What qualities attract you to your choice of texts?
LL: You know, that evolved over the years. For me, both the language-meaning the content of the consonants and the vowels, and the rhythm of the language-and the depth of the speaking voice, whether it's first, second or third person attract me. The depth of spirit in which the words are being presented is what really attracts me. For instance, I've always set translations of Rilke. The depth of spirit in Rilke, you know, hits you over the head! Then I was attracted to the Sonnets of the Portuguese or the Songs From Letters, which are letters of Calamity Jane to her daughter, or the setting of the Brenda Ueland autobiography, ME. There has to be a struggle towards complete honesty which deeply motivates the text. That's what attracts me. Does that make sense?
SC: Yes it does. In the Songs From Letters, which is the piece that I'm focusing on, why were some texts more preferential to you than others? Was it the way that one text flowed to the next, or just personal preference, or...?
LL: I think it really comes down to personal preference. I worked with a woman named Ellen Lane on shaping the libretto, because there are many issues that could be addressed, when you look at the body of the letters. The issue that I wanted to examine-I'm not sure I've been successful-is the issue of what does a parent, in her case a mother, sacrifice in order to really truly love a child. For Calamity Jane in Songs From Letters, it's a very simple issue. Calamity Jane knew who she was. She loved her daughter, and she knew that if her daughter Janey grew up in the vicinity where Calamity Jane was working, Janey would never get to grow up as herself. She would always be the daughter of Calamity Jane, which in that day and society would brand her daughter as an outcast. So Calamity Jane sent her daughter to the east coast to be raised by a friend, and clearly hurt deeply, deeply hurt-because of it. She wanted to explain herself to her daughter, while her daughter was growing up in the very society that stereotyped Calamity Jane as an outlaw, and an eccentric. It is a tragic dilemma. I wanted to trace the attempt to explain the sacrifice through these letters.
SC: I am studying these pieces as a singer, and I'm seeing many examples of duality in the pieces. What you just said is showing me duality in another area that I hadn't thought of before. That's very helpful.
LL: You know, I at least felt kinship with what kind of pain that would be, if you sent your own daughter off to another part of the country to be raised by someone else.
SC: (Laugh) It may happen to me soon. My older daughter is about to head up to start college at Macalester, in St. Paul, which is a long way from central Illinois. She's a lot more ready for this than I am!
LL: Right! You know leaving home is part of how your child grows and becomes, but and at the same time that child becomes part of a society that perhaps doesn't understand what you are. However, Macalester is a good place-they understand artists at Macalester.
SC: Well, this brings me to question two-about your experience as a singer and how that has influenced your writing. Do you have a special affinity to one voice type, or do you just enjoy writing for the voice in general?
LL: Well, I enjoy writing for the voice in general. I have written for the soprano voice more specifically, more than for other voice ranges. The reason that has happened is that my opportunities have been working with very fine sopranos such as Benita Valente, Arleen Auger. But you know, you are about the third person who has asked me this question lately. Right now I'm preparing for a Joy of Singing evening in New York with Paul Sperry, and Paul also asked, "Why don't you write for baritones and tenors?" And you know why? Because of the texts, that's why. I am drawn to first person texts, and a certain expression of spiritual struggle. When I study texts for men to sing, it's very difficult to find-hmm, how can I put this to find the raw struggle towards honesty that interests me in first person female texts. There's a distancing that I often find in male texts. Almost all of the emotions are held at arm's length to be extracted and examined objectively through technique and a particular kind of language. In many texts written by women, the language is subjective and very personal. The author risks exposing herself directly to the reader. You find this same risk in Whitman, Thoreau, Crane, Sassoon and the like, but the centrality of the personal risk has not generally been part of the male author's charge to himself. I am beginning to find this risk in first person writings about Viet Nam and in some memoirs, also in the voices of Armenian poets. Also, because I studied singing, for what it's worth, I feel very naturally about writing for voice in general, even though I can't begin to execute some of the things that I write, not even squeak them out, I know that they can be done within the best technique of the voice.
SC: Do you often write with a specific singer or certain vocal qualities in mind?
LL: Yes and no. The Sonnets from the Portuguese were written for Arleen Auger's voice. I worked meticulously with her, both in the preparation and the execution. To be honest with you, for Songs From Letters I had a tape of Mary Elizabeth Poore singing, but I can't really say that I knew her voice.1 I wrote the Songs From Letters for a voice type.
SC: What do you consider that voice type to be?
LL: Hmmm, I would say, I want to say lyric soprano, although it's not quite that, because I don't mean that heavy a voice quality. I would say soprano, not mezzo. But not high soprano or soubrette. A really beautiful soprano voice is what I had in mind. Not a role type. It really was for the pure sound of a really beautiful soprano voice, which I wish I had, but I don't!
SC: I want to ask about your collaboration with singers, and what you feel about your thoughts on revision. Obviously you must have done some with the Sonnets from the Portuguese. And Gary Briggle2 had told me that you had done some rewriting for him in Mrs. Dalloway.3
LL: Right, that's right. I am very jealous and guarded about the idea and the structure of my pieces, and the basic pitch content of them. On the other hand, I respect the fact that every voice is unique. I feel comfortable with making changes to pieces that maintain the idea, structure and pitch contour, but work better for a singer's voice.
SC: That makes sense. I've read articles about your feelings of connection with nature. How do you feel that nature speaks to you through Songs From Letters?
LL: You know, that's a new question! I know that nature speaks to me all the time as I compose. I visualize as I compose. So for instance, in the phrase "crawling through the brush"4 I visualized a situation which was brambled and really humid and hot and sticky. To me, nature and human situation are inseparable. When I hear minimalist music, I immediately visualize urban settings and modern architecture, if that makes any sense. In the Songs From Letters, I was thinking of open, panoramic, very exposed natural surroundings in which small details, such as a particular bramble, are seen. Or a very small town in the middle of a prairie which you can ride out of on a stage coach. Both panorama and distance, combined with the details of a particular situation suggest music.
SC: I understand. I mean, I sense it in the music, but I'm not an analyst, I'm a singer. Sometimes when I read an analysis, I think, well, maybe the composer just liked the sonority, and the writer is seeing something that wasn't intended. It's really interesting to understand what your point of view is, as opposed to what someone else may have thought. For instance, in "A Man Can Love Two Women," 5 I'm fascinated by the duality, by the fact that it looks like you've got two tonalities going-
LL: True! Right!
SC: -and the fact that you keep going back and forth between calm and energetic rhythmic passages. But I'm not doing this from any academic, esoteric point of view.
LL: But if you can find it in the music without having to do an academic analysis, then to me that's a supreme compliment. The hardest thing for both of us, I think, you performing and me composing, is that the proscenium stage is bound to linear time. We start our concerts at five after eight and finish them about two hours later. We are forced to operate within the linear narrative perception model. And yet, nothing that we do is linear. Film and cinema escape the constant reliance on linear time. We have a hard time escaping. In trying to present duality, I can use many techniques. One is to use two key areas to represent present and past and superimpose them while still moving through linear time. Calamity Jane is a woman who is remembering. Time and memory have an intricate relationship. Time and memory exist in circular time. My challenge is to superimpose circular time and linear time in a model forces the listener into linear time. I had the same challenge in Mrs. Dalloway, actually.
SC: How do you define the difference between popular and classical music today?
LL: Oh, that is interesting! I think some popular music can become classical and some classical music can become popular. Perhaps it's in the definition of the word 'classical.' Some say, "it's classical if it stands the test of time" and if it represents certain parts of our society that seem to be constant-across generations. Given this definition, in music elements such as certain kinds of phrase structures have become classical-four bar structures, twelve bar blues and the like. The definition allows music of all styles to become classic. We're also living in a time where the instruments themselves define the medium. If a person in our culture hears a Mahler symphony, they say that's classical music. While that same person, upon hearing Eric Clapton's newest unplugged version of Layla, might say it's rock and roll. Yet Layla is classic according to my definition.
SC: I read a review of one of your pieces, I don't remember which one, and they said one of the sections could easily become a popular tune. It made me curious as to how you would have reacted to the statement.
LL: I find all of these attempts at writing about music to be curious. I used to become nervous wondering, "Is that an insult? Is that a judgment, pejorative or positive?" Now I just find it curious. The way I react to the statement is that it means perhaps a lot of people might want to perform my piece. In some composing circles this is considered a terrible insult, while in other composing circles it's a compliment. Then the ramifications are just amazing. It's a strange time, I think, for all of us involved in art music. What is our function? What is the desired outcome of our making music?
SC: I think it's really interesting, looking at the way musical comedy is taking on operatic form, and how that fits in with all of this. Definitely the vocal styles are still popular, but the format that's used is much more operatic, if you look at something like Miss Saigon, which of course is based on an opera. But even so, it is really interesting...
LL: To me, this is good news. One of the things about opera is that it's a form that lets us dwell deeply on a complex emotion for a long period of time. Opera really is the only vocal form that still allows us to do that. The oratorio used to, but that's a practically useless form now, as far as I can tell, unless you think of the rock concert as an oratorio-you make a very abstract leap in form! Your observation about the format of musical comedy moving towards the format of opera makes me think of the tremendous social value the format alone of opera offers.
SC: How do you pick an opera libretto? With Mrs. Dalloway weren't you approached by Michael McConnell 6 -
LL: Yes, I was.
SC: -about something that he was excited about. So does collaboration and the enthusiasm of others affect your choices?
LL: It does. To me, opera is theater, and the best theater comes from the best collaboration of passions. If the idea is interesting and there are passionate collaborators, I can consider spending two or three years on the project.
SC: What would someone like me do in these circumstances, write a libretto and submit it to someone like you, or talk about it, or what?
LL: I think the best way to start would be to talk with someone like Gary (Briggle) and say, "I'm interested in being a librettist on this piece. This subject really interests me." I think it's best in creating an opera, to create it a performance. I would approach Gary about producing the world premiere of this piece for which you want to be librettist.
SC: I wish we could get back to the days where we had minimal props and minimal set, and rely on good actors. It's great, but it's not necessary to spend $50,000 on technical effects.
LL: No, it's not! Joe Papp was brilliant, and he always said, "Unless you can do it on a flat bed truck and be convincing, don't do it!" I agree. But I think you're also talking about a chamber opera, a more intimate kind of experience than grand opera. I much prefer working in chamber opera. Many of the regional companies still think that they need to reproduce the Met, and that's grand opera. What's lost, in my opinion, is the intimate 'off Broadway' experience-the small hall, the intimate connection with the person on stage, where you don't need an elaborate set. All you need is some good lighting and a fine performer.
SC: To me, it goes back to the training, too. It's one thing that I am totally appalled at, at least in some of the places I've looked at-the total lack of dramatic training and movement training that the singers are (not) getting, especially now when no one is going to start going to the opera unless they get to see a theatrical experience. The thing that is so funny about the whole thing is that in the teaching I've done, and that Gary's done, the more free you are dramatically, the better you sing!
LL: Oh, absolutely! You know, I love sports and always have, which is a part of my life I don't really show much to the musical world. In sports, the axiom is: you don't really train for something, you just go out and play and technique follows. The result is you are much better at the sport because you sublimate the technique. You're involved in play. I agree with you. If you get involved in acting as your training also to be a singer, the two feed each other, and you become ten times both!
1. Songs From Letters was commissioned by Mary Elizabeth Poore, and given its premiere performance by her on April 18, 1989.
2. Gary Briggle is a nationally known actor-singer, director and teacher of Music-Theatre and performance techniques. Upon receiving his Bachelor of Music degree from St. Olaf College in 1975, he was apprenticed to master teacher and director H. Wesley Balk in the Minnesota Opera Studio, and eventually joined the resident ensemble, where he performed comprimario roles for nearly a decade. During this time he met and collaborated with Libby Larsen, directing the premiere of her setting of Swift's Words on the Windowpane. He has been a staff member of the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis, Florida Repertory Theatre, Seaside Music Theatre, and The Arizona Theatre Company. Ten years of serving as a principal artist with Lyric Opera Cleveland have recently culminated in his being appointed Artistic Director for the 1996 season.
3. Larsen's opera, Mrs. Dalloway, with libretto by Bonnie Grice, premiered with Lyric Opera Cleveland on July 22, 1993.
4. This is a line from "He Never Misses," the second song from Songs From Letters.
5. This is the third song from Songs From Letters. The sense of two tonal areas is noticable in the first two measures of the song.
6. Michael McConnell was the artistic director of Lyric Opera Cleveland from 1984 until recently, and was the stage director for the premiere production of Mrs. Dalloway. He had been approached by Bonnie Grice, who wanted to write a libretto for Mrs. Dalloway, and connected Grice with Libby Larsen.
Susan Chastain is currently a doctoral candidate in vocal performance at the University of Illinois. In the spring of 1995, she took a course on women composers. During this course Susan became interested in Libby Larsen's music, wrote a paper on Songs from Letters , and performed the cycle.