World-Renowned Composer to Present Concert, Lecture at EIU's Doudna
Jan-26-2009
Grammy Award winner Libby Larsen, one of America’s most-performed living composers, will present a lecture and perform a concert of her original works at Eastern Illinois University on Feb. 10.
Larsen's lecture will begin at 6 p.m. in the Doudna Fine Arts Center's Recital Hall. It is free and open to the public.
The concert, part of "A Year of Celebration: The Reopening of the Doudna Fine Arts Center," will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Doudna's Dvorak Concert Hall. It will feature the EIU music department's Concert Choir, Wind Ensemble, and faculty and student performers. Tickets for general-admission seating are $5 for adults and $3 for students.
For Doudna reservations and information, or to arrange accommodations for persons with special needs, contact Doudna Fine Arts Patron Services (217-581-3110, doudnatix@eiu.edu or www.eiu.edu/doudna) or visit the Doudna Fine Arts Center Box Office.
The lecture and concert are part of Larsen's short residency at EIU. While on campus, she will work with composition students in a master class and lecture to other music students about her career and the new music/creative process in general.
Larsen has created a catalog of more than 400 works spanning virtually every genre from intimate vocal and chamber music to massive orchestral works and more than a dozen operas. Larsen is much sought-after for commissions and premieres by major artists, ensembles and orchestras around the world.
Her works are widely recorded on prominent labels, including Angel/EMI, Nonesuch, Decca and Koch International.
She received a 1994 Grammy for producing "The Art of Arlene Augér," an acclaimed recording that features Larsen’s "Sonnets from the Portuguese." Her opera "Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus" was selected as one of the eight best classical music events of 1990 by USA Today.
Larsen has been hailed as “the only English-speaking composer since Benjamin Britten who matches great verse with fine music so intelligently and expressively” (USA Today); as “a composer who has made the art of symphonic writing very much her own” (Gramophone); as “a mistress of orchestration” (Times Union); and for “assembling one of the most impressive bodies of music of our time” (Hartford Courant).
Her music has been praised for its “clear textures, easily absorbed rhythms and appealing melodic contours that make singing seem the most natural expression imaginable” by the Philadelphia Inquirer. In the Wall Street Journal, Larsen was lauded for making "contemporary opera both musically current and accessible to the average audience." According to Fanfare, “Her ability to write memorable new music completely within the confines of traditional harmonic language is most impressive.”
Larsen was the 2003-2004 Harissios Papamarkou Chair in Education at the Library of Congress and recipient of the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The first woman to serve as a resident composer with a major orchestra, she has held residencies with the California Institute of the Arts, the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, the Philadelphia School of the Arts, the Cincinnati Conservatory, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Charlotte Symphony and the Colorado Symphony.
The Doudna Fine Arts Center is a division of the EIU College of Arts and Humanities, Charleston, Ill. Doudna Fine Arts Center public arts programs are funded by the New and Emerging Artists Series Fund, the Excellence in Fine Arts Fund and other patrons as listed.
