Graduate Music Summer Seminar

Since 1990, Graduate Programs in Music Education has sponsored a summer seminar in which distinguished figures in music and arts education present their work to the community of music educators in the Twin Cities. Participants are invited to join in a discussion of pertinent ideas and issues.

Our 2008 distinguished scholar/artist is noted Minnesota composer, Libby Larsen, one of America's most performed living composers. She has created a catalogue of more than 400 works spanning virtually every genre from intimate vocal and chamber music to massive orchestral and choral scores. Grammy Award winning and widely recorded, including more than 50 CD's of her work, she is constantly sought after for commissions and premieres by major artists, ensembles, and orchestras around the world, and has established a permanent place for her works in the concert repertory.

As a vigorous, articulate advocate for the music and musicians of our time, in 1973 Larsen co-founded the Minnesota Composers Forum, which has become an invaluable aid for composers in a transitional time for American arts. As the former holder of the Papamarkou Chair at John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, Larsen also has held residencies with the Minnesota Orchestra, the Charlotte Symphony and the Colorado Symphony. She is currently completing a book, The Concert Hall That Fell Asleep and Woke Up as a Car Radio and her next major opera work on the play Picnic by William Inge.

Ms. Larsen's topic for the seminar is What is the Mission of Music Education? Thoughts from a Composer. As a parent, Libby has had ample opportunity to consider this question. In her own words: "With the advent of technology, the year 1992 has been hailed as the beginning of a new definition for music educaton in the public school systems of the United States of America. The fundamental mission of public education has shifted from the preparation of a student to become a skilled and useful worker in a production oriented commercial culture to a skilled, creative, and spontaneous problem solver in a culture of fluid economic interaction. Music education has kept step with the mission of public education for the last 105 years. As we shape this next millennium we must ask ourselves: What is the mission of music education? Join us to hear Libby's thoughts on this critical question.

"Music exists in an infinity of sound. I think of all music as existing in the substance of the air itself. It is the composer's task to order and make sense of sound, in time and space, to communicate something about being alive through music."                                                     - Libby Larsen