Born in Wilmington, Delaware, Larsen has three degrees from the University of Minnesota, where her teachers were Dominick Argento and Paul Fetler. She has served as composer-in-residence with the Minnesota Orchestra, the Charlotte Symphony, and the Colorado Symphony. She is co-founder (with Stephen Paulus) of the Minnesota Composers Forum (now the American Composer’s Forum).

Evening in the Palace of Reason was written for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in honor of Lowell Noteboom. The premiere was given by that orchestra, conducted by Nicholas McGegan, on February 22, 2008.

In her program note, Larsen writes: “Its title, Evening in the Palace of Reason, is taken from the title of a book by James R Gaines. The book is centered on the meeting of Frederick the Great and Johann Sebastian Bach.

“My interest lies in the story, a story which lies at the crossroads of the Age of Reason and the Romantic Era or, musically speaking, the crossroads of music that values reason and prefers discipline, order and control and music that values feeling and prefers passion, individuality, and spontaneity.

“Frederick the Great challenged Bach to improvise a six voice fugue on a theme which ‘he’ composed. Actually, Gaines posits that as Frederick’s court composer, C.P.E. Bach composed the theme perhaps having something to prove to his father. It did indeed trip up his father who, on the spot, could only improvise the theme into three-voice contrapuntal pieces. Bach left the palace to return to Leipzig, where he transformed the theme into his multi-movement masterpiece, The Musical Offering.

“Evening in the Palace of Reason is composed for the strings of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, singling out the first chair players to form a string quartet that dialogues with the string orchestra throughout each movement. I’ve woven the famous and dastardly theme into the fabric of the entire piece, sometimes in ways that are evident, sometimes in very subtle ways. I want to pay homage to J.S. Bach while placing both his and Frederick the Great’s musical language preferences in the ever morphing continuum of pitch, harmony, and texture. And so within the context of my own musical ear, I explore counterpoint, fantasy, monophonic and polyphonic texture, and in general, music governed by reason versus music governed by emotion.”

~ Program Notes by Charley Samson, copyright 2022.