This lovely pictorial work is one of the most convincing and beautiful portraits of the midlands of the United States ever written for orchestra.

Libby Larsen (b. 1950) is one of the most prolific and important composers in the United States. She not only possesses one of the most distinctive personal voices but is a meticulous and very well-schooled craftsman. In addition, she is one of the most important organizers and leaders of her generation of composers as co-founder of the Minnesota Composers Forum (now the American Composers Forum).

This lyrical piece, only a little over seven minutes long, is a loving portrait of a place at a time of year that is dear to Americans of the plains and upper Midwest of the United States.

Larsen's home city of Minneapolis (she was born in the coastal state of Delaware but her family moved to the Midwest when she was young) is located in a transition area where the lake and woodlands to the north and east yield to the vast open plains that occupy the tier of states that run from border to border from Texas to North Dakota. Particularly in the northern parts, this is a rich, though generally treeless, area, primarily flat. Its natural vegetation is prairie.

Prairie is a ground cover in addition to simply a terrain type, and the word signifies a mixture of tall grasses and wild flowers that, in bloom, can produce riotous colors. Agriculturally, the prairie has been widely replaced by wheat, corn (maize), oats, rye, and sunflowers.

The area can be quite dry, particularly in the mid-summer, though late summer rains often enliven the colors. These are the days when the crop is at or just past maturity, and is about ready to be brought in.

"In the deep summer, winds create wave after wave of harvest ripeness," writes Larsen, "which, when beheld by the human eye, creates a kind of emotional peace, and awe: a feeling of abundance combined with the knowledge that this abundance is only as bountiful as nature will allow."

Larsen's music puts to descriptive use a feature of American music that was developing in those days, the constant even pulse of minimalism. This is not minimalist music, though; Larsen imports a smooth even undulating motion that persists through much of the work as a pictorial device. It seems to depict the constant individual shimmers of the stalks of plants moving in the winds, while smoothly darting figurations appear to suggest the larger wave patterns in the field.

Over it all is a broad string melody, the broad horizon and the "big sky" vaulting over it. Later in the work, a trumpet solo seems to depict an individual in her place amid the open landscape.

In this work Larsen achieves a sound for the vast expanses of the American prairie-land that, unlike the celebrated open sound of Aaron Copland, seems to include the life and activity that takes place there.

© Joseph Stevenson, Rovi