Nature portraits are frequent in music. This one, for an octet of winds, strings, and piano, portrays a nature in an unusually cruel mood, where the air itself, the most immediate source of life, becomes oppressive and even deadly. In keeping with the subject, this work has moments as screaming chaos that are fittingly breathtaking.

Libby Larsen was brought up and educated in Minneapolis, the major city of the upper Midwest of the United States. It is intricately linked to the vast agricultural region of the Great Plains from the Rocky Mountains of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado westward to the upper Mississippi.

The subject matter of this tone poem for chamber forces is a calamitous form of dust storm called a "black roller," which occurs in the Western U.S. Hot winds off the mountains strike the plowed fields and turn up black topsoil, then roll it forward in a churning, low-lying cloud.

Libby Larsen has a strong attachment to nature and especially to fluid processes of the earth. Titles such as Water Music, Parachute Dancing, Deep Summer Music, Cold Silent Snow, Missa Gaia Mass for the Earth, and Atmosphere as a Fluid System bespeak her view of nature as something above the efforts of man.

The 12-minute piece recounts a black roller from the viewpoint of people in its path. The woodwinds hesitantly propose a chromatic—perhaps twelve-tone—subject. The mood is still, expectant, oppressive: heavy air before the windstorm. There are occasionally swirls of woodwind color, perhaps hints of the wind to come.

The warmer sound of strings helps create a lonely atmosphere. While initially there is a considerable amount of rhythmic unison in the instruments, their parts grow more independent, creating a more fidgety feeling. The strings create their first overt sound effects, narrow portamenti (glides), and whining, very close intervals, which strike this listener as containing microtonal elements.

Larsen says in her notes for a performance (quoted by the American Composers Forum) that this represents watching the approach of the dark, roiling cloud.

The texture turns chordal again as mixed sonorities create a spectral harmony. Tone colors become more and more weird, perhaps suggesting the odd quality of the light preceding the windstorm.

The entrance of the piano is the immediate herald of the arrival of the storm. It introduces an alien sound, as it appears only after the midpoint of the piece. It is a rapid piano solo that obviously depicts the arrival of the cloud. People's breathing passages clog up with the dust; their eyes are tortured by it. The music grows disjunct and shrieking, and the strings and pianist and any wind players not immediately playing are told to scream in agony. Crushing chord clusters in the piano drive the music to complete chaos and madness.

Then there is an epilogue as individual instruments realize it is over and speak out in exhausted tones, ending on a dazed final chord.

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