Cambridge, MA.... Libby Larsen, one of America's most prolific and most performed living composers, has been named winner of the 2003 Eugene McDermott Award by the Council for the Arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The award will be presented on Thursday October 23, 2003 in Cambridge, at the Council’s 31st Annual Meeting.

Larsen, who lives in Minneapolis, Minn., has created a catalogue of over 200 works spanning virtually every genre from intimate vocal and chamber music to massive orchestral and choral scores. Her music has been praised for its dynamic, deeply inspired and vigorous contemporary American spirit and her honors include a 1994 Grammy for the CD, “The Art of Arlene Auger,” which features her “Sonnets from the Portuguese.”

The first woman to serve as a resident composer with a major orchestra, Larsen 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. In 1973, she co-founded (with Stephen Paulus) the Minnesota Composers Forum, now the American Composers Forum, which has been an invaluable advocate for composers in a difficult, transitional time for American arts.

MIT students, accompanied by MIT Lecturer Charles Shadle, will perform works by Larsen at the private award presentation. Caitlin Smythe, graduate student in aeronautics and engineering will sing selections from “Try Me Good King: Last Words of the Wives of Henry VIII”; Victoria Davis, a senior in aeronautics and astronautics will perform “The empty song (a tango)” from “Love after 1950”; and Ashley Kim, a senior in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences will sing “Blond Men (a torch song).”

As part of the McDermott Award, Larsen will return to MIT in spring 2004 to work with students.

The McDermott Award in the Arts was established in 1974 by the Council for the Arts to honor the memory of Eugene McDermott, benefactor to the Institute in education and the arts.

The Council for the Arts at MIT is a volunteer organization of MIT alumni and friends founded in 1972 to foster and support the visual, literary and performing arts at the Institute.

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