THOMAS LARSON

This popular program is for music groups, music students, orchestras, chamber music societies, library programs, and general audiences.

Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings is America’s great secular hymn, an icon for our national soul. Written in 1936, Barber’s elegy has been used to memorialize the deaths of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, honor the victims of 9/11, and grieve the tragedy of the Vietnam War in the film Platoon, 1986’s best picture.

Join author and essayist Thomas Larson for his multimedia presentation of the Adagio’s musical and cultural history in sound, video, image, and text. Mr. Larson will also discuss the emotional power of music, answer questions, and sign copies of his book.

Mr. Larson has presented his "Saddest Music" multimedia program at some forty venues across the country. Seven of these programs opened with performances of Barber's "Adagio" by string quartets or by symphony orchestras.

This multimedia talk is appropriate for writers in colleges and literary groups who want to explore a more advanced technique in nonfiction writing.

Among the most intriguing developments in nonfiction writing is the growth of the hybrid narrative. A hybrid (the verb: to hybridize) juxtaposes, usually without transitions, two or more unlike elements: think hybrid automobile that runs on—and switches smoothly between—gas and battery power sources. Hybrid narratives are a bit of a misnomer: we create a narrative and then hybridize it with something that counters or is unlike that narrative. The result is often a piece that fascinates us because of how the writer moves between conflicting elements.

Hybrid writers mix fact and fiction; poetry and prose; memoir and history; biography and memoir. The hybrid goes by a number of names: nonlinear narrative, composite, pastiche, montage, collage, mosaic, and bricolage; it is a form that blurs one genre with another; and it describes any narrative whose structure is fragmented, braided, threaded, broken, or segmented.