A Tarantella for Our Times, 2020, commissioned by Osmo Vanska and Erin Keefe

When Osmo Vanska and Erin Keefe asked for a new work for themselves to perform, it was in 2020, amid our hyper-polarized politics and the early days of the Pandemic. Like most of us, I was troubled. I found myself thinking “if only we could all just take a pause and dance together in the streets, we could dance the poison out of us and get down fixing what’s wrong with us in our country right now.” Then I remembered the Tarantella, one of the most famous folk dances of Italy, which was a medieval cure for poisonous spider bites. Here’s how legend describes the Tarantella:

After being bitten by the spider, the victim, who was referred to as the tarantata, would be overtaken by contortions, begin dancing convulsively. To save the person thought to be possessed by the spider’s venom, musicians were beckoned to perform a very fast-paced rhythmic style of music which became known as the pizzica (the word pizzica is derived from pizzico, which means “bite” in Italian). The music would “awaken” the tarantata from her stupor, or, if she was already contorting, the mandolins, guitars, and tambourines would provide the rhythm to which she would dance for hours or even days to expel the venom from her body. Townspeople surrounded the tarantata as she performed the frenzied dancing ritual and sometimes participated in it. The tarantata continued dancing until she was exhausted, at which point she was considered “cured.”

The idea caught my imagination – the dance’s origin, its purpose, its dance-till-you-drop narrative, its latent desperation… even the question of whether the dancer will survive the poison in their system – struck me as a strong metaphor for our ailing times.

And so, I composed “A Tarantella for Our Times,” for clarinet and violin, adding this tarantella to the body of work of tarantellas composed by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Debussy, Benjamin Britten, Liszt, Saint- Saëns, Rachmaninoff, and many composers.

Libby Larsen, 2020