Libby Larsen was born in Wilmington, Delaware on Christmas Eve, 1950, and currently lives and works in Minneapolis. One of America's most prolific -- and most performed -- living composers, her music runs the gamut from orchestral to solo, dance to opera. She has received commissions from many international orchestras and solo artists and received a Grammy award as a producer. A co-founder of the Minnesota Composers' Forum (now the American Composers' Forum), Larsen thrives in her role as a leader in the compositional world -- sitting on boards of musical organizations, being an advocate for composers and an eloquent spokesperson on the role of composers in contemporary culture. With regard to her own music, Larsen speaks of her desire to create a marriage between the American-English language -- its percussiveness, sharpness and unique expressiveness -- and a complementary American musical language. In a 1999 interview for NewMusicBox, a contemporary music website, Larsen discussed her perception of the inadequacies of the traditional, Euro-centric orchestra — with its current pool of instruments -- to express this American style of speaking:

"With the exception of the violin becoming a fiddle and the contrabass becoming a plucked bass, I see that the core of the orchestra (the strings) are instruments which have not naturally found their way into the ensembles that have developed American music's ragtime, gospel, big-band, country-western, and rock-and-roll. These are the ensembles that accompany the singing of the words in American English. And so I'm wondering what, if anything, a string orchestra has to do with American English? American English is more rhythmic than melodic. It's truncated and full of body language punctuation. I'm not sure that we have a sense of what is lyrical in this culture we're forming other than moments of nostalgia."

Larsen offers a solution to this problem with her chamber work for strings and piano, Four on the Floor. Commissioned by the Minnesota Artists Ensemble, it received its premiere performance in 1983. The work takes three members of the string family (violin, cello and bass) as well as a piano, and hands them a mix of boogie-woogie, some bluesy jazz, and the angular and staccato rhythms of an urban populace during rush hour. Four on the Floor refers not only to the four musicians playing the work, but also the stick shift of a sports car, and this piece is meant to be played at an "Interstate 80" pace. Four on the Floor is written in traditional ABA form, with the energetic boogie beat provided by the piano and the strings engaging in a spirited dialogue, complete with dissonances, rhythmic unity, sharp attacks and glissandos. After a period, the sports car finds a place to pull over for a while; the piano begins a more leisurely pace reminiscent of a barroom-style piano with the strings kicking back a few and shooting the breeze. But the rest stop is short. Soon the boogie-woogie returns and the string players throw themselves recklessly into a musical fray, with each player having her final say before the piece concludes with a flourish.