She Works on Full Commission : Libby Larsen, a throwback to the likes of Mozart and Haydn, wants her works heard in concert halls, not classrooms.

We don’t often think of the modern composer as a practical person. Head in the clouds, he or she follows his or her own muse--in pursuit of a musical ideal, the expression of the heart or the implications of a theory--and if the audience doesn’t like or understand the results, well, that’s the audience’s problem. Consider Milton Babbitt’s battle cry “Who Cares If You Listen?” or the curt admonition of Charles Ives: “Stand up and use your ears like a man!”

Enter Libby Larsen. She lives in the real world (Minneapolis, actually). She makes her living composing music. She’s a bit of a throwback to the likes of Mozart and Haydn, composing not only with a particular audience in mind but specific performers and occasions as well. Far from strictly following her own muse--”It has never entered my mind to write a piece just for myself”--she composes only on commission. Since she doesn’t consider her compositions complete until they have been performed, her music is driven by a kind of healthy Realpolitik .

Her latest work, called “Invitation to Music,” commissioned by the South Coast Chorale, brings the 44-year-old composer to Long Beach this week.

You may think that this is the story of a composer for hire, of a musician who will write anyone a piece, for a price. But then you don’t know Libby Larsen. Practical considerations, for Larsen, are not antithetical to creativity, they are a necessary part of it, and she can get pretty passionate about them.

Besides, her intentions are pure. Larsen, who describes her income as “very low middle-class,” doesn’t take the easy money. She will not, for instance, accept that most lucrative appointment of the contemporary composer, the academic post. Her reason?

“If I were affiliated with an academic institution, I am afraid that in my decision-making process, I would be inclined to make more theoretical and less practical decisions. Theoretical decisions are extraordinarily interesting and really feed my imagination, but I want to have my music performed in the professional concert hall.”

Not only performed, but understood, she said. “The audience that I am most interested in composing for,” explained Larsen, “is an audience that approaches the concert tradition with a great deal of respect, wants to be challenged, but has had neither the time nor the inclination to dig into the construction of music so deeply that they feel comfortable speaking the language of new music.”

Still, her main goal isn’t to be prim and pleasing. Accessibility, for her, has a complex definition. She has no interest in appealing to that listener/lump-in-the-seat to whom all dissonance is anathema.

“This year I wrote an orchestral piece after which I barely made it on stage for applause, there was so little of it. And I felt great about that. I knew what I was doing when I wrote the piece, but I just needed to write that piece.”

In a lively phone conversation from Des Moines (the site of her latest premiere, an orchestral piece titled “Blue Fiddler”), Larsen talked about “Invitation to Music.” The end result of close consultation between South Coast conductor Bob Phibbs and Larsen, “Invitation” is a 5 1/2-minute setting of an Elizabeth Bishop poem, closely honed to the chorale’s skills. Phibbs estimates that about 100 faxes were exchanged during its composition: Detailed explanations of the group’s capabilities were sent along with recordings, and instrumental requirements were discussed, as well as the work’s context in the program.

Though Phibbs is thrilled with “Invitation,” the piece changed considerably over its long gestation period. “As a matter of fact,” Larsen said, “I didn’t write the piece that Bob wanted me to write. He was asking for a very bright, up-tempo, Christmas-y kind of piece. And I began to look for texts and think more and more about what a celebration of music, not of Christmas, could be.”

“I’ve always loved the Elizabeth Bishop text ‘Sonnet’ [from 1928],” she said. “It’s very beautiful. She talks about how she’s in need of music to soothe what she calls her ‘fretful fingertips’ and ‘bitter-tainted lips.’ The text is really about needing music to just flow over you and around you.”

The finished “Invitation” “has a glow about it, a kind of freedom of meter,” Larsen said.

The commission of “Invitation” is a story in itself, coming from the 30-voice, amateur chorale, a gay and lesbian (though now not exclusively) ensemble that offers four to five concerts a season on an operating budget of about $50,000. The mounting of the Larsen piece alone will entail roughly a tenth of that budget, Phibbs estimates.

Larsen’s commissions (she fulfills only five or six a year) come from all levels, from localized groups like the South Coast Chorale to the nationally recognized Los Angeles Master Chorale, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Cleveland String Quartet.

Born in 1950 in Delaware, married to a trial lawyer with whom she has a 9-year-old daughter, Larsen tells of early music experiences that were vocal. In Catholic school, she learned to read music in first grade and was soon singing chant at high Masses and funerals, and organizing her classmates into playground choirs. After studying music at the University of Minnesota, she wrote two operas while working at a non-musical job.

“Those were the very first pieces where I said, ‘I am a composer,’ ” she said, chuckling. “The job that I got with a bachelor’s degree in music theory was as a secretary in an insurance company. And after about four months I was going insane, not fitting into the corporate world. And I composed two one-act operas on coffee breaks and went back to school immediately after that.”

After she graduated with her doctorate in composition in 1978, her music caught on rapidly. From 1983-87 she was composer-in-residence with the Minnesota Orchestra, from 1994-95 with the Charlotte Symphony. In 1994 she received a Grammy for producing “The Art of Arleen Auger,” on which her own song cycle “Sonnets From the Portuguese,” written for the late singer, appears.

Though Larsen’s music is generally conservative, no one would mistake it for anything other than late 20th century music. It also carries a distinctive American sound. “I try,” she said, “to study the culture I live in and use the rhythms and the phrasing of the culture in my music.”

Her “Collage: Boogie,” included on Argo’s recent compact disc “Dance Mix,” is a good example: It’s a propulsive consideration of things boogie, tossed into an orchestral blender. Her “Sonnets From the Portuguese,” a setting of poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning for chamber orchestra, gives the text a moody, incantatory quality that brings to mind Ned Rorem. Her Symphony: “Water Music”--recorded by the Minnesota Orchestra, under Neville Marriner--shimmers in its evocation of water-filled landscapes: Debussy from the northern Plains.

Among her current projects is an opera based on three short stories by Willa Cather, commissioned by Opera Omaha, and early next year the London Symphony will record the first disc devoted entirely to her music, for Koch International.

Larsen is also an advisor to the National Endowment for the Arts, and outspoken enough in her defense of the NEA that she recently found herself embroiled in an impromptu debate on artistic freedom with presidential candidate Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) at a Rotary Club gathering in Iowa.

As for her own artistic freedom, Larsen welcomes most of the demands that society--in the form of commission parameters and audience expectations--places on her music, yet finds others oppressive. She would like to write longer pieces, for instance. “But our concert format has evolved so that we want to hear a major symphony and a major concerto out of the core repertoire. That leaves very little space for the new pieces,” she explains.

Also, the demands of occasion--a piece written to mark a graduation, or to commemorate the 150th anniversary of a university, for instance--sometimes try her patience.

“That’s the most problematic part,” she admitted, “because it seems as if--here comes a big generalization, so excuse me--occasions in this culture are fairly transient and site specific more than they are generationally binding kinds of rituals. . . . They just aren’t universal enough for me. But Mozart had to do that, too.

“I hope I have another 40 years to live,” she said finally. “And in those years maybe I will not respect the occasion so much and I will move into being a kind of super-Romanticist.”

In the end, Larsen is well aware that there is irony in her strong desire to connect with an audience and her role as a composer, especially in a time when composers are hardly central cultural figures.

“I was sitting backstage at the Des Moines Symphony while ‘Blue Fiddler’ was being performed. I’m backstage and there’s nobody around . . . all this work and passion and blood and sweat that I put into the piece, and I’m supposed to be behind the scenes. It’s a very funny place. It’s solitary.

Even my own family, they say, ‘Where were you last week? What were you doing?’ It’s very humbling. What a world.”*

‘The job that I got with a BA in music theory was as a secretary in an insurance company. And after about four months I was going insane, not fitting into the corporate world. And I composed two one-act operas on coffee breaks and went back to school immediately after that.’

“INVITATION TO MUSIC,”Carpenter Performing Arts Center, 6200 Atherton St., Long Beach Dates: Next Sunday, 4 p.m. Prices: $20; $18, students and senior citizens. Phone: (310) 985-7000.