In 1985, the musical world was celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of Georg Frideric Handel. On today’s date that year, a Minnesota-based composer named Libby Larsen, then in her mid-thirties, was celebrating the premiere performance of her Symphony No. 1.

Larsen titled her symphony “Water Music,” and says its first movement was a deliberate homage to Handel’s famous “Water Music.” As a resident composer of a state with over 10,000 lakes, Larsen admits her own love of sailing also had something to do with the symphony’s descriptive title.

Since 1985, Larsen has gone on to write a few more symphonies, each with its own particular title. And Larsen frequently gives individual movements of each symphony their own descriptive tags. For example, one movement from her “Solo” Symphony No. 5, from 1999, is entitled “The Cocktail Party Effect.”

Rather than the wallop of a stiff drink, Larsen says she means the ability of human hearing to pick out a single voice among the extraneous noise one encounters at a crowded cocktail party. “It’s a kind of musical ‘Where’s Waldo?’” says Larsen. “In this case, Waldo is a melody, introduced at the beginning … then hidden amidst the other music.”