There are three errors in Murph's review of Libby Larsen: Composing an American Life, by Denise Von Glahn, in the May 2020 issue of Journal of the Society for American Music. Footnote 1
In two places on page 236, “The Cultural Moment” is mistitled as “The Cultural Movement.” The two sentences in question should read as follows:
Rather than a strictly chronological biography, Von Glahn arranges the book around themes from Larsen's (b. 1950) life: “The Cultural Moment,” “Family,” “Religion,” “Nature,” “The Academy,” “Gender,” “Technology,” and “The Collaborators.”
and
In the first chapter, “The Cultural Moment,” Von Glahn brilliantly contextualizes the postwar American culture in which Larsen grew up, delving deeper into the years 1948–1962, which Larson characterized as the “most radical portion of the twentieth century” (1).
On page 237, “hope” is misspelled as “hop” in the following sentence:
Varèse's imagination of sounds in the twentieth century, as well as his ideas on the “projection” of sound (“a feeling of sound leaving with no hope of reflecting back . . . a journey into space” [195]), connects to Larsen's otherworldly operatic setting of A Wrinkle in Time (1991–1992).
