Book Review

Every so often a work of history appears that is so innovative in its conception and so cogent in its analysis as to constitute a new model for future research. Suzanne Lebsock's The Free Women of Petersburg is such a work. Lebsock has two goals in this community study: to chart changes in the status of women between the first years of the republic and the onset of the Civil War, and to explore the existence of a separate female culture embodying attitudes and values that differ significantly from those of the male culture. By examining virtually every extant public document on the free women of Petersburg, Virginia between 1784 and 1860, Lebsock invests these familiar but elusive goals with a new precision and specificity. Lebsock is a social historian, and legal history, narrowly defined, is not her primary concern. Nonetheless, there is a great deal here for legal historians since law is closely bound up with Lebsock's focus on status. The bulk of her sources is legal, and she develops these sources with respect for their legal context and with awareness of their limits as social documents. Her work attests to the patience and care with which she combed unindexed deed books and court minute books, and to the rewards to be gained from doing so. For example, her survey of all the marriage contracts and the provisions for separate estates scattered throughout the town's deeds and wills contributes significantly to our knowledge of the married woman's equitable estate. It is noteworthy that most separate estates were created in the trust deeds and testamentary provisions of husbands, relatives, and friends, and not by antenuptial agreements. For Lebsock, the number and terms of these conveyances, bequests, and devises comprise an important index to change in the status of women. She finds that the use of separate estates mushroomed in the antebellum period, and although there was little corresponding growth in the power allocated to the wife, she points out that any separate estate was better than none at all. In translating the legal abstractions of jurists and chancellors into tangible options for flesh and blood women, Lebsock illuminates the social dimensions of the married woman's equitable estate. Her work exemplifies the power of social history to enrich our understanding of legal history. There are lessons here also for social historians. No longer will they be able to use source limitations as an excuse for ignoring women, for in fashioning an in-depth community study in which women occupy center stage, Lebsock demonstrates that painstakingly surveyed public documents can tell us a great deal about women. Delineating in meticulous detail which women owned what and whom (slaves figure prominently in property transactions), Lebsock outlines changing patterns in the ownership and transmission of property and speculates intelligently on the implications of those changes for women. She refines the terms of the debate over gains and losses for women

In "Concatenationism, Architectonicism, and the Appreciation of Music," the role of emotion in the experience of music (35) is examined through two different views concerning the appreciation of music. Levinson counters Peter Kivy's musical architectonicism, according to which the perception of large-scale form plays an essential role in the appreciation of a work (38), arguing that music is a process which can be appreciated moment by moment (33) and not as a whole. This view, known as concatenationism, is backed up by results of psychological tests (41-43) and, according to Levinson, accounts for the enduring appeal of single excerpts of music extracted from the main work they are part of (43). The perception of a work as a whole or as a succession of single instants is obviously related to the function played by the variable of time. "What is a Temporal Art?", written in collaboration with Philip Alperson, analyzes the ways in which time interacts with the production and appreciation of artworks. Music is traditionally considered the temporal art par excellence, but time is related to every art form according to object-based, experience-based, and content-based criteria (165), in line with the aspect of the work with which time is related in the most influential way. The issue gets particularly interesting when considering how our perception of time is modified by artworks, musical works in particular, and how this perception has changed in modern times with the advent of systems of digital recording and reproduction (159).
In this book Levinson extends his attention from the analysis of the features which make up the musical work as an entity to considerations regarding musical content and value. "Musical Beauty," "Values of Music," and "Shame in General and Shame in Music" are concerned with whether music has an extra-musical as well as an internal content. In order to counter the formalist claim according to which music cannot convey any kind of knowledge, Levinson wants to demonstrate that musical works possess peculiar features in virtue of which it is possible to deem them valuable. One of these features is beauty, which is characterized as a specific kind of musical excellence (58) with the potential to be both remarkably expressive and novel and to convey pleasure. Levinson then identifies a large number of extra-musical values fulfilled by music (80-85), all of which go beyond the aesthetic and artistic value we usually assign to musical works on the basis of their perceptual and historical qualities.
"Popular Song as Moral Microcosm" acts as a bridge between the discussion about the value of music and a more detailed account of the specific features of jazz explored in "Jazz Vocal Interpretation" and "The Expressive Specificity of Jazz." Levinson addresses the issue of the ascription of different kinds of moral force to music, claiming that music possesses an inner moral quality which contributes to its artistic value in virtue of its expressiveness (116). The moral quality of music and the ways in which it can be enhanced by the conjunction with lyrics are analyzed by Levinson through the consideration of jazz songs with a moral impact on listeners. He then identifies the particular relevance of the performer's interpretation, the contribution brought to the work, and its special expressiveness as the specific features which make it possible to distinguish jazz from other musical genres. The analysis is remarkably illuminating for the attention devoted to the many different ways in which the performer manipulates, molds, and presents the material offered by the composer.
"Instrumentation and Improvisation" considers the relationship between performer and instrument and the issue of improvisation. Levinson argues against Alperson that, even if the relation that bonds a musician and her instrument together is deep and close, the two components remain detached from one another and what emerges is instead an higher-order instrument made up of the two parts (146). This connection has obvious repercussions for the way performers handle improvisations. Improvisation is an issue which has raised profound debates in musical ontology; the analyses by Levinson and Alperson, however, are not concerned with this ontological puzzle but rather with the expressive musical intelligence displayed by an improvisation and with its ethical dimension as a mindful call to an unbiased appreciation of the present moment (150-151).
As in his previous collections of essays, Levinson manages to address profound issues in an accessible and engaging but also informative way. Musical Concerns is therefore suitable both for the scholar who wants to have a grasp on the latest developments in the arguments addressed and for the non-specialist reader who is interested in understanding why music plays such an important role in our lives.