Musical Concerns Essays in Philosophy of Music

This volume presents a new collection of essays, all of them dealing with music, by Jerrold Levinson, one of the most prominent philosophers of art today. It follows in the line of Levinson's earlier collections, Music, Art, and Metaphysics (1990), The Pleasures of Aesthetics (1996), and Contemplating Art (2006), and is representative of the most stimulating work being done under the rubric of analytic aesthetics. The essays, which are wide-ranging, should appeal to aestheticians, philosophers, musicologists, music theorists, music critics and music lovers of all kinds. Three of the twelve essays comprising the volume have not previously been published, and in somewhat of a departure for Levinson, four of the essays focus on music in the jazz tradition.

1 - Philosophy and Music
2 - The Aesthetic Appreciation of Music
3 - Concatenationism, Architectonicism, and the Appreciation of Music
4 - Indication, Abstraction, and Individuation
5 - Musical Beauty
6 - Values of Music
7 - Shame in General and Shame in Music
8 - Jazz Vocal Interpretation: A Philosophical Analysis
9 - Popular Song as Moral Microcosm: Life Lessons from Jazz Standards
10 - The Expressive Specificity of Jazz
11 - Instrumentation and Improvisation
12 - What Is a Temporal Art?

Jerrold Levinson is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland and past president of the American Society for Aesthetics, 2001-2003. He is the author of three collections of essays, Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Cornell University Press, 1990; 2nd edn OUP, 2010), The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Cornell University Press, 1996), and Contemplating Art (OUP, 2006); a monograph, Music in the Moment (Cornell University Press, 1998); the editor of Aesthetics and Ethics (CUP, 1998), Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (OUP, 2003), and Suffering Art Gladly (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2013); and co-editor of Aesthetic Concepts (OUP, 2001) and Art and Pornography (OUP, 2012).