Book Review: Music and the Southern Belle: From Accomplished Lady to Confederate Composer; Music, Women, and Pianos in Antebellum Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: The Moravian Young Ladies' Seminary

[...]she explains that the level of difficulty of the music that southern belles often played in private spaces contradicted the societal prejudice against highly technical musical displays by women, and that this repertory was beyond the abilities of most amateur musicians.3As the author notes, the hand crossing, large registral leaps, stark dynamic contrasts, and other technical challenges in pieces such as Theodor von la Hache's Freedom's Tear Reverie "challenge the propriety and docile nature of the southern belle's behavior" (101), as described by etiquette manuals. Jewel Smith's Music, Women, and Pianos in Antebellum Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: The Moravian Young Ladies' Seminary is related in title and theme to Arthur Loesser's classic study Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History.4The book is also a socio-musical history, in this case of one of the oldest educational institutions for women in the United States.