Episode 108 of Sound Expertise
What if feminist music history isn’t just about elevating composers like Amy Beach and Clara Wieck Schumann, but also about understanding how everyday women made music? What is elocution, and how did a now-obscure genre of musical readings represent a cornerstone of American women performing in the nineteenth century? A conversation with Marian Wilson Kimber, professor of music at the University of Iowa.
If you’re interested in learning more about Prof Wilson Kimber’s work, follow her on Twitter @MWilsonKimber and check out:
- Her book The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word (Please note an important mistake that I made in my intro: the book is from 2017, not 2015)
- Some of her elocution performances, with pianist Natalie Landowski
- Her essay “The Normal Woman Composer,” on her website
- Her article “Women Composers at the White House: The National League of American Pen Women and Phyllis Fergus’s Advocacy for Women in American Music” in the Journal of the Society for American Music
- Her article “The ‘Suppression’ of Fanny Mendelssohn: Rethinking Feminist Biography” in 19th-Century Music
- Her article “Jane Austen’s Playlist: Teaching Music History Beyond the Canon” in the Journal of Music History Pedagogy
- More writing on her website
Sound Expertise is hosted by Will Robin (@seatedovation), and produced by D. Edward Davis (@warmsilence). Please subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and/or Spotify. Questions or comments? Email williamlrobin@ gmail
A written transcript of this episode is available here; many, many thanks to Andrew Dell’Antonio for volunteering to prepare transcripts for the show!
Stay tuned for Episode 109, coming next Tuesday, September 15: an interview with Sumanth Gopinath on Steve Reich, race, and cultural appropriation.
Sound Expertise 