Associate Professor Marian Wilson Kimber of the University of Iowa School of Music has published a new book, The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word (University of Illinois Press). Wilson Kimber's book includes many Iowa-related topics, including novelist Ruth Suckow, whose second novel draws on her elocution school experiences, and the practice of Delsarte posing in Iowa that is satirized in the "Grecian urn ladies" of Meredith Willson's famous musical, The Music Man. 

From the University of Illinois Press website:

Emerging in the 1850s, elocutionists recited poetry or drama with music to create a new type of performance. The genre—dominated by women—achieved remarkable popularity. Yet the elocutionists and their art fell into total obscurity during the twentieth century. Marian Wilson Kimber restores elocution with music to its rightful place in performance history. Gazing through the lenses of gender and genre, Wilson Kimber argues that these female artists transgressed the previous boundaries between private and public domains. Their performances advocated for female agency while also contributing to a new social construction of gender. Elocutionists, proud purveyors of wholesome entertainment, pointedly contrasted their “acceptable” feminine attributes against those of morally suspect actresses. As Wilson Kimber shows, their influence far outlived their heyday. Women, the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, did nothing less than create a tradition that helped shape the history of American music.

“In her fascinating and long-needed study, Wilson Kimber reconstitutes and interprets a set of pervasive but neglected practices that include not only elocution but also melodramatic performance, recitation in combination with music, and the activities of the verse speaking choir. In so doing, she helps to recover an elusive but crucial element of cultural history: the sound of women's lives.”
—Joan Shelley Rubin, author of Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America

Publication of this book was supported by grants from the H. Earle Johnson Fund of the Society for American Music, from the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and from the University of Iowa School of Music.

The Elocutionists
Women, Music, and the Spoken Word
Marian Wilson Kimber
Hardcover, ISBN: 978-0-252-04071-9. $95.00
Paper, ISBN: 978-0-252-08222-1. $28.00
18 Black and White Photographs,
25 Music examples
352 Pages
Publication date: February 13, 2017

Contact: Heather Gernenz 217-300-2687 gernenz2@illinois.edu