The Music Man at Center for Arts I Fergus Falls
"I shouldn't tell you this, but she advocates dirty books… Chaucer… Rabelais... BALZAC!" It's a laugh line that never falls flat, and it advances the plot of The Music Human. Broadway convention meant that Harold Hill and Marian Paroo must end upwards together, then Meredith Willson needed another dramatic tension, and he found information technology in priggish opposition to the library. And what bluenoses could be more hilarious - or more believable - than the mayor's wife and her cronies?
Only they seem believable only because we don't know the territory. The Pick-a-Piddling ladies are not caricatures of their real-life models and then much as opposites. In actual Iowa towns of their era, it was women similar them who founded public libraries and studied Rabelais and Balzac.
That's ane of many striking findings in The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Discussion , a new book by University of Iowa music professor Marian Wilson Kimber. Not that she picks on Meredith Willson, whose accuracies she also details. Her scope is much larger. She shows that well-nigh of us accept the aforementioned historical blind spot as Willson did, and that it obsures far more than than River City. In a number of ways, we underestimate American women of the 1850s-1920s and forget their legacy. Nosotros benefit from the institutions they built but ignore their roles in building them. We lampoon the art forms they created but know nothing of the arts themselves. And we don't begin to grasp how central these endeavors were to shaping American cultural life, and to outcomes we take for granted, like women being welcome to speak outside the domestic sphere.
Wilson Kimber's writing is as engaging as it is meticulous, her research rich and nuanced just clear as a bell. The volume covers a wide range and geography, considering the practice of "elocution" was so pop and widespread. My brusque e-interview with Wilson Kimber cannot do the book justice. I didn't go into the roots of elocution in an educational system that focused on recitation, for instance, or ask well-nigh chapters on dialect, the concept of the musical piece of work, and Mendelssohn's Midsummer Dark's Dream music in performance. But we cover a lot, including Chautauquas, Hoyt Sherman Identify, the novelist Ruth Suckow, the Marx Brothers, Sir Patrick Stewart, and Hamilton. And Delsarte posing. That'due south what Harold Hill was talking the "Pick-a-Little" ladies into, right before they sing that song. Their attempt at posing later in the play brings another reliable laugh, so I plant it remarkable to learn that Delsarte was one time seen as progressive.
Anyone interested in Iowa and American cultural history should read the volume, and as well check out the Elocutionists weblog. And if Wilson Kimber happens to come up to a town near you lot, don't miss her. (She volition be at the Public Library in Washington, Iowa at noon on Th, June 14th.) She doesn't only talk most The Elocutionists, she likewise performs their work, something few musicologists would dare. I enquire her how she started beneath (and also include a youtube clip!). Here'southward our interview:
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What was "elocution"?
Elocution was the fine art of using spoken communication to interpret the meaning of a text.
How was that dissimilar from, say, voicing a script in radio or television today, when we try to sound conversational even when we read from a text?
Today, we think of spoken communication as "natural," only elocutionists were trained in a stylized, most musical style of reciting. Elocution was considered more complicated than singing, since singers already had predetermined pitches only elocutionists had to make them up themselves.
When did "elocution" sally every bit a genre, and how big a part did it play in American civilization?
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A major role! Elocution became a pop action outset in the nineteenth century, and not only in the USA: if you lot read Anne of Green Gables (which is set in Canada) or saw the PBS adaptation, you might recall how much Anne enjoys elocution, reciting poetry in public concerts. Her activities were typical. Here in the United states of america, if y'all look at century-onetime concert programs, you lot discover that it used to be a normal expectation to run across verse or monologues between musical numbers. Many compositions for spoken word with accompaniment were written for the elocutionists who performed across America into the early twentieth century.
Even before the nineteenth century, men who aspired to careers as politicians, attorneys, or preachers studied elocution, partly to learn to projection their voices without distension.
ELOCUTION AND GENDER
That brings upwards a central thread of the volume: the ways in which elocution was related to gender. To start, you show that men'south oratory took place in the public sphere in positions of power, similar politics, law, or the ministry, merely that women were supposed to recite only in the domestic sphere. Elocution, you say, provided a bridge that permit women who weren't Queen Victoria speak outside the home while remaining "respectable." How did this progress in the US?
Reciting to entertain your family at home was socially acceptable. Then, in the tardily nineteenth century, the rising of women's clubs provided places outside the home for women to recite. Women were able to appear in public because they were transmitting "great literature," non giving political speeches or appearing every bit morally "questionable" actresses. Many received training at the oratory schools in every major American metropolis. By 1892, when the National Association of Elocutionists had its first meeting, three-quarters of the attendees were women.
You write virtually how elocution came to be "gendered," seen as a adult female's activeness. You also describe how it was satirized, and you argue that this in part reflected a broader "cultural denigration of female creative endeavour."
Almost of the negative reaction came from men who were unhappy that women had successfully taken over what had been a male person profession. Female performers were critiqued as amateurish or overly sentimental. Elocution was almost too popular—one author called it a "distemper!"
CHAUTAUQUAS, RUTH SUCKOW, AND WHAT THE MUSIC Human being GOT WRONG
Every bit an Iowa Public Radio host, I was taken by how oft your book treats the history of these arts in Iowa. Did y'all start out intending to research local history?
No, simply I couldn't escape information technology! My job interview at the Academy of Iowa was the first time I e'er heard the word "Chautauqua." I merely learned afterwards that in the 1910s and 1920s, the summer Chautauqua tent circuit provided music and spoken word performances to the Midwest'southward rural audiences, and that one of the major talent agencies was in Cedar Rapids.
Stuffed in a scrapbook at Back-scratch Higher in Milton, Massachusetts—a former elocution school—I found a photocopy of capacity from a 1926 novel, The Odyssey of a Nice Girl. This novel, about a girl who goes to elocution schoolhouse, turned out to be by Ruth Suckow, who was born in Hawarden, Iowa, attended Grinnell, then Back-scratch. She spent much of her adulthood in Cedar Falls. She ended upwardly being the focus of my first affiliate.
Another affiliate every Iowan needs to read right at present is on Delsarte posing in Iowa, which most of us know only from the satirical treatment of the "Grecian Urn" ladies in The Music Man. And so I was surprised to learn that Delsarte was one time considered progressive.
In Delsarte, women in white gowns posed as Greek statues or expressed literary content in physical poses. Delsarte made a good finale for an evening of music and elocution, just it too allowed women to abandon their corsets and motility freely. You might think of it every bit like to today'due south yoga, both physically and mentally "healthy." I was dubious nigh this, until I convinced my music history class to endeavor Delsarte and discovered that it really does feel adept.
You lot argue that The Music Man radically misrepresents the Mayor's wife and her circle. It portrays them as "ignorantly opposed to high culture," but in real Iowa towns these women were exactly the people who would be studying Balzac and Rabelais, not the ones beingness outraged by them. You show that these women in fact made huge and lasting contributions to our cultural life. Who were they?
The women in Iowa's clubs were amazing! They were a major forcefulness in working to improve their towns through contributing to their public libraries or performing at music clubs. The ladies of Marshalltown'south Hawthorne Social club were studying Wagner'southward Parsifal in 1905. Iowa women created cultural institutions that endured, such as Hoyt Sherman Place, built by the Des Moines Women's Club. With a grant from the Country Historical Lodge of Iowa, I'm still researching our clubwomen, focusing on how they promoted the state's composers in the 1920s and 1930s, fifty-fifty in smaller towns, similar Tama and Greene.
I can't wait to hear what you find! A broader point of the volume is that these women were central, non peripheral, to the overall history of classical music and its institutions. I'd never seen them treated that manner in standard music histories.
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Classical music is obsessed with oversized male personalities, overshadowing the people who make their careers possible. Women arts patrons are often treated with ridicule—think of the graphic symbol Margaret Dumont played in the Marx Brothers' movies. Another cistron is that historians sometimes don't recognize that musical life takes identify everywhere, not merely in large urban areas. When I showed an Iowa map with many dots indicating where Delsarte took place at a musicology conference, yous could literally hear the room gasp!
ELOCUTION, WOMEN COMPOSERS, AND REVIVING LOST WORKS (SOME OF THEM PRESERVED IN A LAUNDRY BASKET)
Let'due south return to the art of the elocutionists. How did elocution come to combine spoken words with music?
Since elocutionists performed at concerts, it was easy to add music. Poesy could be given with piano accompaniments, and songs could be spoken rather than sung. If a poem mentioned a well-known hymn or song, it could be played at that indicate. One reason nosotros don't remember this took place is that nothing was written downwardly, so I've had to reconstruct these practices.
That is such a contrast to how we retrieve of that era's classical music, with its focus on fully written-out works. How did elocution with music affect women who were composers?
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Because women were elocutionists, women composers in the twentieth century likewise took up creating works that could be performed for women'due south guild audiences. 2 female person composers performed pieces for spoken word and piano for decades, Frieda Peycke in Los Angeles, and Phyllis Fergus in Chicago. Both had been completely forgotten. Fergus's daughters literally brought a laundry handbasket of her music out of the basement to show me.
Recently y'all've taken up performing these women's compositions. Why did you decide to try elocution yourself?
Both Fergus and Peycke received great reviews. I institute their pieces clever and charming and thought, "somebody really needs to perform these." I finally had to admit that the best person to attempt this was me! My wonderful pianist, Natalie Landowski, helped me to effigy out how to make the combination of music and speech work. We're on our tenth concert at present—people even so enjoy these pieces, mostly because so many of them are very funny. [BELOW: Marian reciting Frieda Peycke's If Only Nosotros Could.]
ELOCUTION AND THE FATE OF WOMEN'S ARTS
Allow me move to another implication you explore: that an art class can thrive widely all the same disappear completely. What acquired the demise of elocution?
To put it simply, the globe inverse. The kinds of Victorian poetry elocutionists performed were no longer pop. At the same fourth dimension that there was a backlash against women's success in elocution, it likewise became more socially acceptable for women to enter theatrical life. The rise of radio and movies made other entertainments available.
Today we're used to prophecies of artistic doom that don't come up to pass—the death of the novel, of classical music, of radio. But and so far, the novel and classical music accept thrived, and radio listenership has increased. Based on your work, should we be more than worried?
Later learning about the disappearance of elocution, I do tend to worry more when I read those dire forecasts! What I'd similar to emphasize is that information technology is art forms by women that are usually in more danger. Many classical ensembles are currently working to plan more compositions by women. In the era of elocutionists, women composers' works were heard far more than frequently than they are today. So it'southward non only hard for women to get their art forms before the public, it's harder for them to stay there in the long term.
Did the combination of elocution and music have any lasting bear on?
Since we've lost the more than stylized versions of elocution, most of the spoken word compositions popular a century ago are not performed today. A few years ago Sir Patrick Stewart and the pianist Emanuel Ax recorded Richard Strauss's setting of Alfred Lord Tennyson'south Enoch Arden, 1 of the most substantial of these works. In another sense, although it's not the same manner as elocutionists performed, the combination of speech and music continues to exist all around us—in the movies, on television set, or in Hamilton.
Or Kendrick Lamar, right? But did the works of the elocutionists final at all?
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I unremarkably say that the compositions past women were completely forgotten. Merely one of Phyllis Fergus'southward pieces, The Usual Way, satirizing marriage, was a regular feature of bridal showers for years. I've found it being performed as belatedly as 1976 in Milford, Iowa. And the lady who invited me to perform at the Washington, Iowa, Public Library told me she used to perform Fergus'south Soap, the Oppressor, when she was a little girl. Women's arts are there, if y'all are willing to look.
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Source: https://www.iowapublicradio.org/show/classical-music-with-barney-sherman/2018-06-13/what-the-music-man-got-wrong-iowa-author-uncovers-womens-forgotten-cultural-legacy
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