Dr. Wilson Kimber’s video project on American women composers receives SAM subvention

The Society for American Music recently announced that Dr. Wilson Kimber was the recipient of its 2020 Sight and Sound Subvention! You can read more about the 2020 SAM award winners here, and Dr. Wilson Kimber’s video project is described below. Congratulations, Marian!

“In a Woman’s Voice: Musical Readings by American Women Composers” will be a video recording of musical readings for spoken word and piano by women composers, performed by  Marian Wilson Kimber, reciter, and Natalie Landowski, piano. The project is based on the work in Wilson Kimber’s book, The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word  (University of Illinois Press, 2017). The influx of female performers into elocution during the Progressive era resulted in women’s dominance of spoken-word compositions, which were frequently performed for audiences in women’s clubs from the 1890s to the 1940s. The texts treat stereotypically feminine topics—fashion, courtship, or domestic life—often in satirical tones, supported by musical commentary in the piano. Composers such as Phyllis Fergus and Frieda Peycke created works that specifically appealed to women while subtly resisting existing gender norms. Wilson Kimber and Landowski have been performing these works for several years to warm response in academic settings and for the music’s original audience, women’s groups; this recording will help further the rediscovery of this practice.

Congratulations to Dr. McGinnis!

This spring Kelsey McGinnis successfully defended her dissertation and received her Ph.D. in Musicology. Titled “A Captive Enemy Audience: Music and the Reeducation of German POWs in the United States,” Dr. McGinnis’s dissertation draws on research conducted at the U.S. National Archives and the Iowan Camp Algona POW Archive to consider how musical activities in the camps were experienced and valued differently. Kelsey considers the perspective of government officials who hoped music might help sway German prisoners to embrace democracy. Dr. McGinnis’s work also reflects on the prisoners, whose varied musical activities provided a means for reckoning with internment.

Some of Kelsey’s new research is already set for publication in the forthcoming Music and World War II (Indiana University Press). Kudos, Dr. McGinnis!