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Eleanor Roosevelt’s papers in the FDR Presidential Library contain approximately seventy musical works calling for world peace, the lyrics and/or music of which were created by women. Women’s peace songs from the 1930s were often a response to the First Lady’s press and radio statements about peace. They were also influenced by calls for cultural change by activists in the women’s peace movement, represented by the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, groups with which Roosevelt was involved. Compositions about peace typically either featured march-like music and nationalistic imagery or were religious choral works and hymn-like expressions of women’s collective action. Writers sometimes parodied well-known hymns or patriotic songs, providing them with less militaristic texts. Musical offerings for the First Lady reflected women’s desire to assist Roosevelt in her peace efforts, their growing concern about the onset of World War II, and a strong belief in the power of music to help achieve a better world.

Marian Wilson Kimber, Former Reviews Editor, Journal of Musicological ResearchThe lowly book review suffers from benign neglect in the pecking-order of academic publications, tucked at the bottom o...

Women composers' concerts, arranged by Phyllis Fergus, were held for Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House in 1934 and 1936. They featured music by members of the National League of American Pen Women—an organization for writers, artists, and composers—and were part of a substantial agenda proposed by Fergus, its music director and later president, to achieve national recognition for its composer members. Drawing on Fergus's scrapbooks and documentation in the FDR Library and Pen Women's archives, this article explores the events that Fergus helped to organize, including concerts in Miami, Chautauqua, and Chicago, the latter played by members of the Women's Symphony Orchestra. White House appearances by Amy Beach helped emphasize the League's professional status, and the nationalistic tone of its publicity, urging audiences to “Buy American” during the Depression, worked to distract from age-old assertions of women's lack of creativity. However, the musicales for Roosevelt, who received the composers socially rather than as paid professionals, reinforced women's domestic position, and financial restraints limited most League programming to the genres typically associated with female composers. Despite its separation from a male mainstream, the NLAPW was nonetheless a significant force in promoting women's music in the 1930s.

Due to the prevalence of bells in poetry performed by late-nineteenth-century elocutionists, melodramatic compositions frequently included bell sounds. Elocutionists imitated bell tones vocally, or accompanied texts such as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Bells with character pieces. Richard Strauss’s Enoch Arden, Max von Schillings’s Hexenlied, Sumner Salter’s The Madonna at Palos, Stanley Hawley’s Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight, and other works imitated bells through unusual sonorities, chord repetition, or recurring “swinging” figuration. Musical bells were not merely audible representations of natural sounds but also helped to create poetic meanings surrounding the passage of time, religious rituals, and death, sentimentally evoking grief and loss.

Women confirmed their own more highly cultured positions through recitation of African American dialect, particularly the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, or “child dialect,” sometimes with musical accompaniment. Many women incorporated Dunbar’s dialect poems into their repertoires, texts that also inspired settings for speaker and piano by women composers. However white women’s imitations of African American dialect perpetuated racial stereotypes such as that of the Mammy, even while their musical settings negated the text’s origins. Child dialect allowed child imitators to express comedic and rebellious sentiments without transgressing feminine social boundaries. The child-like persona cultivated by diseuse Kitty Cheatham facilitated her eclectic programming of children’s songs, nursery rhymes, and European art music alongside spirituals and African-American dialect texts.

Poetic recitation was regularly heard at concerts and in “musical and literary entertainments.” Recitation anthologies designed for homes and schools provided sample programs. Music and elocution were combined outside of the conventions of notation: texts of songs were spoken to their accompaniments, and previously composed or improvised music was used to accompany speech. Contemporary speech pedagogy reveals that performed speech was characteristically musical due to highly-pitched practices, often notated with graphic symbols. The career of Jane Manner demonstrates the full range of melodramatic approaches available. Something between a musical composition and a genre of performed literature, accompanied recitation allowed women to exert their artistic power beyond the traditional boundaries of elocution and to usurp the place of the composer.

Musical accompaniment for poetry recitation not only enhanced the dramatic narrative, but it served as what Joanne Dobson has dubbed the “sentimental keepsake,” common to nineteenth-century literature. Accompanied recitations typically featured appropriate romantic or religious topics, depicting nostalgic memories of dancing with lost loves, singing soldiers longing for home, and sufferers’ faith in the face of death. Dances, parlor songs, or hymns were played when they were mentioned in poetic texts. Songs served as an audible expression of grief, loss, memory, and the fragility of human connections, topoi at the core of the sentimental literary tradition. That familiar music recalled the domestic sphere enabled platform appearances by women to be acceptable despite their gender.

Women’s clubs networks supported the careers of composer-performers Frieda Peycke (1884–1964) and Phyllis Fergus (1887–1964). Both women presented herself not as an elocutionist, but as a composer of a musical art form and publicized the spoken word genres in which she performed with a unique label: Fergus’s “story poems,” and Peycke’s “musically-illustrated readings.” Fergus appeared before women’s music clubs in Chicago, groups that had readers as members into the 1940s, and gradual assumed leadership positions. Peycke’s performances in private homes suggests an ongoing women’s salon culture that supported spoken word performance. Never released, Peycke’s recordings, as well as her published articles, were unable to create a lasting audience for her compositions, though she performed successfully in Los Angeles for fifty years.

Nettie Arthur Brown’s The Red Fan (1896) was typical of the humorous spoken-word compositions in twentieth-century America. Due to female elocutionists’ performance traditions, women became the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, including a few modernist composers, such as Ruth Crawford Seeger and Marion Bauer. More typically, comic “musical readings” satirized gender expectations. Courtship, marriage, and domesticity were portayed as less than ideal. Performers sometimes adopted a rebellious boy persona, allowing for women’s further expression of gendered satire. Some compositions depicted grandmothers, and moral and religious works continued and modified nineteenth-century ideals. Piano accompaniments humorously quote well-known compositions and feature closing gestures that punctuate the narratives’ climactic “punch lines.” Ultimately, female composers feminized melodrama, creating genres to speak for and to women.

The Delsarte movement expanded the oratorical poses of elocutionists into tableaux of Grecian statuary performed to poetic recitation or music, justified by the belief that a spiritual essence could be expressed through women’s bodies. Over one hundred Delsarte performances took place ca. 1888-1920 in fifty Iowa communities, often as benefits for community betterment. Music was essential to these exhibitions, pacing movements, and clarifying meaning, through the use of popular songs. Amateur female practitioners’ attempts to associate their bodies with the highest art of Western European culture through tableaux and pantomime were satirized in Meredith Willson’s 1957 Broadway musical, The Music Man.

I am a curious girl who likes books.—Lauren HancockRead the poem to the rhythm of the music.(Use a big voice!)(Read with feeling!) …Entertain and amaze your friends with this new way to read.—Nancy Polette, “How to Do Concert Reading”...

Ruth Suckow’s novel, The Odyssey of a Nice Girl (1925), based on her elocution school experiences, demonstrates how gender shaped women’s artistic lives in the Progressive era. Elocution enhanced men’s careers, yet women’s voices were for education or domestic entertainment. However, changing social roles allowed for women to adopt elocutionary performance as a mode of expression. Women’s educations at elocution schools allowed them undertake careers as professional performers and teachers. Female elocutionists’ desire to embody acceptable feminine attributes and to separate themselves from morally suspect actresses influenced their performances, presented as highbrow interpretations of great literature. The decline of elocution was in part due to the backlash against the professionalization of women in the field.

Between 1850 and 1920, readings of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by women took place in conjunction with concerts of Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music, popularized by actress Fanny Kemble. The practice responsed to criticism of the physicality of theatrical stagings and the ability of Mendelssohn’s music to depict extramusical content. Female elocutionists were considered ideal performers due to the depiction of fairies as female and in order to render Shakespeare’s pure poetry stripped of theatrical excess. The combination of Shakespeare and Mendelssohn represented the highest level of elocutionary art. In reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, elocutionists became more voice than body, and the fairy elements were transmitted through Mendelssohn’s magical music, mediating the problem of the female body displayed on the stage.

“Verse-speaking” choirs led by women trained in elocutionary techniques were popular at women’s colleges in the 1930s and 1940s. School groups expressively speaking poetry together reflected the Depression-era values of social usefulness and civic unity. Pedagogical materials written by women consistently relied on musical terminology to describe choirs’ arrangements. Choirs undertook recitation utilizing differently pitched voices and alternating spoken solos with larger groups. The Wellesley College Choir, conducted by Cécile de Banke, was a leading representative of this style of musical interpretation of contemporary poetry. While elocution had featured female soloists in personal interpretations of literary works, the speech choir, with its patriotic overtones of civic good, was an even safer venue for feminine expression, as women’s personalities would be absorbed into the whole.

Poetry recitation and music intersected in performances by American women between ca. 1850 and 1950. Through oral interpretation of literature, women aspired to a place in high culture, yet in taking to the platform, female elocutionists transgressed the previous boundaries between private and public domains. Nonetheless, programs, press reports, and archival materials from women’s clubs, elocution schools, women’s colleges, and the Chautauqua circuit demonstrate that musical and literary entertainments by professional and amateur female performers were widespread. Repertoire was selected to be socially acceptable for women and to distinguish elocutionists from morally-suspect actresses. Many of the performance practices typical of spoken word and accompaniment are unknown today because they fall outside our conception of the musical work. Although women’s increasing dominance of the field of elocution resulted in its subsequent denigration as a “feminine” profession, their spoken-word performance tradition influenced the history of music, and they became the primary composers of melodramatic compositions in twentieth-century America. The Elocutionists is thus a study of the intersection of gender and genre, demonstrating female elocutionists’ role in the creation of musically-accompanied recitation and women composers’ transformations of late nineteenth-century practices in creating works that would appeal specifically to women.

Felix Mendelssohn's two mature piano concertos, Op. 25 in G minor (1831–32) and Op. 40 in D minor (1837), were widely performed in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the D-minor Concerto fell completely out of favor and came to be regarded as a work the composer had completed hurriedly. However, the numerous extant autograph sources for the second Concerto reveal that Mendelssohn considered it worthy of the meticulous revision customary of his major artistic efforts. The problematic reception of the D-minor Concerto was due to a convergence of factors, not the least of which was the highly favorable reception of its predecessor, Op. 25, deemed historically significant due to its formal innovations. But more subtle forces also shaped the decline of Op. 40, including a perceived seriousness of musical content as opposed to popularizing virtuosic display, as well as a long history of performance by women and amateurs rather than male virtuosi. In addition, the second Piano Concerto's biographi...

It is a familiar scenario. The governing board of an orchestra struggles with programming decisions. Anxious to keep subscribers happy and ward off financial exigencies, it resolutely markets perfo...

The poetic epigrams and vignettes that precede the movements of Fanny Hensel's Das Jahr in the recently discovered autograph allow for a new, enriched interpretation of the work, previously believed to depict the composer's Italian sojourn. Hensel's music is frequently shaped by the poems from which the epigrams were taken: works by Schiller, Uhland, Eichendorff, Tieck, and Goethe. The epigrams, vignettes drawn by Wilhelm Hensel, and references to other compositions combine to evoke the passage of time and the seasons of human life, a narrative of change tinged with a melancholic sense of loss, in a genuinely Romantic musical cycle.

In art, literature, theatre and music, Victorians demonstrated increased interest in the supernatural and nostalgia for a lost mythic time, a response to rapid technological change and increased urbanization. Romanticism generated a new regard for Shakespeare, also fuelled by British nationalism. The immortal bard's plays began to receive theatrical performances that more accurately presented their original texts, partially remedying the mutilations of the previous century. The so-called ‘fairy’ plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, were also popular subjects for fairy paintings, stemming from the establishment of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in 1789. In such a context, it is no wonder that Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream was so overwhelmingly popular in England and that his style became closely associated with the idea of fairies. This article explores how the Victorians’ understanding of fairies and how the depiction of fairies in the theatre and visual arts of the period influenced the reception of Mendelssohn's music, contributing to its construction as ‘feminine’. Victorian fairies, from the nude supernatural creatures cavorting in fairy paintings to the diaphanously gowned dancers treading lightly on the boards of the stage, were typically women. In his study of Chopin reception, Jeffrey Kallberg has interpreted fairies as androgynous, but Victorian fairies were predominantly female, so much so that Lewis Spence's 1948 study, The Fairy Tradition in Britain, includes an entire section on fairy gender intended to refute the long-standing notion that there were no male fairies. Thus, for Mendelssohn to have composed the leading musical work that depicted fairies contributed to his increasingly feminized reputation over the course of the nineteenth century.

A book on teaching music history is long overdue. To encounter Teaching Music History, edited by Mary Natvig, is to wonder why this volume appears to be the first of its type. Teaching Music Histor...

Felix Mendelssohn9s Serenade and Allegro giojoso, op. 43, was composed rapidly for his performance in a concert in Leipzig on 2 April 1838. Originally entitled Adagio and Rondo , the concert piece underwent substantial revision before its publication in late February the following year. The autograph sources reveal that Mendelssohn9s Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor, op. 40, composed less than a year before in 1837, influenced the Serenade and Allegro giojoso9s musical content. Not only do the two works for piano and orchestra share a key and thematic material, but an extended sketch found in the Mendelssohn Nachlass 19 (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz) was part of the compositional history of the concerto, yet served as the basis for a transition, later rejected, between the Serenade and Allegro giojoso9s two movements. Revisions to the Mendelssohn Nachlass 30 draft of op. 43 show Mendelssohn working to make his new work more like the D minor concerto. Not only were parts of the early stages of op. 43 derived from op. 40 sketches, but the finished work suggests that Mendelssohn, facing the proof sheets for op. 40 while working on the Serenade and Allegro giojoso , had not yet worked the concerto9s musical material out of his artistic consciousness.

The idea that Felix Mendelssohn prevented his sister, Fanny Hensel, from publishing her compositions is central to biographical representations of her, including Franccoise Tillard9s Fanny Mendelssohn (1992) and Gloria Kamen9s Hidden Music (1996). This story can be traced to nineteenth-century publications by male members of the Mendelssohn family and their desire to portray both siblings according to socially acceptable gender roles. Such origins challenge the assumption that the story of Fanny Hensel9s "suppression" represents a modern feminist reinterpretation of her life. Instead, current treatment of Hensel relies on common biographical models for male composers; in her lack of a public career, she fits the Romantic stereotype of the neglected, suffering genius. The retelling of the "suppression" of Fanny Hensel represents a "story" in itself - a rescue plot in which modern women rediscover Hensel and somehow "save" her from historical neglect. This feminist recovery relies on the assumption that Hensel was forgotten, overlooking the numerous publications between 1830 and 1920 in which she appears. Centering Hensel9s biography on her brother9s influence rather than on her eventual publication of her music oversimplifies the larger historical situation for women composers, replacing the manifold issues surrounding gender and class with a single male villain. The difficulties encountered in telling the story of Hensel9s life reveal a need for a feminist biography that balances an understanding of larger cultural constraints with recognition of individual female agency.

Wie soll man uber den Ruhm einer Komponistin aus dem 19. Jahrhundert sprechen? Fanny Hensel trat vorwiegend im halboffentlichen Rahmen auf, publizierte ihr op. 1 (Sechs Lieder fur eine Stimme mit Begleitung des Pianoforte, 1837–1841) kurz vor ihrem Tod und war uber mehr als ein Jahrhundert mit einer sehr geringen Zahl veroffentlichter Werke vertreten. Eine solch unscheinbare Karriere, die mit ihrer Rolle als Frau zusammenhangt, machte es fur Fanny Hensel unmoglich, in den Kanon musikalischer Grosen aufgenommen zu werden. Sie war, wie viele Kunstlerinnen, gleichzeitig bekannt und unbekannt.