Amy Beach

Amy Beach

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (September 5, 1867 – December 27, 1944) was an American composer and pianist. She was the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music. As a pianist, she was acclaimed for concerts she gave in the United States and in Germany.

Biography

Early years, child prodigy

Amy Marcy Cheney was born in Henniker, New Hampshire. A child prodigy, she was able to sing forty songs accurately by age one; by age two she could improvise a counter-melody to any melody her mother sang; she taught herself to read at age three,[1] and began composing simple waltzes at age five. Amy's mother, Clara Imogene Marcy Cheney, was herself an "excellent pianist and singer".[2] She sang and played the piano for Amy. Despite this, her family struggled to keep up with her musical interest and demands. Young Amy often commanded what music was to be played and how. She was often prone to fits and tantrums if the music did not meet her demands. In addition, her mother forbade Amy from playing the family piano despite the child's wish to play, believing that indulging her would damage parental authority.[3] At age four, she composed three piano pieces (waltzes) while spending the summer at her grandfather's farm in West Henniker, NH.[4] There was no piano near the farm; Amy composed the pieces mentally and eventually played them at home.

Amy began formal piano lessons with her mother at age six. Block (1998, p. 7) writes that in the social milieu of the time, "middle and upper class women gifted in music were turned away" from a career in it "because of the stigma attached to those who appeared as performers on the public stage." In Europe, Fanny Mendelssohn, sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, and herself a pianist and the composer of hundreds of compositions, encountered a similar stigma. But at age 7 Amy gave some public recitals, playing works by Handel, Beethoven, and Chopin, as well as her own pieces. One recital was reviewed in The Folio, an arts journal, and two or more agents proposed concert tours for the prodigy pianist, but Amy's parents declined, for which she was later grateful.[5]

Amy's father, Charles Abbott Cheney, had forebears active in the anti-slavery and women's rights causes. Oren B. Cheney, an uncle of Charles, founded Bates College in Maine, the second-oldest coeducational college in the United States and oldest in the East, with first female graduate in 1869.

Move to near Boston

In 1875, the Cheney family moved to Chelsea, a suburb just across the Mystic River from Boston,[6] where they were advised to enter Amy into a European conservatory. Her parents opted for local training, hiring Ernst Perabo and later Carl Baermann as piano teachers. Baermann had been a student of Franz Liszt, the "most brilliant" European pianist, at the Munich Conservatory.[7] At age fourteen, Amy received her only formal training in composition with Junius W. Hill, with whom she studied harmony and counterpoint for a year in 1881-82.[8] Other than this one year of instruction, Amy was self-taught as a composer; she often learned by studying much earlier works, such as Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier. She got some useful advice later from the Boston Symphony Orchestra's conductor Wilhelm Gericke.

Early career

Amy Beach in 1908

In Amy Cheney's concert debut 18 October 1883 in the Music Hall, Boston, when she was 16, she played Chopin's Rondo in E-flat and was piano soloist in Moscheles's piano concerto No. 3 in G minor, in a "Promenade Concert" conducted by Adolph Neuendorff. Her performance received large acclaim from critics. The audience also was "enthusiastic in the extreme."[9] The next two years of her career included performances in Chickering Hall, as well as starring in the last performance of the Boston Symphony's 1884–85 season.[10]

Marriage, composing career

Following her marriage in 1885 to Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a Boston surgeon 24 years older than she, her name, as on concert programs and published compositions, became "Mrs. H. H. A. Beach." She agreed to limit performances to two public recitals a year, with profits donated to charity. Following her husband's wishes, she devoted herself more to composition, although she wrote "I thought I was a pianist first and foremost".[11] Henry did not approve of Amy studying composition with a teacher,[12] so that in her further development as a composer, she was self-taught. "She collected every book she could find on theory, composition, and orchestration ... she taught herself ... counterpoint, harmony, fugue."[13] Gevaert's and Berlioz's treatises [in French] on orchestration ... "were most composers' bibles". Amy translated them into English for herself.[14]

Also, "along with her marriage vows, Amy" agreed with her husband "to live according to his status, that is, function as a society matron and patron of the arts. She agreed never to teach piano, an activity widely associated with women" and regarded as providing "pin money."[15]

Further successful compositions

Her next major success was the Mass in E-flat major, which was performed in 1892 by the Handel and Haydn Society orchestra, founded in 1815. The well-received performance of the Mass moved Beach, according to newspaper music critics, into the rank of America's foremost composers.[16] The Mass was the first piece composed by a woman that was performed by the Society. In 1883 the Society had performed a Mass by Luigi Cherubini, and in 1887 selections from Bach's B Minor Mass. Some parallels have been seen between passages in Beach's Mass and some in Cherubini's or, less clearly, in Bach's.[17]

The group into which Amy Beach had graduated has been called the Second New England School of composers, an unofficial title, with members John Knowles Paine (1839—1926), Arthur Foote (1853—1937), George Whitefield Chadwick (1854—1931), Edward MacDowell (1860—1908), Horatio Parker (1863—1919), and soon also Beach. Beach's Gaelic Symphony, composed in 1896, was premiered Oct. 30 by the Boston Symphony "with exceptional success".[18] It was another important milestone in women's music, as it made her the first American woman to compose and publish a symphony.[19] But, "whatever the merits or defects of the symphony were thought to be, critics went to extraordinary lengths in their attempts to relate them to the composer's sex."[20] Around 1898 "critics stopped making Beach the target of sexual esthetics."[21] After hearing the Gaelic Symphony, Chadwick wrote to Beach that he and Parker had attended the premiere and much enjoyed it: "I always feel a thrill of pride myself whenever I hear a fine work by any of us, and as such you will have to be counted in, whether you" wish to "or not—one of the boys."[22] The five men previously in the Second New England School, together with Beach, became known as the Boston Six, of whom Beach was the youngest.

In 1900 she was soloist in the premiere of her Piano Concerto wiith the Boston Symphony.[23] Before writing the concerto Amy had been piano soloist in performances of piano concerti of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns, and others.[24] In a concerto performance, the soloist may compete against the conductor to set the tempo. In a rehearsal of the performance of a Mendelssohn concerto in 1885, the conductor decided, in light of Amy's youth, to take the last movement more slowly than usual. But when Amy began the piano part, it was at full prescribed tempo: "I did not know that he was sparing me, but I did know that the tempo dragged, and I swung the orchestra into time".[25] It has been suggested that Beach expresses in her concerto her own struggles against her mother and her husband for control of her musical life.[26]

Chamber music

Franz Kneisel was a leading violiniist in Boston and beyond, having been hired at about age 20 by Wilhelm Gericke, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as concertmaster of the orchestra. Soon after arriving in Boston, he formed the Kneisel String Quartet with three other string players of the Boston Symphony. (The Quartet lasted until 1917. Meantime Kneisel moved to New York in 1905.) In 1894 Amy had joined the Quartet in performing Robert Schumann's Quintet for piano and strings.[27]

In January 1897 Amy played, with Franz Kneisel, in the premiere of her Sonata for Piano and Violin, which she had composed in the spring of 1896.[28] Critical reception In New York was mixed, but in Europe it was better: composer and pianist Teresa Carreño performed the piece with violinist Carl Halir in Berlin, October 1899 and wrote to Amy:

I assure you that I never had a greater pleasure in my life than the one I had in working out your beautiful sonata and having the good luck to bring it before the German public...(I)t really met with a decided success and this is said to the credit of the public.[29]

In 1900, with the Kneisel Quartet, Amy performed the Brahms quintet for Piano and Strings.[30] Beach wrote her own Quintet for piano and strings, in F-sharp minor, in 1905. "During Beach's lifetime, the work had well over forty performances, in dozens of cities, over the radio, and by many string quartets. A large number of those performances were with the composer at the piano, most notably during a lengthy tour in 1916 and 1917 with the Kneisel Quartet."[31]

Variations on Balkan Themes, Beach's "longest and most important solo" piano work, was composed in 1904.[32] It responded to revolts in the Balkans against the then ruling Ottoman Empire.

Widowhood, years in Europe

Her husband died in June 1910 (the couple had been childless) and her mother 7 months later. Her father, Charles Cheney, had died in 1895.[33] Beach felt unable to work for a while. She went to Europe in hopes of recovering there. In Europe she changed her name to "Amy Beach".[34] She travelled together with Marcella (Marcia) Craft, an American soprano who was "prima donna of the Berlin Royal Opera."[35] Beach's first year in Europe "was of almost entire rest."[21] In 1912 she gradually resumed giving concerts, Her European debut was in Dresden, October 1912, playing her violin and piano sonata with violinist "Dr. Bülau," to favorable reviews.[36] In Munich in January 1913, she gave a concert, again with her violin sonata, but now with three sets of songs, two of her own and one by Brahms, and solo piano music by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Two critics were rather unfavorable, one calling Beach's songs "kitschy.".[37] She was unfazed, saying the audience was "large and very enthusiastic."[38] Demand arose for sheet music of Beach's songs and solo piano pieces, beyond the supply that Beach's publisher Arthur P. Schmidt had available for German music stores.[38] Later In January, still in Munich, she performed in her Piano Quintet; a critic praised her composing, which he did not like all that well, more than her playing.[38] In a further concert in Breslau, only three of Beach's songs were on the program, fewer than in Munich.

In November–December 1913 she played the solo part in her Piano Concerto with orchestras in Leipzig, Hamburg, and Berlin.[18] Her Gaelic Symphony was also performed in Hamburg and Leipzig.[39] A Hamburg critic wrote "we have before us undeniably a possessor of musical gifts of the highest kind; a musical nature touched with genius."[39] She was greeted as the first American woman "able to compose music of a European quality of excellence."[18]

Return to America

She returned to America in 1914, not long after the beginning of World War I. Beach and Craft made pro-German statements to the American press, but Beach said her allegiance was to "the musical, not the militaristic Germany." She gave some manuscripts of music she had written in Europe to Craft, who brought them back to the U.S. Beach delayed her own departure until September 1914 and so had a further trunkful of manuscripts confiscated at the Belgian border.[40]

She settled in New York in 1915. Someone had asked her if she were the daughter of Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. She resumed using that married name, but used "Amy Beach" on bookplates and stationery.[41] For a few summers she composed at her cottage in Centerville, Massachusetts on Cape Cod.

While continuing to get income from her compositions published by Arthur P. Schmidt, during 1914-1921 she had new compositions published by G. Schirmer. The Centerville cottage had been built on a five-acre property Amy had bought with royalties from one song, Ecstasy, 1892, her most successful up until then.[42]

From 1921 on she spent part of each summer as a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where she composed several works. She encountered there some other women composers and/or musicians, including Emilie Frances Bauer, Marion Bauer, Mabel Wheeler Daniels, Fannie Charles Dillon, and Ethel Glenn Hier, who "were or became long-time friends" of Beach.[43] But there were "generational and gender divisions" among the Fellows in music, with some feeling that Beach's music was "no longer fashionable".[44]

In New York, she became the virtual composer-in-residence at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church, New York. She used her status as the top female American composer to further the careers of young musicians. While she had agreed not to give private music lessons while married, Beach was able to work as a music educator during the early 20th century. She worked to coach and give feedback to various young composers, musicians, and students. Given her status and advocacy for music education, she was in high demand as a speaker and performer for various educational institutions and clubs, such as the University of New Hampshire, where she received an honorary master's degree in 1928. She also worked to create "Beach Clubs," which helped teach and educate children in music. She served as leader of some organizations focused on music education and women, including the Society of American Women Composers as its first president.[45] Heart disease led to Beach's retirement in 1940 and her death in New York City in 1944.

Compositions

A member of the "Second New England School" or "Boston Group," she is the lone female considered alongside composers John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote, George Chadwick, Edward MacDowell, George Whiting, and Horatio Parker.[46] Her writing is mainly in a Romantic idiom, often compared to that of Brahms or Rachmaninoff. In her later works she experimented, moving away from tonality, employing whole tone scales and more exotic harmonies and techniques.

Beach's compositions include a one-act opera, Cabildo, and a variety of other works.

Symphonic works

She wrote the Gaelic Symphony (1896) and the Piano Concerto in C-sharp minor. Another orchestral piece, Bal masque, has a solo piano version. Two further pieces, Eilende Wolken and Jephthah's Daughter, are for orchestra with voice.

Choral works

Sacred choral works among Beach's compositions are mainly for 4 voices and organ, but a few are for voices and orchestra, two being the Mass in E-flat major (1892) and Beach's setting to music of St. Francis's Canticle of the Sun (1924,1928), first performed at St. Bartholomew's in New York. A setting of the Te Deum (with organ) was first performed by the choir of men and boys at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Boston. Betty Buchanan, Musical Director of the Capitol Hill Choral Society in Washington, D.C., had founded it in 1983. The Society under her direction in 1998 recorded the Canticle of the Sun, seven Communion Responses, and various other pieces by Beach.

There are some tens of secular choral works, accompanied by orchestra, piano, or organ.

Publisher Arthur P. Schmidt once complained to Beach that her "choral pieces had practically no sale,"[47] seemingly suggesting preference for solo piano works or songs.

Chamber music

Her chamber music compositions include a violin and piano sonata (recorded on seven different labels), a Romance and three further pieces for violin and piano, a piano trio, and a piano quintet.

Solo piano music

One of the many pieces is Variations on Balkan Themes. Large numbers of solo piano pieces have been recorded by pianists Kirsten Johnson (4-disc set), Joanne Polk (3-disc set), and Virginia Eskin (see the Discography).

Songs

She was most popular, however, for her songs, of which she wrote about 150. The words of about five each are her own and those of H. H. A. Beach, for the rest by other poets. "The Year's At the Spring" from Three Browning Songs, Op. 44 is perhaps Beach's best-known work. Despite the volume and popularity of the songs during her lifetime, no single-composer collection of Beach's songs exists. Some may be purchased through Hildegard Publishing Company and Masters Music Publication, Inc.

In the early 1890s, Beach started to become interested in folk songs. She shared that interest with several of her colleagues, and this interest soon came to be the first nationalist movement in American music. Beach's contributions included about thirty songs inspired by folk music, including Scottish, Irish, Balkan, African-American, and Native American origins.[48]

Writings

Beach was a musical intellectual who wrote for journals, newspapers, and other publications. She gave advice to young musicians and composers—especially female composers. From career to piano technique advice, Beach readily provided her opinions in articles such as, "To the Girl who Wants to Compose",[49] and "Emotion Versus Intellect in Music."[50] In 1915, she had written Music’s Ten Commandments as Given for Young Composers, which expressed many of her self-teaching principles.[51]

Late 20th century and early 21st century revival and reception

Despite her fame and recognition during her lifetime, Beach was largely neglected after her death in 1944 until the late 20th century. Efforts to revive interest in Beach's works have been largely successful during the last few decades.

Gaelic Symphony

The symphony has received praise from modern critics, such as Andrew Achenbach of Gramophone, who in 2003 lauded the work for its "big heart, irresistible charm and confident progress."[52] In 2016, Jonathan Blumhofer of The Arts Fuse wrote:

"To my ears, it is by far the finest symphony by an American composer before Ives and, by a wide margin, better than a lot that came after him. It surely is the most exciting symphony penned by an American before World War I. [...] Her command of instrumentation throughout the Symphony was consistently excellent and colorful. The manner in which she balanced content and form succeeds where her contemporaries like George Whitefield Chadwick, John Knowles Paine, and Horatio Parker so often came up short: somehow Beach’s Symphony is never daunted by the long shadows Brahms and Beethoven cast across the Atlantic. It’s a fresh, invigorating, and personal statement in a genre that has offered plenty of examples of pieces that demonstrate none of those qualities."[53]

Piano Concerto

Beach's Piano Concerto has been praised as an overlooked masterwork by modern critics. In 1994 Phil Greenfield of The Baltimore Sun called it "a colorful, dashing work that might become extremely popular if enough people get a chance to hear it.[54] In 2000 Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle also lauded the composition, writing:

Its four movements are packed with incident -- beautifully shaped melodies (several of them drawn from her songs), a forthright rhythmic profile and a vivacious and sometimes contentious interplay between soloist and orchestra. The piano part is as flashy and demanding as a virtuoso vehicle calls for, but there is also an element of poignancy about it -- a sense of constraint that seems to shadow even the work's most extroverted passages.[55]

Andrew Achenbach of Gramophone similarly declared it "ambitious" and "singularly impressive... a rewarding achievement all round, full of brilliantly idiomatic solo writing ... lent further autobiographical intrigue by its assimilation of thematic material from three early songs".[52]

Tributes and memorials

In 1994, the Boston Women's Heritage Trail placed a bronze plaque at her Boston address, and in 1995, Beach's gravesite at Forest Hills Cemetery was dedicated.[56] In 1999, she was put into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 2000, the Boston Pops paid tribute by adding her name as the first woman joining 86 other composers on the granite wall of Boston's famous Hatch Shell.[57]

Discography (incomplete)

Solo piano music

Other chamber music

Amy Beach, Sonata for violin and piano in A minor, Op. 34:

Recorded on the following labels: Albany No. 150, Arabesque No. 6747, Centaur Nos. 2312, 2767, Chandos No. 10162, Koch Nos. 7223, 7281, NWW No. 80542, Summit No. 270, White Pine no. 202. More details on Chandos 10162:
Amy Beach, Sonata for Violin and Piano in A minor; Quartet for Strings; Pastorale for Wind Quintet; and Sketches (4) for Piano, Dreaming. Performed by the Ambache Chamber Ensemble. Chandos Records 10162
Centaur 2312 also has the Barcarolle for violin and piano, the three pieces for violin and piano Op. 40, the Romance Op. 23, and the Invocation Op. 55, all performed by Laura Klugholz, violin/viola, and Jill Timmons, piano



Orchestral Music, possibly with chorus

Sources

References

  1. ↑ Block 1998, p. 8
  2. ↑ Gates, 2010, p. 1
  3. ↑ Block (1998), p. 6
  4. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 8
  5. ↑ Block 1998, p. 23
  6. ↑ Block (1998), p. 7
  7. ↑ Block (1998), p. 28
  8. ↑ Gates (2010), p. 2
  9. ↑ "It is hard to imagine a more positive critical reaction to a debut": Block 1998, p. 30
  10. ↑ Block (1998), pp. 29–32
  11. ↑ Block 1998, p. 50
  12. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 51
  13. ↑ Block, 1998, p.55
  14. ↑ Block 1998, p. 55
  15. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 47
  16. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 71
  17. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 65
  18. 1 2 3 Nicolas Slonimsky, Ed., The Concise Edition of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 8th Ed., p. 67
  19. ↑ Gates 2010, p. 1
  20. ↑ Gates 2010, p. 4
  21. 1 2 Gates 2010, p. 5
  22. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 103
  23. ↑ Griiffiths, Paul, "Beach, Amy", in Oxford Companion to Music, Alison Latham, Ed., Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 113
  24. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 131
  25. ↑ Block 1998, p. 33
  26. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 132.
  27. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 91
  28. ↑ Block, 1998, pp. 113—122, gives an extended treatment of the sonata with selections from the score.
  29. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 121
  30. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 127
  31. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 129
  32. ↑ Block 1998, pp. 122-126
  33. ↑ Block 1998, p. 136
  34. ↑ Block, 1998, pp. x, 183
  35. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 180
  36. ↑ Block,1998, p. 184
  37. ↑ Block 1998, p. 184
  38. 1 2 3 Block 1998, p. 185
  39. 1 2 Gates 2010, p. 6
  40. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 196
  41. ↑ Block 1998, p. x
  42. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 98
  43. ↑ Block, p. 222
  44. ↑ Block, p. 223
  45. ↑ Block 1998, p. 233
  46. ↑ Beatie, Rita. "A Forgotten Legacy: The Songs of the 'Boston Group'", NATS Journal 48 no. 1 (Sept–Oct 1991): 6–9, 37.
  47. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 186
  48. ↑ "Fried Block, Adrienne. Amy Beach's Music on Native American Themes", American Music, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Summer 1990), pp. 141–166. Published by University of Illinois Press. doi:10.2307/3051947
  49. ↑ "To the Girl who Wants to Compose," The Etude, vol. 35 (1918), 695.
  50. ↑ "Emotion Versus Intellect in Music," Studies in Musical Education, History, and Aesthetics, vol. 27 (1933), 45-48.
  51. ↑ Block, 1998, p. 57
  52. 1 2 Achenbach, Andrew (June 2003). "Beach Piano concerto; Symphony No 2: One of the most valuable releases yet in Naxos's American Classics series". Gramophone. Retrieved January 9, 2016.
  53. ↑ Blumhofer, Jonathan (March 10, 2016). "Rethinking the Repertoire #9 – Amy Beach’s “Gaelic” Symphony » The Arts Fuse". artsfuse.org. The Arts Fuse. Retrieved 2016-03-20.
  54. ↑ Greenfield, Phil (October 7, 1994). "Beach's piano concerto will take center stage", The Baltimore Sun Retrieved January 9, 2016
  55. ↑ Kosman, Joshua (March 27, 2000). "Thwarted Composer's Intense Work". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved January 9, 2016.
  56. ↑ Music Clubs Magazine, World Music News, Spring 1996, 20.
  57. ↑ Meyer, Eve Rose. "Composer's Corner: Amy Beach Joins the Ranks of Honored Composers," International Alliance for Women in Music 5 nos. 2–3 (1999): 20.

Further reading

External links

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