1867–1944 · Romantic
Amy Beach
2 works
Amy Beach (born Amy Marcy Cheney in Henniker, New Hampshire) was a concert pianist from childhood and, apart from lessons in harmony and counterpoint with Junius W. Hill in 1881 and 1882, taught herself composition. After her marriage in 1885 she gave few public recitals and turned mainly to composing, which is why most of her large works date from her Boston years.
She belongs to the group of Boston composers later called the Boston Six or the Second New England School, and her music speaks the late-Romantic language of Brahms and Dvořák: rich chromatic harmony, broad melodies and classical forms. Her Mass in E-flat (1892) was the first work by a woman performed by Boston's Handel and Haydn Society, and her Gaelic Symphony (premiered in 1896) was the first symphony composed and published by an American woman.
Folk song is a recurring thread: the Gaelic Symphony is built partly on Irish tunes. The Piano Quintet of 1907 adapts a theme from the finale of Brahms's Piano Quintet and ties its three movements together by bringing music from the first movement back in the last. After 1910 she toured Europe as a pianist and composer, and from 1921 she spent part of each summer at the MacDowell Colony. She was the first president of the Society of American Women Composers (1925).
What to listen for
- Folk tunes worked into symphonic music: in the Gaelic Symphony the Irish melodies return as the subject of variations in the scherzo.
- Late-Romantic harmony in the manner of Brahms and Dvořák: chromatic, with sudden shifts to distant keys, as when the second subject of the Gaelic Symphony's first movement comes back in A-flat major.
- Cyclic form: in the Piano Quintet the slow introduction of the first movement returns in the finale.
- Virtuoso piano writing from a composer who was herself a concert pianist, such as the piano cadenza in the Quintet's slow movement.
Sources: Amy Beach (Wikipedia), Gaelic Symphony (Wikipedia), Tammie Leigh Walker, The Quintet for Piano and Strings, Op. 67 by Amy Beach (A.Mus.D. diss., University of Illinois, 2001)
