“Historical Anthology Of Music By Women” in “Historical Anthology of Music by Women”
An American-born and American-trained member of the Second New England School of composers, Amy Cheney Beach (Mrs. H. H. A. Beach) was the first woman in the United States to have a successful career as a composer of large-scale art music. She was prodigiously talented not only as a pianist and composer but also intellectually and was recognized during her lifetime as the dean of American women composers. She made her debut as a pianist in Boston at age fifteen. During the next two years she played recitals and was widely hailed as a fine pianist on her way to a brilliant performing career. In 1885, a momentous year for her, Amy Cheney played for the first time with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, began a lifetime association with the Boston publisher Arthur P. Schmidt, and married the 43-year old widower Henry Harris Aubrey Beach. Dr. Beach was a surgeon and society physician as well as an amateur singer, pianist, poet, and painter. For the next 25 years, Beach concentrated on composition, giving only occasional concerts. Leading artists and ensembles performed her works in the United States and Europe.
Dr. Beach died in 1910. A year later Beach went to Europe to rest, then to rebuild her career as a concert pianist, and not least to have her works performed and reviewed in Europe. After a highly successful three years, she returned to the United States on the eve of World War I, already booked for the 1914-15 concert season. From then until the mid-1930s, she undertook annual winter concert tours but devoted her summers to composition.
Beach was a prolific composer with 152 opus numbers to her credit. Her catalogue includes over 110 songs, piano pieces, sacred and secular choral works with and without orchestra, chamber music, a symphony, a piano concerto, a Mass with orchestra, and a one-act opera, Cabildo.
Beach’s early works are in the late-Romantic tradition. Her harmonic vocabulary recalls that of both Brahms, in its richness, and Wagner, in its restless modulations. The energy and passion are her own, however, as is her gift for spinning out a long lyrical line. Some works composed after 1914 reveal the influence of French Impressionism along with a new leanness and restraint.
Beach set works by American, English, French, and German poets, as well as more exotic texts, such as the Scottish dialect poems of Robert Burns. As early as her very first set of songs, published in 1885, Beach’s lyrical gifts and sensitivity to language are apparent. “Elle et moi” (My Sweetheart and I), composed in 1893 to a text by Félix Bovet, is in the tradition of Schubert and the lied. It has an accompaniment figure that expresses one central musical idea, possibly inspired by the idea of the flame, while the voice line, in its fioritura, suggests the butterfly’s fluttering wings. The wonderful darkening toward D flat, the borrowed VI chord in F, and the second modulation to A flat both presage the final image of the butterfly destroyed by the flame.
On May 28, 1893, the same year that “Elle et moi” appeared in print, an article in the Boston Herald reported that Antonin Dvořák, visiting head of the National Conservatory of Music in New York (1892-95), recommended that American composers look to their own folk music for thematic materials for their art music. According to the article, Dvorak advocated the use of “plantation melodies and slave songs.” In response, Beach wrote in a solicited statement that Negro melodies “are not fully typical of our nation. . . . We of the north should be far more likely to be influenced by old English, Scotch, or Irish songs, inherited with our literature from our ancestors.” Her Symphony in E minor, subtitled “Gaelic” and completed in 1894, may well have been her thoughtful response to Dvorak’s challenge.
The movements are marked Allegro con fuoco, Alia Siciliana, Lento con molto espressione, and Allegro di molto. Three of the four have themes of a distinctly Gaelic cut. Themes and motives from all four movements in this cyclical work are related but are transformed within each movement. The first movement, reproduced here, is in sonata allegro form, with motives and themes undergoing development almost immediately after their initial statements. Following an introductory chromatic passage for strings and woodwinds over an E pedal, the first heroic motive (m.17) is announced by the trumpets. The second motive (m.75), announced in the strings, is a slightly longer chromatic variation of the first. It also anticipates the dotted rhythms of the third, “Gaelic,” theme in G major (m.151). This theme, presented by a solo oboe over a G drone resembling a bagpipe, is the closest to a true theme in the entire first movement. Its dotted rhythms, emphasis on modal scale degrees, and plagal cadence make it unmistakably Gaelic. Otherwise, the harmonic vocabulary is Brahmsian, and the movement’s motivic underpinnings are chromatic and driving. The first performance on October 31, 1896, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Emil Paur, had wide and mostly positive coverage by the critics. During succeeding years, leading orchestras in the United States and abroad performed the symphony.
Beach became interested in birdcalls as a child. At age eleven, when she was visiting San Francisco, the ornithologist E. R. Sill asked her to notate the song of the California lark, and he later published her transcription in a scholarly journal. Her continued interest in birdcalls can be seen in a number of works for piano and voice.
Beginning in 1921 Beach spent part of each summer as a Fellow-in-Residence at the MacDowell Colony. She produced a number of works her first summer, among them “A Hermit Thrush at Morn” and “A Hermit Thrush at Eve,” which are probably her most-inspired works using birdcalls. Both are based on “exact notations of hermit thrush songs in the original keys but an octave lower, obtained at MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, N. H.” Her use of the calls in this set illustrates two techniques: in the first piece, the centuries-old decorative device of imitation; in the second, a relatively new one in which the birdcalls provide the melodic material out of which the entire piece is built. The poems quoted at the head of each piece stress the immanence of God in nature and Beach’s own belief in the religious content of music, which on the one hand derives from Thoreau’s and Emerson’s transcendentalism and on the other looks forward to Messiaen.
In “A Hermit Thrush at Eve,” scalar melodies in long ascending and descending sweeps suggest flight, while the chromatic, whirring triplets may represent the beating of wings. These passages introduce the birdcalls twice, while the entire piece is framed by a passage that makes a slow three-octave ascent. Its key is the darkest E-flat minor, an appropriate setting for the bird’s evensong. The complete poem quoted at the head of the piece is by an American, John Vance Cheney (1848-1922): “Holy, holy! in the hush / Hearken to the hermit thrush; / All the air / Is in prayer.”
In “A Hermit Thrush at Morn,” reprinted here, the song of the thrush begins in m.5 and becomes the motivic material for the Poco agitato sections, the second of which also presents the birdcall in the left hand. The descending second of the opening measure of the waltz accompaniment is also related to the song of the thrush, the principal notes of which are also a second, but ascending. This piece starts in the darker D minor and ends in the pastoral F major, suggesting the brightening at sunrise. The quotation at the head of the songs is taken from “The Thrush’s Nest” by the British poet John Clare (1793-1864). It begins: “Within a thick and spreading hawthorn bush / That overhung a mole-hill large and round, / I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush / Sing hymns to sunrise, while I drank the sound / With joy. . . .”
Recordings
Amy Beach. Songs and Violin Pieces. “Elle et moi,” Opus 21, no. 3. Northeastern NR 202 (1981).
Piano Music of Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. “A Hermit Thrush at Eve” and “A Hermit Thrush at Morn,” Opus 92, nos. 1 and 2. Genesis GS 1054.
Symphony in E minor (Gaelic), Op. 32. Society for the Preservation of American Music, MIA 139 (1968). There are cuts in the first, third, and fourth movements. The cut in the first movement is from 32 measures after J to Q, that is, the entire recapitulation up to the Coda.
Further Reading
Apthorp, William E “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach; Symphony in E minor, ‘Gaelic,’ Op. 32.” In Boston Symphony Orchestra: Programmes of the Rehearsals and Concerts, Music Hall, Boston, 1896-97. Boston: C. A. Ellis, 1896-97, pp. 77-82.
Block, Adrienne Fried. “Why Amy Beach Succeeded as a Composer: The Early Years,” Current Musicology 36 (1983):41-59.
Merrill, E. Lindsay. “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. Her Life and Works.” Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1963.
Tuthill, Burnet Corwin. “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach,” Musical Quarterly XXVI, no. 3 (July 1940):297-306.
Reprinted by permission of the MacDowell Colony, copyright holder
Reprinted by permission of the MacDowell Colony, copyright holder.
Reprinted by permission of the MacDowell Colony, copyright holder.
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