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. Her "Gaelic" Symphony, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1896, was the first symphony composed and published by an American woman. She was one of the first American composers to succeed without the benefit of European training, and one of the most respected and acclaimed American composers of her era. As a pianist, she was acclaimed for concerts she gave featuring her own music in the United States and in Germany. 

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. 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 her setting 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. The Capitol Hill Choral Society of Washington, D.C., recorded the Canticle of the Sun, seven Communion Responses, and other pieces by Beach in 1998, led by its Musical Director Betty Buchanan, who founded the Society in 1983.

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".

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, a string quartet, 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.