Amy Beach (1867 – 1944)
Amy Beach was the first prominent American woman composer.
She was born Amy Marcy Cheney in Henniker, New Hampshire, and quickly showed an aptitude for music, singing on pitch when she was two, beginning piano at four, and composing at the same age. She was initially taught piano by her mother and gave her first recital at seven.
The Cheney family moved to Boston shortly thereafter, where Amy had private lessons in piano and a year of music theory and composition. In 1885 at the age of 17 she made her concert debut with the Boston Symphony playing the Chopin Piano Concerto No. 2.
At the age of 19, Amy Cheney married Dr. Henry Harris Beach, a physician who was in his early 40s and who had long admired Amy’s piano performances. But as his wife, Amy was limited to two concert appearances per year. He encouraged her to compose, although not allowing her to study composition formally in a school or with a tutor. Aside from the year of instruction as a teenager, she was largely self-taught in music theory and composition. When she published or performed, she was known as Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.
Most of Mrs. Beach’s early compositions were for piano, voice, and choruses, but from 1894 to 1896, she composed a four-movement 40-minute orchestral work that she called the Gaelic Symphony because it incorporated songs from the British Isles. It is the first symphony composed and published by an American woman, and it was widely performed in the decade after its premiere.
After her husband died in 1910, she legally changed her name to Amy Beach, but she continued to compose and perform under the name Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. However, there are indications that she wished to be known by posterity as Amy Beach, and that was the name that Adrienne Fried Block chose for the title of her groundbreaking 1998 biography Amy Beach: Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of an American Composer, 1867 – 1944.
Amy Beach is now considered to be one of the Boston Six, or the Second New England School, which is a group of American composers recognized by music historians as having flourished around Boston in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is the youngest and only woman of the group that also included John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote, George Chadwick, Edward MacDowell, and Horatio Parker. Edward MacDowell is best remembered today for founding the MacDowell artist’s residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire. In her will Amy Beach created the Amy Beach Fund so that royalties from sales and performances of her music would help fund MacDowell.
Particularly in the 20th century, Amy Beach composed more chamber music. Two of her final works are an engaging Piano Trio (Opus 150) from 1938 and the short Pastorale for Woodwind Quintet (Opus 151) from 1942. Here is her very Brahmsian Piano Quintet in F♯ Minor (Opus 67) from 1907.