Beach, Amy Cheney (1867–1944)

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Beach, Amy Cheney (1867–1944)

Composer, pianist, and the first American woman to overcome gender bias in music, who attained an international reputation as a composer of large-scale classical music. Name variations: Mrs. H.H.A. Beach, Amy Marcy Cheney. Pronunciation: Chain-ee. Born Amy Marcy Cheney on September 5, 1867, in Henniker, New Hampshire; died of heart failure in her New York apartment on December 27, 1944; only child of Charles Abbott Cheney (a paper manufacturer and importer) and Clara Imogene (Marcy) Cheney (a singer and pianist); at age six, began studying piano with her mother; attended a Boston private school; studied piano with Ernst Perabo, 1876–82, and Carl Baermann, starting 1880; studied harmony with Junius W. Hill, 1881–82; taught herself orchestration and fugue, translating treatises by Berlioz and François-Auguste Gevaert; awarded honorary Master of Arts from University of New Hampshire, June 18, 1928; married Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach (d. June 28, 1910, a prominent Boston physician and lecturer), on December 2, 1885; children: none.

Family moved to Chelsea, a suburb of Boston (1871), then Boston (1875); made Boston debut as pianist (October 24, 1883); debuted with Boston Symphony

(March 28, 1885); began publishing compositions (1885); presented Mass in E-Flat, op. 5, first mass composed by an American woman, performed by Boston's Handel and Haydn Society (February 7, 1892); premiered Eilende Wolken, op. 18, with New York Symphony Society (December 2–3, 1892); premiered Festival Jubilate, op. 17, for the dedication of the Woman's Building at Chicago's Columbian Exposition (May 1, 1893); performed first piano recital devoted to her own compositions, Wellesley College (May 7, 1894); composed Gaelic Symphony, op. 32, first symphony by an American woman, presented by Boston Symphony Orchestra (October 30, 1896); premiered Piano Concerto in C-Sharp minor, op. 45 (April 6–7, 1900); premiered Piano Quintet in F-Sharp minor, op. 67 (February 27, 1908); baptized at Emmanuel Church, Boston (November 4, 1910), confirmed (April 2, 1911); lived in Europe (September 5, 1911-September 1914); began to spend winters touring and summers at Hillsboro, New Hampshire, and Centerville, Cape Cod, Massachusetts; began composing at the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire (summer, 1921); began affiliation with the League of American Pen Women (1921); named first president of the Society of American Women Composers (1924); toured Europe (November 1926–July 1927 and December 1928–May 1929); made permanent winter home in New York City (1930); finished only opera, Cabildo, op. 149 (1932); elected first vice president of the Edward MacDowell Association (January 1934); performed at the White House (April 23, 1934 and April 17, 1936); visited London (May–June 1936); premiered Piano Trio, op. 150, in New York (January 15, 1939); honored at a dinner in New York's Town Hall Club (May 8, 1940); made an honorary member of the Town Hall Alumni Association of New York (December 29, 1943). Her 75th birthday anniversary was recognized by The Phillips Memorial Gallery of Washington, D.C. which presented two concerts of her music (November 27–28, 1942); a bust of Beach, sculptured by Bashka Paeff, was donated to the Phillips Gallery, Washington (1942).

Selected discography:

The American Romantic (Alan Feinberg, piano, Argo, 1990); Carolyn Heafner Sings American Songs (Carolyn Heafner, soprano, Dixie Ross Neill, piano, Composers Recordings, 1981); Chamber Works for Piano and Orchestra, op. 45; Piano Quintet in F-Sharp Minor, op. 67 (Mary Louise Boehm , piano, Westphalian Symphony Orchestra, Siegfried Landau, conductor, Vox Turnabout, 1991); Grand Mass in E-Flat major (Michael May, conductor, Elaine Bunse, soprano, Barbara Schramm, mezzo-soprano, Paul Rogers, tenor, Leonard Jay Gould, baritone, Daniel Beckwith, organist, Newport Classic, 1989); The Piano Music of Mrs. H.H.A. Beach (Virginia Erskin , piano, Genesis, 1975); Sonata in A Minor for Piano and Violin, op. 34, in Recorded Anthology of American Music (Joseph Silverstein, violin, Gilbert Kalish, piano, New World Records, 1977); Symphony in E Minor (Gaelic), in Music in America (Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Karl Krueger, conductor, Musical Heritage, 1968); The Toledo Trio Paints Three New England Portraits (Piano Trio in A minor, op. 150, Musical Heritage Society, 1988); "When I Have Sung My Songs," in Recorded Anthology of American Music; "The Year's at the Spring" (Emma Eames, soprano, 1976).

Historically, few women composers have been able to tear down existing gender obstacles to achieve success. Even a cursory glance at Western musical history reveals that works by women are largely absent. For the most part, their compositions have remained outside the standard music-history textbook and concert repertoire. Remarkably, almost everything in Amy Cheney Beach's life seemed to work in her favor, allowing her to overcome gender discrimination with her incredible talents and emerge as an eminent international composer of classical music.

Born on September 5, 1867, in Henniker, New Hampshire, Amy Marcy Cheney was the only child of Clara Marcy Cheney and paper manufacturer Charles Abbott Cheney. Her parents, both scions of distinguished New England pioneers, enjoyed considerable wealth and high social position. Amy's ancestors were among the original settlers of Woodstock, Connecticut; she was also a direct descendant of William Learned Marcy, who was governor of New York, secretary of war, and secretary of state, and General Henry Dearborn, secretary of war and later U.S. minister to Portugal. Many of Amy's maternal relatives were musical: her mother was a fine amateur singer and pianist, her grandfather played the clarinet, and her aunt and grandmother sang.

Extraordinarily precocious, Amy Cheney possessed exceptional musical ability, including absolute pitch. Reputedly, by age one, she had memorized 40 tunes and sang them flawlessly. "If anyone sang a song to her with a slightly different rhythm or melody than … when she first heard it," wrote Janet Nichols , "she complained that it was being sung incorrectly." Before reaching two, she improvised and sang alto lines against her mother's soprano melodies. By age four, she composed and played her first piano pieces and, after one hearing, played church hymns by ear in perfect four-part harmony. Beach associated colors with major keys: C was white, F-sharp black, E yellow, G red, A green, A-flat blue, D-flat violet or purple and E-flat pink. Before long Amy required a wider range of colors. Realizing that music had a powerful influence over her child's moods (lively music gave Amy joy, sad music made her cry), Clara Cheney came up with a creative form of punishment for mischievous behavior. She disciplined her daughter by playing Louis Moreau Gottschalk's lugubrious Last Hope on the family piano.

In 1871, when Amy was still four, the family moved to Chelsea, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston; at age six, she began to receive formal instruction on the piano from her mother three times a week. The following year, she started performing at a few small church musicales and private soirees: her repertoire consisted of Beethoven's Sonatas, op. 47, nos. 1 and 2, Chopin's Waltz in E-flat, op. 18, and a variety of piano transcriptions written by the great European masters. Often after being called back on stage for encores, the seven-year-old would amaze her listeners by playing one of her own compositions, such as Mama's Waltz.

In 1875, the Cheneys moved to Boston, a hub of cultural activity and a well-established breeding ground for music in the worshipped German tradition. In a short time, the family became involved with a social circle that included prominent Harvard faculty members, writers, musicians, artists, and patrons. Several of these pillars of Boston society became Amy's sponsors, including the famous poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who was so delighted by "Miss Amy's" musical genius that he spoke openly of her brilliance and invited the prodigy to play at his home. At 14, after one such visit, Amy thrilled Longfellow by setting his poem "The Rainy Day" to music. In 1883, Oliver Ditson issued the song, and it became her first published composition.

Aware of Amy's unique talent, several of Boston's distinguished musicians recommended that she follow the example of many 19th-century American composers and continue her musical education in Europe. Nevertheless, the Cheneys enrolled their only child in a local private school and asked three Boston masters to teach her music: Ernst Perabo and Carl Baermann, once a pupil of Franz Liszt, were selected to teach Beach piano, while, for one year, Junius W. Hill was chosen to instruct her in harmony and counterpoint. For the most part, Beach was self-taught. She learned counterpoint by transcribing Bach's piano pieces from memory, then studying her mistakes. She learned orchestration by paying close attention at concerts; once home, she transcribed the piece from memory, along with the instrumentation, then compared her work with the written score. She also studied, in the original French, Hector Berlioz's Treatise on Instrumentation.

If you feel deeply and know how to express what you feel, you make others feel.
—Amy Cheney Beach

On October 24, 1883, just after her 16th birthday, Beach made her formal public debut as a pianist, performing in A.P. Peck's Anniversary Concert at the Boston Music Hall. Her program included Ignaz Moscheles' G-minor Concerto with orchestra and the Rondo in E-Flat by Chopin as part of a larger variety concert which presented performances by both a leading Boston violinist and a vocal quartet. All 11 newspaper reviews agreed, however, that the most important event of the evening was the debut of Amy Cheney.

On March 28, 1885, she debuted with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, performing Chopin's F-minor Concerto, op. 21, with Wilhelm Gericke conducting. Recognizing that Amy's talent deserved special attention, Gericke invited the young pianist to attend future rehearsals of the Boston Symphony in order to closely examine the art of orchestration and musical composition. She then journeyed to New York for her debut with the New York Philharmonic. During rehearsal, conductor Theodore Thomas slowed the tempo of Felix Mendelssohn's Piano Concerto in G Minor, anxious to make the piano section more manageable for the young pianist. "After the orchestra played the opening measures alone," wrote Nichols, "seventeen-year-old Amy launched into her first entrance at a lively clip, forcing the conductor to rev up the orchestra to match her speed."

Sometime during the early 1880s, when Amy injured a finger, Clara had taken her to visit the prominent surgeon, Dr. Henry H.A. Beach, an instructor at Harvard Medical School. Widowed in 1880, the doctor had attended some of Amy's concerts and admired her work. An amateur musician, he had a deep appreciation for the fine arts; he loved to play the piano, sing, read, paint, write poetry, and collect art. The friendship between patient and doctor blossomed, and it soon became apparent that Amy Marcy Cheney and Dr. H.H.A. Beach, who was 24 years her senior, were very much in love. At a student recital on January 16, 1885, the doctor had displayed his affection by performing "Jeune fille et jeune fleur," op. 1, no. 3, Amy's newly composed love song.

On December 2, after turning 18, Amy Cheney married the 43-year-old physician, and, since it was only proper for all proper married Bostonian women, she insisted on using her married name, Mrs. H.H.A. Beach, professionally. Henry Beach had a strong influence over his young wife. It was Henry who encouraged her to limit her performances and donate her fees to charity. It was Henry who discouraged her desire for formal study, fearing it might hamper her originality. And it was Henry who strongly urged her to turn her skills to composition. Henry and Clara were untiring supporters of Amy's work. They were, wrote Beach, "the kindest, most helpful, and most merciless critics I ever had. How often they would make me work over a phrase—over and over and over!—until the flow of the melody and the harmonization sounded right! The result was that I had two critics before facing a professional critic."

The year of their marriage was also the year that Arthur P. Schmidt of Boston began to publish her compositions. Since Henry and Arthur were close friends, the publication of Beach's work was given special attention. His company, committed to cultivating an American school of composition, had offices in New York and Leipzig, as well as in Boston, and remained Beach's only publisher until 1914.

On February 7, 1892, the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston proudly presented the first mass composed by an American woman. Mrs. H.H.A. Beach's first large work, the Mass in E-flat, op. 5, was conducted by Carl Zerrahn at the Boston Music Hall. The Mass, which had taken three years to complete, was well received by both the critics and the public. In New York, reviewers also praised the work, and the New York audience gave the composer a standing ovation. When the contralto soloist for the Mass asked Beach to write her a "grand dramatic aria," the composer responded with her usual speed and on December 2 and 3, 1892, Walter Damrosch led the New York Symphony Society in the premiere of Eilende Wolken, op. 18. The composition, a recitative and aria for voice and orchestra based on the words of Schiller, depicted Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots ' emotions after being released from prison. It was the first time that the New York Symphony Society had presented the work of a woman composer.

Beach was then commissioned to write a work for the dedication of the Woman's Building of the Columbian Exposition to be held in Chicago on May 1, 1893. Two other women—Ingeborg von Bronsart of Weimar and Frances Ellicott of England—were invited to submit compositions for this occasion. Bronsart and Ellicott composed orchestral works while Beach wrote Festival Jubilate, op. 17, for orchestra and a mixed chorus of 300 voices. In spite of poor acoustics, the performance of Festival Jubilate, conducted by Theodore Thomas, was a huge success, and the event gave Beach's music new international exposure. According to W. Waugh Lauder, correspondent for the Musical Courier, the work "made a deep and satisfying impression, and gave an official seal to woman's capability in music." Lauder's remark was an obvious attempt to undermine late 19th-century theories that supposedly "proved" women's creative inferiority.

Although Beach had achieved much success with her previous compositions, the premiere of her Gaelic Symphony, op. 32, despite mixed reviews, firmly established her as a major American composer. On October 30, 1896, the work was performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Emil Paur. According to Percy Scholes in the Oxford Companion to Music, Beach was not only the first American woman to compose a symphony, but the first American composer "to write a symphony of importance." It was astounding that a largely self-taught composer could produce such a technical masterpiece. Her 14 years spent studying orchestration and musical composition with the Boston Symphony Orchestra had clearly paid off.

On April 6, 1900, appearing as soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Boston's Music Hall, Beach premiered her Piano Concerto in C-Sharp minor, op. 45, which was dedicated to the Venezuelan pianist Teresa Carreño . For the first time, the majority of Boston's critics disliked Beach's work. In the Boston Journal, Philip Hale angrily wrote that "the concerto was a disappointment in nearly every way" and went on to suggest that Beach's ambition far outweighed her musical knowledge. Beach was later vindicated when German critics praised the concerto.

Beach's seemingly charmed life suffered a downward shift in 1910 and 1911. On April 25, 1910, while making a house call, Henry Beach fell down a steep flight of stairs and was badly injured. He died on June 28, at age 66. Following his funeral, Beach, along with her mother, sought refuge at her Cape Cod cottage in Centerville. In quiet seclusion, she found new comfort in meditation and reading. Upon her return to Boston that autumn, she renewed her faith and, on November 4, was baptized at a private service in Boston's Emmanuel Episcopalian Church. Prior to her husband's death, Beach had been religious, but she had not chosen to affiliate with any particular church. Eighteen months after Henry's death, Beach's mother Clara died on February 18, 1911. Clara Cheney had long been her daughter's closest friend. Devastated, Beach turned to her newly found faith for spiritual strength. On April 2, 1911, she was confirmed at the Emmanuel Episcopalian Church.

On September 5, 1911, after closing her home on Boston's Commonwealth Avenue, Beach left for Europe, first to recuperate and then to concertize and establish herself as an international composer and pianist. Before she sailed, she told an interviewer: "Since I am a very bad sailor, I have never quite summoned the requisite courage until this year to attempt a voyage across the ocean. Indeed I had almost concluded that until the journey could be made by some other way—perhaps by a flying machine—I should have to forego the pleasure of travel in Europe." In a letter written to Arthur Schmidt on November 30, 1912, she observed that successful European concerts would enhance her reputation back in the United States: "Even a limited number of European performances will help at home you know." When Amy Beach arrived in Europe, she was already known as an eminent American composer. Many leading musicians had introduced several of her compositions to European audiences. The Violin Sonata, op. 34, had been performed by Carreño in Berlin in 1899 and by Sigmund Beel in London in 1901; throughout 1894, Lillian Russell had performed the song "Ecstasy," op. 19, no. 2, in London; during 1904, Emma Eames had included the composer's most popular song, "The Year's at the Spring," op. 44, no. 1, in her European concerts; and for several years, Marcella Craft , an old friend of Amy's who sang with the Munich opera, had presented a number of Beach's songs in her European recitals.

Beginning in the autumn of 1912, Beach appeared as piano soloist and accompanist, presenting her Piano Concerto, op. 45, Gaelic Symphony, op. 32, Sonata for Violin and Piano, op. 34, Piano Quintet, op. 67, and piano pieces and songs in a number of German cities. The reviews were favorable, and she was warmly received. Dr. Ferdinand Pfohl, one of Germany's foremost music critics, praised Beach's ability to compose large-scale classical music and observed that "one need only mention the name of Amy Beach in order to refute the foolish prejudices concerning women composers." Her brief journey to Europe lasted three years.

In the fall of 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I, Beach arrived in Boston triumphant. By attaining a distinguished musical reputation in Europe, she had firmly established her concert career in the United States and was scheduled to perform 30 recitals during the upcoming concert season. Her songs and piano music were especially popular, and American musical organizations, professional women's clubs, and colleagues viewed her as a musical hero. For the next four years, Beach concertized extensively throughout the U.S., performing her works in major cities, including Boston, Kansas City, Portland, Detroit, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Diego. Distinguished orchestras such as the Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra performed the Gaelic Symphony, op. 32, and the Piano Concerto, op. 45.

In the years following 1918, Beach gave fewer large concert-hall appearances. Surrounded by friends and supporters, she now became more active in professional organizations and often performed small intimate recitals on their behalf, including the League of American Pen Women, the MacDowell Colony, the National Federation of Musical Clubs, and the Music Teachers National Association. She had become wealthy from the sales of her sheet music, most especially her songs. Aware of the singularity of her good fortune among women musicians, Beach helped found the Society of American Women Composers in 1924 and was the group's first president.

Since her husband's death, Beach had rented her Commonwealth Avenue home in Boston to physicians and never returned there to live. She spent her winters mostly on tour, while part of her summer was spent at the home of Jessie Parker in Hillsboro, New Hampshire. Drawn to the Parker family because of their "serious, scholarly nature," Beach loved to sit in their kitchen and visit over coffee. Throughout her life, her cottage in Centerville, Cape Cod, purchased entirely with proceeds received from her famous song "Ecstasy," remained her main summer residence. Beginning in 1921, Beach also took time each summer to compose at the Mac-Dowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Established by Marian MacDowell in 1908, the Colony was a natural haven where artists worked in peaceful bliss, faraway from the routines of everyday living.

Beach often traveled abroad. On November 20, 1926, she sailed on the S.S. Martha Washington for "a complete rest from musical work," traveling to Greece, Italy, France, and Belgium, sightseeing and attending concerts. On July 12, 1927, she returned to America. Feeling rejuvenated, Beach once again began to concentrate on her composing and concertizing, before another five-month trip to Europe on December 11, 1928. In Rome, she composed her String Quartet, op. 89, and appeared in concerts at the American Academy and the American embassy.

In 1930, at age 63, Amy Beach decided to make New York City her winter residence. Up until October 1942, she resided at the American Women's Association Clubhouse. After that, she rented an apartment at New York's Barclay Hotel. During the summer, she continued to return to Hillsboro, Centerville, and the MacDowell Colony because life in the New England woods "was her greatest joy." Captivated by nature from childhood, the musician chose to do her composing outdoors when weather permitted. During the summer of 1921, she had composed two of her most popular pieces at MacDowell: The Hermit Thrush at Eve, op. 92, no. 1, and The Hermit Thrush at Dawn, op. 92, no. 2. The pieces were based on transcriptions of bird song that Beach collected from the hermit thrush who sang outside her studio. She was also fascinated with folk music. Approximately 30 of her compositions were inspired by Irish, Scottish, Balkan, African-American, or Native American melodies. In 1922, a Native American woman had sent the composer a well-known Omaha dance tune. Overjoyed by the kind gift, Beach based her piano composition, From Blackbird Hills, op. 83, on the tribal dance.

From 1931 to 1944, Beach's choral works gained widespread popularity throughout the northeast. Her own church, St. Bartholomew's Episcopal, regularly performed several of her choral compositions. Beach's sacred works, in particular the Canticle of the Sun, op. 123, remain in America's church repertory. When Ruth Shaffner resigned as soprano soloist at St. Bartholomew's after many years of service, Beach gifted her with a brief trip to London. The two sailed from New York on May 8, 1936, visiting many English gardens and estates. Beach was scheduled to return to Europe on March 2, 1938, but a fire aboard her ship before embarkation postponed the sailing indefinitely. She never traveled to Europe again.

By the late 1930s, it became apparent to Beach and her friends that some of her former admirers were beginning to lose interest in her music. Many critics and musicians considered her work to be hopelessly out of vogue because it avoided modern avant-garde compositional styles such as Impressionism and atonality. Like the New England composers of her youth, she wrote in a late Romantic style. Her music, often described as Lisztian, relied on a natural gift for melody and contained a hefty amount of chromaticism, modulation, and emotional intensity. Terse notes in Beach's diary indicate that she was also bothered by some of the music written by her contemporaries. For instance, on more than one occasion she describes the orchestral music of Copland and Stravinsky as being "horrid."

During the last 14 years of her life, Beach composed a considerable amount of music, though only two works—her first and only opera Cabildo, op. 149 (1932), and the Piano Trio, op. 150 (1939)—are considered especially noteworthy. Both were written during her summers at the MacDowell Colony. "I can't compose in New York," confessed Beach. "I have too many friends and there are too many good concerts." The Piano Trio premiered on January 15, 1939, at the MacDowell Club in New York. But the opera Cabildo, based on Pierre Lafitte's escape from Cabildo prison in New Orleans during the War of 1812, only brought her frustration. On August 24, 1940, Hugh Hodgson, head of the music department at the University of Georgia, visited Beach and discussed the possibility of premiering the opera at the university, but continued postponements and World War II intervened before its premiere in 1945, a year after her death.

In 1942, Amy Beach's 75th birthday year, a bust of Beach, sculptured by Bashka Paeff of Cambridge, was donated to the Phillips Gallery (now the Phillips Collection) in Washington. In addition, many retrospective concerts of her works were given in her honor. Though Beach's health did not allow her to attend any of the festivities, she was extremely moved by the warm tributes. Two years later, on December 27, 1944, America's first distinguished woman composer died of heart failure in her New York City apartment.

Amy Cheney Beach's career was one of incredible musical achievement. In an era when women had barely won the right to vote, she found a way to successfully overcome gender discrimination in music and attain international recognition as an eminent composer. What she did was nothing short of amazing. "Not only was it unheard of for a woman to compose music for orchestra," wrote Janet Nichols; "it was unacceptable for them to acquire any hands-on experience by playing orchestral instruments. Most young ladies played the piano a little, and a few played harp or guitar. The violin was out, since a woman's pretty face was distorted when she pressed her chin into the instrument. A woman clutching a cello between her knees was considered scandalous. A young lady blowing into a wind instrument or beating a drum was simply vulgar." Beach's success broke ground for future generations of women composers, and her music contributed greatly to America's rich musical heritage.

sources:

Ammer, Christine. Unsung: A History of Women in American Music. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980.

Block, Adrienne Fried. "Why Amy Beach Succeeded as a Composer: The Early Years," in Current Musicology. Vol. 36, 1983, pp. 41–59.

Jenkins, Walter S. The Remarkable Mrs. Beach. Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1994.

Wilson, Arthur. "A Conservation on Musical Conditions in America," in The Musician. Vol. 17, no. 1. January 1912.

Wise Brown, Jeanell. Amy Beach and her Chamber Music. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1994.

collections:

Scrapbooks, diaries, personal correspondence, manuscript scores, and memorabilia in Amy Beach Collection, Special Collections Department, University Library, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire, and Fuller Library Collection of Hillsboro, New Hampshire, both on permanent loan to University of New Hampshire; Amy Beach clipping file, New York Public Library, collection of magazine articles, correspondence between Beach and B.C. Tuthill, and newspaper reviews; Arthur P. Schmidt Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (all business correspondence between The Arthur P. Schmidt Company, publisher, and Amy Beach 1898–1944); Crawford Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (letters and memorabilia collected and donated by Rebekah Crawford).

Cheryl Gillard , musicologist and freelance writer, Ottawa, Canada

Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia