AMY BEACH AND THE “GAELIC” SYMPHONY (Part 1 of 9)

Posted on October 9, 2019

Amy Marcy Cheney, ages 2 and a few years older.  Special Collections, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham.

PYP performed Amy Beach‘s Gaelic Symphony on Saturday, November 9, 2019, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Click here to watch our performance.

Introduction and Amy the Pianist

If asked to name a female American composer, many people with a passing familiarity with classical music history will reply “Amy Beach”, or perhaps “Florence Price”.  Unfortunately, Beach is often then dismissed as a dusty late-romantic antique along with the rest of the Boston composers of the late 19th century (known as “The Second New-England School”), a rich Boston ‘Brahmin’ society wife whose work isn’t performed very often in this era ‘for a good reason’.

The reality of Beach’s life and work is quite different. While at the time of her death in 1944 she was the most performed composer of her generation, a double revolution was actually necessary for anyone today to know the story and work of Amy Marcy Cheney Beach, a.k.a. Mrs. H.H.A. Beach. It took not only Beach’s historic genius but also the equally historic genius of another woman, who paved the way for revived consideration of her and other women composers. 

Several decades after Beach’s death, Adrienne Fried Block and the movement she championed rescued Beach, her music, and her crucial advocacy of women in music from historical erasure and obscurity; in the 70s-90s, Beach became the standard-bearer for Block’s advocacy for the inclusion of women in American music history.

Beach wrote that she lived two lives, that of “the pianist” and “the writer”.  She lived two lives in another way as well: that of the New England well-bred young lady who lived in a gilded cage and graciously met all social expectations (or at least kept up appearances), and that of the beyond-category, self-taught musical genius who survived repression and constriction until catastrophe finally allowed her to break free at 43.

NOTE: This set of blog entries will be a bit longer than others have been, because so little is widely known about American art music culture, Boston society life, and the expected roles for women at the time that it’s necessary to take time to describe them in order to appreciate the significance of Beach’s and her contemporaries’ achievements.  Please see the ‘table of contents’ at the end of this entry to jump to whatever area you’re most interested in.

Amy the pianist

Amy Marcy Cheney was born in 1867 into an amateur-musical, middle-class New Hampshire family that had a piano in the house, but her astounding natural abilities almost immediately challenged her parents’ expectations and assumptions of childrearing. In her earliest days, she would tantrum when her mother, Clara Cheney, would sing off pitch; before she could even speak, she could hum one of the forty tunes she had memorized by the time she was one year old; and she improvised alto harmony to her mother’s songs when she was two.  When her mother wanted to punish her, she would, rather sadistically, play something in a minor key, which set Amy sobbing immediately.

Amy was also a rare, true synesthete who associated certain pitches and scales with specific colors.  At this age she would demand her mother “play the purple song!”  Throughout Amy’s life, color almost definitely affected her composition (scholars have analyzed all the color references in her writing, and the relationships of the keys of her compositions to her earlier-stated associations), although by adulthood she had learned to keep quiet about it.

As a dedicated Calvinist, Amy’s mother’s reaction to this fireworks-display of an infant/toddler was to ration piano time and withhold lessons for years for fear of Amy becoming a ‘prideful’, un-ladylike prodigy.  Throughout her childhood Amy was both recognized for her massive “God-given” musical talent *and* trained to take music only so far and no further – since it was clearly what she loved best, according to her mother’s logic she *had* to be kept from it in order that she both desire it and not expect to be able to build her entire life around it. 

In this period Amy learned to live within contradiction, diving into her passion as deeply as possible while not violating her mother’s shielding/shaping constraints.  Block noted that “Although [Amy’s mother] tried to keep Amy’s talents more or less hidden, privately – in a biographical sketch of her daughter—she revealed immense pride in her daughter’s achievements while omitting any mention of their battles of wills” (Block, p. 11).  After all, “because she was female, she must learn early that her adult life would be centered on home, husband and children, not music…with few exceptions, a professional artist-musician class…did not yet exist in the United States” (Block, p. 7).

Nonetheless, after just her first appearance in a group recital, managers started knocking. Clara shielded her daughter from exploitation, but when the family relocated to Roxbury, very close to Boston, she immediately sought out the best teachers in the city.  They in turn immediately advised that Amy go to Europe, “both a recognition of the child’s outstanding talent and a compliment to her mother’s training” (Block, p. 22).

Amy’s parents steadfastly refused to let her go abroad, where girls were already allowed in conservatories, however, or even to let her have normal formal *general* schooling, which was available to Boston girls.  Instead, she was taught piano by the most prominent, German-trained, local teacher.

Amy finally convinced her mother to let her make her Boston musical “debut” in 1883, playing both solo and with an orchestra in the same concert.  It was entirely acceptable for young single ladies to perform men’s compositions, as performing lay within the scope of their ‘limited abilities’.  There were not the same ideological barriers as those placed before women composers. 

Reviews of the time were glowing: Amy was a splendid pianist, a credit to Boston, a complete technical master who demonstrated more emotional sophistication than expected for a sixteen-year-old. She loved the experience and started performing headlong after that first evening.  Yet just two years later, the same year she played twice with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, marriage cut her performing career short, and at the time she had no idea that it would ever return.

NEXT: Part 2: Amy the Compose

Learn more in our in-depth program notes:

• Part 1: Introduction - Amy the Pianist
• Part 2: Amy the Composer
• Part 3: Amy the Composer (Continued)
• Part 4: Amy and Her Contemporaries
• Part 5: Amy and Her Contemporaries (Continued)
• Part 6: The “Gaelic” Symphony
• Part 7: The “Gaelic” Symphony (Continued)
• Part 8: Performance History of the “Gaelic”
• Part 9: Conclusion