Beach, Amy Marcy (EN)

Beach Amy Marcy Cheney, *5 September 1867 Henniker (New Hampshire), †27 December 1944 New York, American pianist and composer. She took piano lessons from E. Perabo in Boston and also studied with J. Hill (harmony, counterpoint and composition). At the age of 16, she made her debut as a pianist, performing Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto in D minor in Boston. In 1885, she married the famous physician, H.H.A. Beach, and after he died in 1910, she resumed her concert activities, giving recitals in many European cities. In 1914, she returned to the United States and settled in New York. She left behind approximately 300 works. She is considered the first American to compose a symphony (Gaelic Symphony 1894). Even during her lifetime, she was appreciated and known to a wider audience, mainly thanks to her songwriting. Her popularity is evidenced by the fact that she was often commissioned to write compositions to celebrate such occasions as the Chicago World’s Fair (Festival Jubilate 1892) or the Trans-Mississippi Exhibition in Omaha (Song of Welcome 1898).

Beach – with G.W. Chadwick, A. Foote and others – belonged to the so-called Boston school, cultivating the traditions of 19^th-century music. Her work is eclectic. The composer referred to both late Romantic music (including Brahms and Wagner) and the works of French impressionists (Debussy). There are also influences of folk music in her works (in the opera Cabildo, she introduced elements of Creole folklore, and in her piano works, among others, Balkan and Scottish folklore). Beach used extended tonality, bold modulations, diminished chords, pedal notes and archaic scales, on which folk-stylised themes were based.

Literature: D.J. Epstein A. M. Ch. Beach, in: Notable American Women, ed. E.T. James, Cambridge (Massachusetts) 1971; L. Petteys “Cabildo” by A.M. Beach, “Opera Journal” XXII, 1989; A.F. Block Dvořák, Beach and American Music, in: A Celebration of American Music, H.W. Hitchcock’s festschrift, Ann Arbor 1990; A. F. Block Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of an American Composer, Oxford 1998; D. Shadle Orchestrating the Nation. The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise, Oxford University Press 2015; S. Gherk “Common Joys, Sorrows, Adventures, and Struggles”: Transnational Encounters in Amy Beach’s “Gaelic” Symphony, “Journal of the Society for American Music” 2016, vol. 10, issue 2; T. Lennon Amy Beach First Female Composer to Have Her Music Played by a Major Orchestra, “The Daily Telegraph” 5 September 2017, https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/amy-beach-first-female-composer-to-have-her-music-played-by-a-major-orchestra/news-story/a42f241fcb84176c430c1112af67598e; L. Curtis Worth the NH trip: Symphonies from the 1890s’ and Rediscovering Beach’s “Cabildo” and More “The Boston Musical Intelligencer” 9 October 2017 and 4 November 2017, https://www.classical-scene.com/2017/10/09/beach-dvorak-nh/, https://www.classical-scene.com/2017/11/04/rediscovering-beach/; S. Clarke Amy Beach the Synesthete, Women in Art Music (WAM!): A Project of the Department of Music, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, https://wam.rutgers.edu/amy-beach-the-synesthete-an-essay-by-dr-sabrina-clarke/; L. Curtis “Jephthahs’ Daughter” Rediscovered in Plain Sight, “The Boston Musical Intelligencer” 2 December 2021, https://www.classical-scene.com/2021/12/02/jephthahs-daughter-rediscovered/?fbclid=IwAR3usiWUvuipNGfGZH5LvghfKU7hJtDHEfQZShSKr_aNrN0FYw7x3K0bE2k.