Born: September 5, 1867, Henniker, New Hampshire
Died: December 27, 1944, New York
Amy March Cheney Beach
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In her own words....
"The women composers of today have advanced in technique, resourcefulness, and force, and even the younger composers have achieved some effects which the great masters themselves would never have dared to attempt. The present composers are getting away more and more from the idea that they must cater to the popular taste, and in expressing their individual ideas, are giving us music of real worth and beauty."
American composer and pianist. She was the first significant female composer in America and one of the leading composers of the "New England School."
By all measures, young Amy Marcy Cheney was a true prodigy. At one year she knew forty songs, always singing them at the same pitch. By age two she could improvise a countermelody to any melody her mother sang, and at age four, she could not only read four-part hymns at sight, but wrote her first pieces in her head and then sat down and played them on the piano. She began piano study at age six with her mother, and then studied with the finest pianists in Boston. She made her debut at sixteen, and in 1885 played with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
From this point on, her career was influenced greatly by society's views of women. It was suggested that her desire to study composition would best be served by independent study, in part in the belief that women composed based on feeling rather than intellect. When she married the physician and amateur musician Henry Harris Aubrey Beach in 1885, he asked that she limit her concertizing to a few performances a year. Because of this, she focused on composition. After his death in 1910, she resumed her concert career in Europe and in this country.
These all had an effect on her musical development, and the results can be seen as both positive and negative. Her natural abilities made self-study a viable avenue (she learned orchestration, for example, by translating the famous treatise by Hector Berlioz). At the same time, this probably accounts for the fact that much of her music borrows stylistic elements from contemporary composers. Her husband's desire that she not make a career as a performer may have curtailed that aspect of her professional life, but it allowed her the rare luxury (rare for both men and women) of full-time compositional activity.
The body of work that Beach produced stands out for its size as well as its quality. She also stands out as the first woman to master larger forms. Her Symphony in E (the Gaelic) demonstrates this, and is one of the first works by an American to answer Antonin Dvorak's challenge to use national themes in their compositions. Beach believed that since a large percentage of Boston's citizens were of Irish extraction, this would be the most representative source to draw upon. Many of her works have remained popular in this century, and her music is receiving a fairer re-evaluation as a result of the general interest in the music of women and the special circumstances of its creation.
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