Amy Beach

Amy Beach was born Amy Marcy Cheney in 1867 in Henniker, a small town in New Hampshire, in the north-east of the United States. Her father was a businessman who made paper, and her mother sang and played the piano well. According to her family, at two Amy improvised a second melody while her mother was singing. It is said that at four she spent a summer at her grandfather’s farm, where there was no piano. There she composed three waltzes in her head, and she played them when she got home. It is also said that she linked each key with a colour. For her, E was yellow, A was green and D♭ was purple. As a little girl she asked her mother to play “the purple music” or “the green music.” People offered to take her on concert tours, and some wanted to send her to Europe to study. But her parents refused, because they wanted her to prepare for life at home and in society.

In 1875 the family moved to a town near Boston. In 1881, at 14, Amy had one year of lessons in harmony, the rules of how chords go together. These were the only lessons in composition that she ever had. After that she taught herself. She studied the printed music of great composers, and she learned whole symphonies until she could remember every note. She also wanted to learn how to write for an orchestra. Berlioz had written a book on this subject in French, so she translated it into English for her own use.

In 1885, at 18, she married Dr Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a Boston doctor who was 24 years older. As the wife of an important doctor, she was expected to live like a lady of Boston society. So she agreed to give only one or two concerts a year, and the money from them went to people in need. Her husband wanted her to spend her time on composing. She later wrote that she had been afraid that she did not have the skill to compose. She said that it was he “more than any one else” who encouraged her, and that his honest opinions gave her courage. From then on she published her music under the name “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.” Ecstasy was published in 1892. It is a love song, and she wrote the words herself. It sold so well that with the money from it she bought land on Cape Cod, by the sea in Massachusetts. She later had a summer house there.

In 1893 the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák was working in New York. He told a newspaper that American composers should build their music on the songs of Black Americans. In a Boston newspaper, Beach answered that composers in the north of the country would more naturally use the old songs of England, Scotland and Ireland, where their families came from. She then wrote a symphony on old Irish tunes, and she called it the Gaelic Symphony. Gaelic is the old language of Ireland and Scotland. In 1896, when she was 29, the Boston Symphony Orchestra played it for the first time. It was the first symphony composed and published by an American woman, and the audience loved it.

In 1910, when Beach was 42, her husband died. Seven months later her mother died too. For about a year she was too tired with grief to work. As a young woman she had not been allowed to study in Europe. So in 1911 she went to Germany, and there she began a new life as a concert pianist. She played in many cities, and orchestras in Hamburg and Leipzig played her Gaelic Symphony. When the First World War began in 1914, she went back to America.

From 1921, at 53, she spent most summers at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, a place in the woods where artists could work in peace. Since she was a child, Beach had loved to write down the songs of birds. In her first summer at the colony, a hermit thrush, a small North American bird, sang outside her studio. She wrote down its song exactly, and she used it in two piano pieces, A Hermit Thrush at Eve and A Hermit Thrush at Morn. The young women composers at the colony called her “Aunt Amy,” and she encouraged them in their work. In 1944 she wrote that her work had always been judged as work, and not by whether a man or a woman had written it.

She died at her home in New York in 1944, at 77. She left the rights to all her music to the MacDowell Colony, and the colony still receives the money from her music today.

Amy Beach had only one year of lessons in composition, and she never studied in Europe as a young woman. She taught herself from printed music and books, and she became the first American woman to write a symphony. In her lifetime her songs, like Ecstasy, were sung all over America.