Amy Marcy Cheney Beach

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach

Introduction

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867-1944), America's first prominent woman composer, wrote about her troubled relationship with her pianist mother, Clara Imogene Marcy Cheney. Clara used music as punishment by playing music that made her child prodigy daughter despondent or limiting access to the piano if young Amy misbehaved. Nevertheless, the controlling mother was an important early influence; she assisted 4-year-old Amy with her first composition, “Mamma's Waltz.”

Twenty years later, overcoming decades of career repression by both her mother and husband, Amy dedicated the second movement of her Piano Concerto in C-sharp Minor, op. 45 to her mother. With its intrusive accompaniment and overshadowed melody reflecting an overpowering mother and marginalized daughter, the dedication was not necessarily complimentary.

Discussion and Analysis

Mrs. Beach's position as the most prominent American woman composer of her time was confirmed in 1892 by a commission to write a work for the dedication of the Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago; this was the Festival Jubilate (Op. 17), for chorus and orchestra. Soon afterward she began composing her Gaelic Symphony (Op. 32), based on a number of Gaelic themes. Completed in the spring of 1896, it was first performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Emil Paur in October and was subsequently played in New York, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Kansas City, San Francisco, and Chicago. In the six weeks following its completion she wrote a sonata in A minor for violin and piano (Op. 34), which she played with Franz Kneisel at one of his quartet concerts in January 1897. In 1900 she completed her piano concerto (Op. 45) and played it for the first time with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Gericke in April. A remarkably energetic yet never hasty composer, she also wrote in a variety of smaller forms: church music, piano pieces, choral works, and over 150 songs, several of which became widely popular.

Amy Beach mainly wrote art songs and piano music, but it was with her Mass in E flat op. 5 (1890) and Gaelic Symphony op. 32 (1897) that she won acceptance and international success. In seeking an American style in art music she occasionally referred to Irish traditional music, which she considered the most traditional music in America. In works like the Gaelic Symphony and piano pieces like The Fair Hills of Eire op. 91 (1922) and the Suite for two Pianos Founded upon ...