Amy Beach’s music was printed and distributed by a dozen publishers during her lifetime. Her compositions – melodic, imaginative, deftly fashioned, and often supplied with evocative titles and imbued with a popular appeal – were an irresistible commodity for businessmen astute enough to recognize their value. And in her day, there were plenty of those. Beach’s principal publishers were Boston’s Arthur P. Schmidt Company (by far her most important partnership), G. Schirmer, Inc. (New York), the Theodore Presser Company (Philadelphia), the Oliver Ditson Company (Boston), and the John Church Company (Cincinnati).² Several other firms combined to release a small number of her works, some of which rank among Beach’s best.

Beach came of age at a time when advances in printing technology and business administration combined to give composers unprecedented visibility and access to a lucrative music market. Following the Civil War, the already flourishing publishing business proliferated. Technological innovations were matched by increased business efficiencies and advances in the mutable art of advertising. In the music publishing industry, as in other fields of commerce, heightened attention was paid to the customers’ wants. This was, after all, the era during which the phrase “The customer is always right” gained currency.

Beach’s publishers were acutely in touch with their times. As art music in America began to blossom in the second half of the nineteenth century, a cohort of American composers, including Beach, emerged. Publishers were eager to support them at home and abroad, often even at a financial loss. After the turn of the century, especially as the Great War approached, Germany’s favorability in the US sank. Esteem for native composers swelled, and many publishers were eager to assert the Americanness of their respective firms.

Beach got to know some of her publishers personally, and, as they passed from the scene, she became familiar with their successors, those family members or business associates who carried on their firms’ missions. Not all were musicians, but they were well versed in their trade and genuine in their determination to serve the musical public. As William Arms Fisher, an early historian of music publishing in America, observed, “Business routine and ability, both essential to success, develop with experience, but the great music publishers were primarily great music-lovers.”³ While access to information about Beach and some of her publishers is currently limited, the exploration of her relationships with these “great music lovers,” to the extent they can be known, sheds significant light on her music and career.

The Arthur P. Schmidt Company

No small part of any publisher’s attraction to Beach was her enormous versatility. When the Arthur P. Schmidt Company began issuing Beach’s music, its principal, Arthur Schmidt, could not have imagined her resourcefulness. Among the first dozen Beach works circulated by Schmidt are five sets of songs, including one vocal duet (opp. 1, 2, 10, 11, and 12); three keyboard pieces (opp. 3, 4, and 6), the first of which was a cadenza to Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3, which Beach performed to acclaim in 1888 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra; three sacred choral compositions (opp. 5, 7, and 8), including her Grand Mass in E-flat major (op. 5); and The Little Brown Bee, a lighthearted secular chorus for women’s voices (op. 9). A similar cornucopia of Beach’s compositional riches – in all, some seventy works – would be made available exclusively from the Schmidt Company for the next twenty-five years.

When Beach’s first works rolled off his press, Schmidt was still a new name in Boston’s competitive music business. A German immigrant with about twenty years of US residency, Schmidt established in 1876 a small retail outlet on Winter Street in downtown Boston. He was an ambitious man by nature, and the following year he began to issue his own publications. The effort to reach the burgeoning middle-class consumers of music compelled Schmidt to move his operation in 1889 to Boylston Street in Boston’s tony new Back Bay. During this time, Schmidt was also gaining a reputation abroad; he had successfully established relationships and sales outlets in Germany, and he was increasing the distinction of his company by publishing noteworthy works by celebrated composers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. As the century turned, the Schmidt Company could boast brisk sales and an expansive catalog of 6,000 compositions, including many by Beach.⁴

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Beach’s partnership with Schmidt dates to at least 1885, when on December 2 she married Dr. H. H. A. Beach, a prominent Boston surgeon who was not only Schmidt’s personal physician but also a dear friend.⁵ Earlier in the same year, Schmidt had published Beach’s song, “With Violets,” op. 1, no. 1. While there may well have been some cheerleading by the good doctor, Beach had already begun making a name for herself in Boston’s musical circles. At her Boston Symphony Orchestra debut on March 28, 1885, she had played Chopin’s Concerto in F minor, op. 21. The Boston Daily Advertiser critic marveled at her technique, which “has acquired that inexplicable something.”⁶

The decades-long partnership between Beach and Schmidt was largely constructive. Schmidt esteemed women composers – before publishing Beach’s music, he had churned out works by Helen Hood, Clara Kathleen Rogers, and Helen Hopekirk⁷ – and he was sensitive to the values of his customers, many of whom were women. By all accounts, Schmidt was a formidable corporate leader, and he could provide composers with decent financial returns by squeezing from a composition every ounce of profit. Beach’s song, “Ah, Love, But a Day,” the second number from her popular Three Browning Songs, op. 44, provides an excellent example. When it appeared in 1900, one could purchase it in at least five different versions for various voices. Other renderings appeared over the years: a duet arrangement for mezzo-soprano and baritone (1917); a version with an optional violin part (1920); and an arrangement for women’s chorus (1927). Schmidt also routinely published “Song Albums,” or compilations of previously released songs by various composers that were grouped together and sold at bargain prices.

Schmidt’s attention to detail endeared him to many composers, including Beach. She and her husband were “simply overjoyed” with the design and layout of her piano work, Summer Dreams, op. 47 (1901), which they considered “strikingly attractive.”⁸ But if Schmidt’s publications were aesthetically appealing – the printing was routinely clear, the spacing was often generous, and splashes of color gave energy to the whole – he recognized that “second editions were rare” and demanded notational accuracy.⁹ A careful proofreader himself, on occasion he hired additional ones to ensure exactness. This was a level of service to the composer that would have been unheard of at other publishing houses. And, once a piece was published, Schmidt did not hesitate to send gratis copies to newspaper and journal editors who could review them and to musicians who could perform them.¹⁰

To the aforementioned characteristics may be added Schmidt’s impeccable reputation for honesty. The scrupulous Edward MacDowell hailed the Schmidt Company as “thoroughly reliable and in every way solid and respectable,” and insisted that the proprietor was “a thoroughly honest man.”¹¹ Upon his retirement in 1916, Schmidt received a loving cup from composer-admirers whose written testimony acknowledged his “unselfish work in [sic] behalf of the American composer.”¹² Schmidt by now was reckoned a “pioneer publisher of American music.”¹³

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There were other reasons to esteem Schmidt’s business ingenuity. Although Beach was just getting into the composing trade, her publisher had already shown a remarkable devotion to the cause of American music. John Knowles Paine’s Second Symphony, published by Schmidt in partnership with a Hamburg firm, had appeared in 1880, and Arthur Foote’s String Quartet, op. 4, in 1884. Wilma Reid Cipolla has noted that Schmidt brought out relatively few large chamber and orchestral works compared to his enormous catalog of small works – songs, choruses, selections for piano, and the like.¹⁴ But he nevertheless thought that by bringing major instrumental works to market, in both the US and in Europe, he could accomplish two goals: first, he would bestow on his company a necessary corporate identity; second, he would bolster composers native to his adopted country. Schmidt was a grateful patriot – critic Philip Hale called him “wholly American in feeling and in speech”¹⁵ – but he knew that both of these goals invited peril.

As for the former aim, Schmidt made plain his belief that publishers required conspicuous markers of what, or in whom, they believed. “The aim of every firm,” he calculated, “must be to secure something which is a specialty in its particular line.”¹⁶ To forge his corporate distinctiveness, Schmidt threw in with the almost completely unknown “American Composer.” In so doing, he forged an original “brand identity,” a gambit for which alone he may be considered a trailblazer among publishers. On the second point, Schmidt’s advocacy added luster to the reputations of his stable of American composers – whose leading avatars, besides Beach, were Paine, Foote, MacDowell, and George Whitefield Chadwick – but it did so at his own considerable financial risk. Schmidt is known to have taken a publishing subvention in at least one instance – from Paine’s widow, who wished to see her husband’s Oedipus tyrannus, op. 35 (1881), in print – but more often he footed the printing bills himself. Hale reflected that “Cautious in some respects, [Schmidt] had faith in the American composer, when some other publishers were unwilling to run the risk of pecuniary loss.” Hale deeply admired Schmidt’s bold “willingness to publish compositions of long breath” – that is, works that might have staying power in an emerging American canon – “for which he knew there would be no adequate return.”¹⁷

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Much has been made of a possible rift between Beach and Schmidt, one that perhaps led to her rejection of the Schmidt Company following the publication of Three Songs, op. 71, in 1910. Beach’s biographer Adrienne Fried Block has speculated that Dr. Beach’s death in June of the same year may have closed the door on her relationship with Schmidt. Her mother’s illness and death just eight months later no doubt contributed to their disaffiliation.

Yet another reason for the separation may have been Schmidt’s brusque manner, which composer Mabel Daniels once referred to as “bluster.”¹⁸ But Hale, in his Schmidt obituary, critiqued the publisher’s demeanor: “A man of strong convictions and decided opinions, he was at times aggressive in the expression of them, so that those who did not know him well took a wrong view of his character.” Surely Beach knew Schmidt well enough to know that he was, as described by Hale, “sympathetic and generous”; he ultimately strikes one as a man not so much prone to intemperateness as one who could drive a hard bargain and would not hesitate to refuse unprofitable work.¹⁹

In truth, Beach’s production had slowed long before 1910. Although in 1907 Schmidt published three of her finest delicacies – Eskimos, Four Characteristic Pieces, op. 64, and Les rêves de Colombine: Suite française, op. 65, both for piano; and The Chambered Nautilus, op. 66 – over the next three years, 1908 to 1910, just four new works appeared in print: the Quintet for Piano and Strings in F-sharp minor, op. 67, and three song sets (opp. 68, 69, 71). This represents a sharp decline in her published output.

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Beach’s spate of family tragedies had but one positive result: she was able in September 1911 to embark on a long-awaited Grand Tour of Europe, from which she returned to the US in September 1914. During three years away, she had intermittent, mostly productive communications with Schmidt. Topics of their correspondence included routine business matters – Beach provided various mailing addresses for the forwarding of royalty payments, and she was careful to keep Schmidt aware of her concert calendar and the resulting reviews.

Nevertheless, Beach grew increasingly dissatisfied with Schmidt. His European operations – the Leipzig branch that opened in 1889 and the English outlets that appeared following the passage of the sweeping International Copyright Law of 1891 – were a windfall to American composers who now had unprecedented visibility in musically mature nations. But Block has posited that while Schmidt had been a strong advocate for American music in Europe, his post-1901 overseas efforts had been comparatively lackluster.²⁰ He retained a corporate presence in Germany, but by 1906 he had virtually abandoned the British market.²¹ It has been further asserted that Beach’s bond with Schmidt may have been tested by his inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to keep European distributors supplied with her music during her travels.²² One imagines that here Schmidt’s age might have come into play. By the time Beach arrived in Europe near the end of 1911, her publisher, a man already sixty-five years old and within five years of retiring, may have simply lost his zest for peddling music overseas.²³

Of course, there may have been other reasons for Beach’s renunciation of her first publishing partnership. She had profited from it in innumerable ways, but the fierce relational chill that had now descended would take more than a decade to warm. Until then, Beach was finished with the Arthur P. Schmidt Company.

G. Schirmer, Inc.

Over the course of the next thirty years, until her death in 1944, Beach contracted with a number of other firms to publish eighty-five compositions. The first among them was the house of G. Schirmer, Inc., which took fourteen (16%) of her post-European compositions, most between 1914 and 1918. There are seven song sets (opp. 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 124); five choral works, including three sacred (opp. 74, 76, 78) and two secular pieces (opp. 74 and 82); the Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet, op. 80; and the Prelude and Fugue for piano, op. 81.

Electing to publish her works with G. Schirmer was not a gamble, for the brand was well respected. The founder and patriarch was Gustav Schirmer, Sr. (1829–93), a German immigrant whose entire life was devoted to the music business. Schirmer pursued his career at several New York City music houses, and he bought an interest in one of them in 1861. Within five years he was its sole owner. By the 1880s, sons Rudolph (1859–1919) and Gustave, Jr. (1864–1907), both highly educated and musically inquisitive, were deeply invested in the industry. Gustav’s nephew, E. C. Schirmer (1865–1958), apprenticed at the firm in the late 1870s; he would go on to work at several G. Schirmer spinoff companies – including Boston Music Company – before establishing his own concern.²⁴ In later years, G. Schirmer, Inc., would be headed by another namesake, Gustave Schirmer (1890–1965), grandson of the founder.

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Beach’s recently acquired European bona fides may have endeared her to G. Schirmer’s current president, Rudolph Schirmer, who, before matriculating to Princeton and then Columbia Law, had been formally schooled in Weimar, Germany. There he had become acquainted with none other than the great Franz Liszt.²⁵ Schirmer’s affinity to German culture perhaps accounts for Beach’s first two publications with the firm, each titled Two Songs (opp. 72 and 73), which comprise four songs in the German language.

Rudolph alone had borne the weight of leadership since the passing of his brother, but he oversaw a number of triumphs during his tenure as president. He was at the helm when in 1914 G. Schirmer opened its new publishing facility on Long Island, “the largest and most modern establishment of its kind in America.”²⁶ A year later he introduced The Musical Quarterly and appointed as its first editor Oscar G. Sonneck, who resigned from the Library of Congress and the Music Division he had founded. Through the years, as employees moved between posts at G. Schirmer and the Library of Congress, one editorialist quipped that the Library “is an appanage of the Schirmer publishing firm.”²⁷

Schirmer, like all successful business professionals, was enterprising. One cost-saving ingenuity made big news in the industry. It was reported in 1916 that G. Schirmer would trim the size of its standard sheet music from 10½ × 13¾ inches to 9 × 12 inches, which would result in a 40 percent savings of paper “to the publisher’s advantage.” It was hailed as “one of those innovations which, when made, causes one to wonder why it was not thought of long ago.”²⁸ It was expected that many competing publishers would follow suit.

Like Arthur Schmidt, Rudolph Schirmer took pride in his stable of American composers, artists whose careers “have become indissolubly connected with his own in American musical history.”²⁹ Besides Beach, Rudolph’s American roster included Henry Hadley, John Alden Carpenter, Charles T. Griffes, and many others.

Health concerns compelled Rudolph to retire from active management in 1916. Given that nine of Beach’s fourteen compositions published by G. Schirmer, Inc., date from 1914 to 1916, her rapport with the firm may have existed principally through Rudolph. Certainly, when he died in 1919, the sense of loss was considerable. Rudolph was roundly praised for his activities on behalf of American composers, for “in matters of real art he did not hesitate to subordinate commercial considerations to the higher cultural aspects of an enterprise.” Music was vital to Rudolph’s life; his vocalist wife sang a Beethoven selection at his deathbed.³⁰

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Following the flurry of issuances from G. Schirmer, Beach’s published output again plunged. From 1917 to 1920, just three works sprang from Schirmer’s press: the Three Songs, op. 78 (1917), the Prelude and Fugue for keyboard, op. 81 (1918), and the Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet, op. 80 (1920). Beach published nothing in 1919; and just one gem – the song “Mine Be the Lips,” op. 113 – was published in 1921, although not by Schirmer.

Much of this stagnation can be attributed to the times. While the 1918 appearance in the United States of the Spanish flu contributed to interruptions in business operations – trade magazines routinely reported on contagion in the music industry – it was less significant than the menace of war. When the US joined the European war effort in April 1917, commerce struggled; the economy rebounded only two years later. G. Schirmer had by then been taken over by Rudolph’s nephew, Gustave Schirmer, whose corporate ambitions gave shorter shrift to the promotion of art music. Popular music was on a meteoric rise, and it was another imposing factor with which the American composer of art music had to reckon. Instruments were at the forefront of public enthusiasm following the 1918 armistice: “Not for a generation or more has there been such an unprecedented demand for pianos and players [i.e., player-pianos].”³¹ As concerns the latter, the writer exclaimed that “the demand for this class of instrument surpasses all belief.”³² Naturally, sheet music was required by America’s new pianists, and “up-to-date, sentimental, novelty, jazz, rag, blue and shimmie songs” were flooding the American market.³³ Gustave took steps to secure G. Schirmer’s place in popular music. He signed composers of middlebrow songs to exclusive contracts and expanded the company into Cincinnati, Memphis, Chicago, New Orleans, and Los Angeles, although he wisely dumped the company’s less profitable stake in the phonograph-selling business.

America’s postwar boom – during which one economist reported that Americans “went on a spree that has never been equaled in history”³⁴ – resulted in skyrocketing inflation. Dwindling demand for increasingly expensive goods ushered in the depression of 1920, which had predictable effects on manufacturing and unemployment. The music business was not spared, but fortunately the economic woes were short-lived. The Roaring Twenties – no great boon to art music composers – soon rushed in.

Besides financial considerations, the music industry also had to grapple with adverse American attitudes toward Germany. Many composers, Beach included, considered Germany a sort of musical homeland, and some publishers thought likewise; it was a view that had the potential to cause trouble. It is likely not a coincidence that Rudolph Schirmer’s withdrawal from company affairs had coincided with the upsurge in resentment against Germans as American involvement in the Great War became a reality. Many businesses, including publishing firms, publicly distanced themselves from Germany. One editor took pains to inform readers of G. Schirmer’s domestic loyalties: “All its shareholders are American, and the company has no German connections or affiliations of any sort.”³⁵ Declarations of this variety were not unique. At the 1921 death of Arthur P. Schmidt, an obituarist insisted the publisher was “a German of the old school, abhorring Prussian militarism and Prussian arrogance.”³⁶

Beach was seemingly torn on the matter. Although she abandoned the composition of German songs during the period of the Great War, she also had not been inspired to write any new patriotic ones.

The Houses of Presser, Ditson, and Church

As the depression ebbed, Beach contracted with the Theodore Presser Company, which published thirteen (15%) of her post-1914 compositions; most of them date from 1922 to 1925, although a few appeared later. Company founder Theodore Presser (1848–1925) was a competent musician who sought collaborations with composers. In his youth, Presser’s brother had befriended Stephen Foster, and the three serenaded neighbors in their native Pittsburgh.³⁷ Composer George Whitefield Chadwick was also a close friend. Presser and Chadwick occasionally roomed together in Boston in the 1870s. They did likewise later, when both were students at the Royal Conservatory in Leipzig, Germany.³⁸

What would one day be Presser’s publishing empire began in 1883 with the founding in Virginia of his educational magazine, The Etude. Shortly afterward he moved the business to Philadelphia and added retail operations. The Etude featured copious amounts of music in its pages, and soon Presser began to publish those works in individual leaves. An aggressive publishing regimen, combined with the rapid acquisition of other, smaller firms, yielded impressive results. In 1908, the Theodore Presser Company could boast a catalog of 7,000 compositions, 119 employees, and circulation of The Etude at 135,000.³⁹

A surprising number of Beach’s compositions with Presser are religious in character. Several of her five songs or song sets are sacred, including “Spirit Divine,” op. 88, “Jesus my Saviour,” op. 112, and Around the Manger, op. 115. Presser also published four sacred choral works (opp. 84, 95, 96, 98), as well as her Te Deum, op. 84, and the secular “Peter Pan,” op. 101, for women’s voices. But instrumental works were not neglected; there are three works for keyboard (op. 87, a rare unnumbered selection, and op. 128) published respectively in 1923, 1928, and 1932.

Theodore Presser died in 1925, after which Beach published just two more compositions with his company.⁴⁰

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Beach published nine (10%) of her post-European compositions with the distinguished Oliver Ditson Company starting in 1921 – eight were brought out in the 1920s; one outlier appeared in 1934. They included three piano selections (opp. 102, 116, 119); four choral works, three sacred (opp. 103, 109, 115) and one secular (op. 140); and two songs (opp. 113 and 120). In what may have been an act of nostalgia, Beach was actually returning to – not debuting with – Ditson, for the company can claim credit for publishing Beach’s first printed work, “The Rainy Day” (1883), a song with words by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Beach’s long-awaited return to Ditson may have been prompted by its striking corporate prowess. When Oliver Ditson died in 1888, a succession of leaders followed until 1907, when his son, Charles Healey Ditson, was named president. Charles, who had been leading his own firm in New York City, became president, but the Boston operations were run by Clarence A. Woodman, a company veteran.

Woodman was an innovative businessman. Under his leadership, Ditson’s retail stores were redesigned, and advertising became far more aggressive, both in print media and onsite at various storefronts. The Ditson Company was a leader in creative window displays, which often spotlighted visiting artists, events and holidays, upcoming concerts, or local musical celebrities.⁴¹ For example, Beach’s From Six to Twelve, op. 119 – a delightful keyboard suite that includes “Canoeing,” “Boy Scouts March,” and “A Campfire Ceremonial” – reflected the company’s support of the Boy Scouts, which was the subject of an elaborate window layout in 1923.⁴²

Any composer would have admired Ditson’s attention to its customers and to music dealers around the country. Woodman spoke regularly on matters related to customer service, and in 1921 the company’s sales booklet titled “Ditson Service” offered tips to the sales force and advised “the music buyer as to how he may best satisfy his needs.”⁴³ To that end, Ditson published a wide variety of popular, art, and educational music. Among the most progressive of Ditson’s projects was the partnership with the Aeolian Company to produce recordings connected to some of its publications, including Clarence G. Hamilton’s Music Appreciation (1920) and Karl W. Gehrkens’s Fundamentals of Music (1924).⁴⁴ The company’s geographic reach might also have convinced composers to sign with Ditson. Operations were imposing in Boston, New York, Chicago, and London, and the war hastened the company’s foreign interests “to increase wondrously” – vital new markets even included Japan and Australia, both of which were proving profitable.⁴⁵

As with the other publishers examined thus far, the Oliver Ditson Company was eager to validate its Americanness. It established the unabashedly patriotic Red, White, and Blue series, a “comprehensive catalogue of representative American songs,” which were “bound to become camp favorites” among the troops.⁴⁶ Following the 1918 armistice, Woodman said, “I feel that we are justified in adopting a slogan for the future: ‘The American Composer First.’” He further predicted that the expansion of the American music project would be “a dominating factor” across the globe.⁴⁷ Industry leader John C. Freund later called the Ditson Company “a distinctly American concern,” one that was “among the very first to hold out a helping hand to the American composers – woman as well as man.”⁴⁸

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John Church (1834–90) was already employed at the Oliver Ditson Company when in 1859 he partnered with Mr. Ditson for a half-interest in a Cincinnati music retail operation. Church bought Ditson’s share a decade later, and he became the sole owner of what was later named the John Church Company. Celebrated for publishing music in a variety of styles – from Sousa’s marches to hymns by the revivalists Dwight Moody and Ira D. Sankey – the firm was also known for its informative periodical, Church’s Musical Visitor (1871–97), an out-West response to Boston’s Dwight’s Journal of Music.

Church died in 1890, and leadership of the company eventually fell to his son-in-law, R. B. Burchard. Perhaps Burchard’s most astute business maneuver was the promotion in 1919 of Walter L. Coghill to the position of general manager of the Church Company’s New York City–based publication headquarters. Coghill had been a loyal employee since 1897 and was admired in the trade. Following a quarter-century of steadfast service, he was made a member of the company’s board of directors in 1922.

Coghill was an effective advocate for his profession, and, as a representative of the Music Publishers Association of the United States, he often spoke at industry conventions. Coghill variously addressed “The Best Manner of Advertising”; the “Advantages of a Sheet Music Department to Piano and Talking Machine Retailers”; and best practices for the introduction of sheet music departments in general stores. Keeping an eye on developments in technology, Coghill also commented on extracting “royalties from broadcasting music through wireless methods.”⁴⁹

When made general manager, Coghill promised a “vigorous campaign” of sheet music selling, as he believed strongly in the cause of American music.⁵⁰ Marketing campaigns soon touted the John Church Company as “The House Devoted to the Progress of American Music.”⁵¹ Under Coghill’s auspices Church published six compositions (7%) of Beach’s post-European output. All appeared in 1924 and 1925, by which time the company had settled on a savvy sales strategy: its music would be supplied with “fanciful headings” and that “never-to-be-despised virtue, melody.” Among the pieces Beach submitted were four keyboard works: the Suite for Two Pianos Founded upon Old Irish Melodies, op. 104; Old Chapel by Moonlight, op. 106; the far less fancifully titled Nocturne, op. 107; and A Cradle Song of the Lonely Mother, op. 108. Beach’s compositions obviously comported nicely with Coghill’s imperatives.

Schmidt Redux and Beach’s Other Publishers

When Arthur P. Schmidt died in 1921, the encomia poured in. Composer Arthur Foote remarked that Schmidt’s work was of “far-reaching importance”; critic Philip Hale cited his “sympathetic and generous” character; and a writer for The Musical Courier, echoing a sentiment MacDowell sounded three decades earlier, claimed that the publisher’s “dealings with the composers … were scrupulously upright and honest.”⁵²

Beach gradually renewed her relationship with the Arthur P. Schmidt Company following his death. One could surmise that her appreciation of Schmidt’s character and accomplishments had rebounded over time and were renewed at his passing; a more cynical view posits that he was now simply out of the way. In any event, Beach was ready to return to the Schmidt Company. Its new owners, who had taken over the management at Schmidt’s 1916 retirement, were Harry B. Crosby, Henry R. Austin, and Florence J. Emery. Beach informed them that “It has been about 4 years since I have sent anything for publication in any direction, owing to many and various circumstances beyond my control,” and that she was prepared to resume business dealings.⁵³ It is difficult to know the Schmidt Company’s corporate priorities with certainty, but one was clearly a reconnection to Beach. Although the new managers responded that “difficulties of production” and “very unsettled conditions” prevented the company from making too many promises, they nevertheless went on to publish a whopping twenty-six (30%) of Beach’s post-1914 compositions, nineteen of which were published after 1927.⁵⁴

The earliest fruits of her revivified activities with Schmidt are three keyboard compositions (opp. 83, 91, and 92) and her song “In the Twilight” (op. 85), all of which left the presses in 1922. An additional three keyboard selections (opp. 97, 111, and 130) appeared through 1932. Beach’s production of ten choral works, including her laudable Canticle of the Sun (op. 123), is noteworthy because seven of them are sacred. The remaining works are songs or song sets, several of which are also sacred. Among the secular works, we see that Beach has returned to ethnically influenced works with her arrangement of a traditional song, “On a Hill: Negro Melody” (without opus number). Schmidt also published her Two Mother Songs (op. 137), a subgenre that she had long found enthralling but which by now was considered old-fashioned.⁵⁵

The Schmidt Company’s desire to re-sign Beach may have been part of an ongoing strategy to emphasize the company’s close connection to the American composer. Just after the Great War, Schmidt published two volumes of music by composer and signer of the Declaration of Independence, Francis Hopkinson. The initial installment, The First American Composer (1919), was “used extensively this season on the concert stage.” The second volume, Colonial Love Lyrics (1920), was “quite as interesting musically as the first collection.”⁵⁶ As for Beach, the Schmidt Company surely calculated that putting out works by America’s greatest woman composer would be a feather in its artistic and marketing cap.

Beach corresponded with Schmidt principals throughout the twenties and thirties. One 1935 letter from Henry Austin demonstrates a cordial working relationship, although his friendly eye rarely strayed from the company’s bottom line. He again groused about the company’s current “slow rate of production,” which was more likely a slow rate of sales caused by the Great Depression. Austin plainly wished to reissue some of Beach’s older works, but he suggested that, rather than commissioning costly new engravings, a more fiscally prudent solution would include utilizing existing printing plates for reprints and depleting Beach inventories that were still sitting in company warehouses. Beach was probably unsurprised when Austin made clear that the publishing of new works for which there was no current market would have to be put on hold.⁵⁷

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Beginning in the 1930s, Beach published a few miscellaneous compositions with a number of firms. Many of them are respected names: Silver Burdett (Boston), H. W. Gray (New York), C. C. Birchard (Boston), and others. By far the most important of Beach’s later publishers was Composers Press, led by Charles T. Haubiel (1892–1978). Haubiel, a pianist and composer of marked ability, was Beach’s colleague at the MacDowell Colony. In 1935, he founded Composers Press explicitly for the purpose of putting out American works. Four Beach compositions appeared from Haubiel’s press between 1938 and 1942, including her Five Improvisations, op. 148; the Trio for Piano, Violin and Violoncello, op. 150; Pastorale for Woodwind Quintet, op. 151; and the sacred song, “Though I Take the Wings of Morning,” op. 152 (from Psalm 139). Although serious and contemporary in their conception, like most of Beach’s oeuvre, these compositions are attractive and accessible.

Haubiel’s press was a perfect match for Beach’s 1930s compositional style, which had veered toward Modernism. Publishing music likely to have been eschewed by more mainstream publishers, Haubiel’s operation was a collective; composers had to share the financial risks, and Beach had skin in the game.⁵⁸ Freed from the concerns of editors and the constraints of practical commerce, she could produce works whose appeal to profit-oriented publishers and general audiences might have been limited. Besides that, Beach was no doubt relieved that, at the Composers Press, it was unnecessary to gild her works with “fanciful titles.”

Conclusion

What do we learn, then, from an investigation of Beach’s publishers and an exploration of her relations with them? First, it is clear that Beach ably navigated personal ties to her publishers throughout her career. The available record demonstrates that while her husband was alive, Arthur P. Schmidt was perforce her go-to publisher. Beach’s decision to take up with other publishers was only possible following Dr. Beach’s passing. But while her connection with Schmidt may well have been the result of her husband’s association with him, there are hints that Beach’s future publisher relationships were based on more than corporate preeminence. Given a few facts – that Beach’s work with G. Schirmer Inc. ended at approximately Rudolph Schirmer’s death; and that her resumption of publication with the Arthur P. Schmidt Company occurred only after Schmidt’s passing; and that her stint with the Theodore Presser Company ended at approximately Presser’s death – there is every reason to believe that Beach’s choices of publishers were generally guided by close personal connections. This is especially true of her later collaborations with Charles Haubiel and his Composers Press.

Second, music by Beach published before her European sojourn – that is, her pre-Great War works offered by Schmidt – represent an eclectic collection of genres, including vocal and instrumental compositions. But after the war, her published output comports with the narrower needs of her publishers, which – with the single exception of op. 80, the aforementioned Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet – did not include instrumental music other than works for keyboard until 1939. Schmidt and Schirmer had a market for her secular songs, as well as her choruses, both sacred and secular. Oliver Ditson benefited mostly from her keyboard works and sacred choral works. The Church Company focused its attention on her catchy keyboard pieces. And Presser considered her sacred compositions – songs and choruses – most favorable to his catalog. We cannot be certain whether Beach ever conversed with her publishers on the notion of putting out new works she might have wished to compose for orchestra or chamber ensemble. Although no more orchestral pieces appeared, she wrote several chamber works that remained unpublished for decades. Perhaps following the war, Beach simply acceded to the realities of a market that esteemed music in its smaller and more popular forms, ones that were not only more accommodating to home and church musicians but also more susceptible to profitability.

It is worth noting, thirdly, that all of Beach’s major publishers were hugely concerned with perceptions of their own Americanism. Those firms founded by Germans were especially eager to tout themselves as American companies whose composers included Americans. Even if they did not seek to publish characteristically American music, per recipes supplied by Dvořák and others, Beach’s publishers nevertheless were compelled to voice their strong support of native talent.

Finally, it is fascinating to discover that the men who published Beach’s music were by and large considered extraordinary individuals, and that their tangled corporate interrelationships continued unabated through the mid-twentieth century. The John Church Company was acquired by the Theodore Presser Company in 1930. Two years after Charles Ditson’s 1929 death, Presser added the Oliver Ditson Company to its empire. The Arthur P. Schmidt Company persevered until 1960, when it was purchased by the Illinois-based Summy-Birchard Company. And G. Schirmer, Inc., survived intact until 1968.

During a brief publishing renaissance in the 1990s, small and scholarly presses saw in Beach’s compositions exactly what earlier publishers had seen in her works during her lifetime, but there was also an undeniable attraction to her personal odyssey. In a profession dominated by men, a young woman sought a career as a concert pianist. She was then directed toward composition, a field in which she struggled through self-guided learning, limitations wrought by marriage, family tribulations, wars, depressions, and the persistent vagaries of the music market and its related commercial considerations. It was to Beach’s extreme good fortune that, for most of her professional life, she persevered in partnership with publishers – themselves music-lovers – who recognized her genius.