When Beach died in December 1944, her circle of supporters had grown smaller but no less loyal. The pair of concerts in Washington’s Phillips Gallery in honor of her seventy-fifth birthday was a testament to the range of her musical output and the determination of violinist Elena de Sayn to share it with a wide audience.1 Beach’s many friends from the MacDowell Colony remembered her fondly despite her absence in recent years. Her circle of younger female musician friends remained intensely loyal. But by this time most of her works were out of print and performances were rare, as it seemed likely that Beach’s name would soon disappear from American music.
Fast forward to 2022, and Beach is more prominent than ever. In a documentary in the series “Now Hear This” that aired on PBS in April 2022, violinist Scott Yoo calls her “a first-rate genius,” “America’s greatest Romantic composer,” and “the towering equal of the greatest European composers.”2 To borrow a quaint New England expression that Beach would probably have recognized, “You can’t get there from here.” The story of Beach’s renaissance can be told in two separate but related streams: one focused on scholarship and the other on performance and recording. In order to place these in context, however, we will need to examine the reasons for her decline, which have as much to do with changing musical tastes and historical events as they do with her music.
Beach’s Decline
The pinnacle of Beach’s fame was achieved in the mid-1910s. She had cannily taken advantage of her European reviews to build a national reputation upon her return to the United States in 1914. For three years after her return, she performed extensively until personal circumstances led her to reduce her schedule in 1918. By the time she was ready to resume an active career in the early 1920s, the postwar arts climate was shifting with the rise of Modernism in art music and the widespread popularity of jazz, which had burst onto the scene in 1917.3
As Kara Anne Gardner has chronicled, the decades before and after 1900 witnessed the growing influence of women as performers and patrons in American music. By 1922 there was a backlash, prompting critic Deems Taylor to write of the “feminization” of musical culture and its deleterious effect on the status of serious musical composition.4 Gardner identifies Beach’s skill at connecting with the emotional needs of her female audience as both a strength and a weakness for her long-term reputation, noting: “When modernists redefined their ‘erratic tendencies’ toward experimentation as independent and American, Beach’s musical style began to be viewed as anachronistic.”5 Furthermore, in her study of avant-garde American music in the 1920s, Carol Oja provides ample evidence of the misogynism of modern music in the later decades of Beach’s life. Women played crucial roles as organizers, editors, and patrons of modern music, but they were not welcomed as composers or conductors. Critics from Paul Rosenfeld to Deems Taylor were dismissive of female composers on principle, and composers from George Antheil to Virgil Thomson were jealous of competition from women composers. The modernist clique was even more of a “boys club” than the Second New England School had been a generation earlier. As a consequence, Oja points out that the only successful female American modernists were Marion Bauer and Ruth Crawford Seeger.6 Although a few of Beach’s late works – notably the String Quartet, op. 89, and the Five Improvisations, op. 148 – adopt some of the harmonic techniques of Modernism, she was still a Romantic at heart.
In similar fashion, Beach showed no interest in exploring the possibilities of jazz style. Throughout her life, she had been open to incorporating exotic influences in the form of melodies and harmonies. The “Gaelic” Symphony; the Variations on Balkan Themes, op. 60; Eskimos, op. 64; and even the Hermit Thrush pieces showed her willingness to find melodic interest in a wide range of source materials. Jazz presented a different challenge, however, as those who embraced it were drawn to its audacious rhythms and raucous timbres. To a Romantic like Beach, these parameters were not the ones that she wished to explore, as even her most harmonically adventurous late works remain firmly grounded in traditional rhythms and timbral combinations.
Beach also experienced frustration in later years as her works gradually fell out of print. She had enjoyed the benefits of a twenty-five-year exclusive relationship with Arthur P. Schmidt during her husband’s lifetime, when some of her most ambitious works were written. The publisher was a close friend and medical patient of Dr. Beach, who clearly did what was necessary to keep Schmidt actively engaged in his wife’s career. After his death, however, the relationship quickly cooled. The correspondence files in the Library of Congress’ Arthur P. Schmidt Company Archives contain numerous examples of Beach asking why her works were not more easily available and Schmidt or his successors making a series of excuses. She grew so dissatisfied that she turned to Schmidt’s rival, Schirmer, while in Europe and did not return to her first publisher until after the owner’s death in 1921. Now, though, she could no longer count on having all her new works accepted, and instead she needed to convince Schmidt’s successors to accept each work on its merits and to open negotiations with other publishers. More to the point, however, she discovered belatedly that the company was allowing the copyrights of some of her best early works to go unrenewed at the end of their initial twenty-eight-year terms. A particularly troublesome illustration of this was the company’s failure to renew the copyright on her Balkan Variations, op. 60, which I believe was her motivation for the hastily prepared revised edition of 1936.7 Though Schmidt has been hailed as a champion of women and American composers, his company’s copyright record book shows that the company rarely bothered to renew copyrights by female composers.8
Compounding the lack of availability of publications for performers was a lack of documentary evidence for scholars. When Beach died, she bequeathed her home and its contents in Centerville, Cape Cod, to her close friend Lillian Buxbaum. Although she recognized her obligation to preserve the letters, diaries, and other manuscripts that she had inherited, Beach’s friend also wished to spread her mentor’s fame by sharing their contents with interested parties. This led her to loan a large cache of primary source materials in 1950 to Walter S. Jenkins, a young composer Beach had befriended at the MacDowell Colony who wanted to write her biography. Despite numerous urgent pleas, he never returned these items to Buxbaum, leading her son to write in 1993,
My mother allowed him to take many items, with the understanding that he would return them to her. To the best of my knowledge, she never saw him or the afore-mentioned items again. She was very upset about this and often talked about it with me, because she wanted my sister and my wife and me to have all of the items which were in “Aunt Amy’s” home.9
The items finally made their way to the University of New Hampshire Special Collections in 1994 after Jenkins’ biography was published posthumously, where they joined other manuscripts that had followed similarly circuitous paths. These include the documents in Beach’s Hillsborough apartment at her death, which had lain unnoticed for decades in the Hillsborough Public Library, as well as various manuscripts donated by Beach’s other “kittens”: Ruth Shaffner, Eugenie Limberg Dengel, and Virginia Duffey Pleasants.10 For researchers, though, the documentary evidence for telling Beach’s story was largely inaccessible for decades after her death.
Scholarship
As a subject for scholarly research, Beach was “rediscovered” initially by writers of dissertations working primarily from published scores. E. Lindsey Merrill completed a dissertation entitled “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, Her Life and Music” in 1963 in fulfillment of a requirement of the PhD in music theory at the University of Rochester.11 The title is deceptive, as it looked only briefly at her life but examined her music in depth using the theories of his adviser, Allen McHose. In this system, works are analyzed statistically to determine frequency of chord usage, a method that yielded valuable insights when applied by McHose to the chorales of J. S. Bach but was perhaps less enlightening when applied to the late-Romantic harmonic vocabulary of Beach. Merrill (1925–95) was appointed dean of the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Music in 1975, where he continued to promote Beach’s music. UMKC staged a production of Cabildo in conjunction with the 1982 MTNA convention, established an important collection of primary sources related to Beach, and hosted a scholarly conference on Amy Beach in April 1989. Myrna Garvey Eden’s 1977 dissertation for Syracuse University looked at Beach’s aesthetic orientation as a reflection of the cultivated tradition in America, which flourished 1865–1920. She drew parallels to the work of sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876–1973) in their cultural backgrounds and aesthetic ideals.12 Eden’s work explicitly showed the significance of Boston as a center for the dominant trend in late nineteenth-century American high culture. Her dissertation was published as a book by Scarecrow Press in 1987.
Beach later became recognized as a fruitful subject for DMA dissertations, presumably because her cosmopolitan musical style bore similarities to the European works that performance students know best. Marmaduke Miles completed a dissertation on Beach’s solo piano works at Peabody Conservatory in 1985, backing up his scholarly work with public performances. In 1992, two dissertations on the solo songs by Patricia J. Bracken and Katherine Kelton appeared, along with concerts and recordings. Jeannell Wise Brown completed a dissertation on the chamber works at the University of Maryland in 1993 that was subsequently republished as a book by Scarecrow Press.13 The remainder of the 1990s saw a virtual flood of new scholarship in the form of dissertations.
To bring a composer to public attention, however, dissertations have limited impact. In the case of Beach, her reputation was secured primarily through the efforts of one dedicated scholar: Adrienne Fried Block (1921–2009). She began her musicological career with a dissertation on Renaissance music, but her publication with Carol Neuls-Bates of Women in American Music: A Bibliography of Music and Literature (1979) set her career on a decisive new path. Described in a memorial tribute by Ellie Hisama as “Feminist Scholarship as a Social Act,” Block’s research was shaped by the feminist scholarship and activism of her era.14 Over the next two decades, she brought a missionary zeal to promoting the life and music of Beach, the dogged research skills of a musicologist to locating and analyzing source materials, and the creative imagination of a social historian to reimagining Beach’s cultural significance. As the culmination of her decades of research, she published the biography Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian, which won the Society for American Music’s Lowens Award for best book in American music for 1998. Along the way, she published a series of important scholarly editions of out-of-print works, contributed liner notes to new Beach recordings, wrote numerous articles on specific aspects of Beach’s life and works, and delivered a plethora of conference papers. On one occasion she confided to me that all this activity in Beach research amounted to a “cottage industry” for her.
Among the many significant accomplishments of Block’s decades of service to Beach scholarship was the organization of two scholarly conferences. The first, entitled “Amy Beach and Her Times,” took place at the University of New Hampshire on October 28, 1998. The event brought together an eclectic group of scholars and performers to celebrate Beach in conjunction with the release of Block’s biography. A highlight of the program was a discussion with Eugenie Limberg Dengel about recollections of her friend and mentor. The second conference, “The Music of Amy Beach: A Cross-Disciplinary Conference,” was hosted by the Mannes School of Music in December 1999. Participants at this conference analyzed and performed a diverse range of musical works from a wide variety of theoretical and performance perspectives.15
Block was of course not the only scholar interested in Beach, but she was part of a cohort of female scholars who actively sought to center women in a musicological canon that had previously ignored them. Judith Tick, whose pioneering work on Ruth Crawford Seeger unfolded parallel to Block’s on Beach, recalled the radical agenda of their work: “When I remember the beginnings of the scholarship around Amy Beach, ‘rediscovery’ does not capture the various efforts necessary to launch a scholarly investigation into her legacy. The words that come to mind are ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘radical revisionism.’ … To get to first base meant reclaiming her identity on the most basic level.”16 One of the strategies they employed was to rechristen the composer’s public persona as “Amy Beach,” the name she had used in private settings and during her European tour, but not in her professional life in the United States. This was the central act of revisionism that freed Beach from the shadow of her husband and Victorian stereotypes, rehabilitating her as a woman appropriate for a new feminist generation in the late twentieth century.
Performance
Turning to performance and recordings, the acceleration of interest has been even more impressive. As noted, Beach’s works had largely fallen out of print by the end of her life, a trend that only continued after she was no longer available to remind the Schmidt Company of her desires. In 1959, the company was sold to the Summy-Birchard Company, Inc., of Evanston, Illinois. David Sengstack, president of the successor company, had the foresight to donate the music manuscripts, correspondence, and selected financial records of the Schmidt Company to the Library of Congress, where they were preserved for scholars and performers.17 This allowed most of Beach’s scores to be readily accessible when interest began to revive in the 1970s. In particular, Da Capo Press took advantage of lapsing copyrights to publish facsimile editions of piano, vocal, and chamber works.18
Piano was integral to Beach’s entire professional career, and it is not surprising that the Beach “rediscovery” was spearheaded by two female pianists. Mary Louise Boehm and Virginia Eskin were each professional pianists looking to broaden their repertoire in the 1970s. Eskin became acquainted with the music of Beach around 1971, and she has been playing it ever since. She had the distinction in 1976 of playing the first Boston-area performance of the Beach Piano Concerto, op. 45, since Beach’s 1917 performance with the BSO.19 She recalled that when she first signed with Columbia Artists in 1977, they tried to dissuade her from playing women and American composers on her concerts. Her persistence eventually led to her reputation as a specialist in women composers, which was then promoted by Columbia.20 Eskin also created a niche for herself with recordings of Beach, starting with a 1975 album of Beach solo works for Genesis. She went on to record four more albums devoted in part or in full to the music of Beach on the Musical Heritage Society, Northeastern, and Koch International labels. Almost simultaneously with Eskin’s initial efforts, Mary Louise Boehm (1924–2002) began recording Beach as well. With her husband Kees Kooper, Boehm released a recording of the Piano Quintet in 1974. She recorded the Piano Concerto with Siegfried Landau and the Westphalian Symphony Orchestra in 1976. Because both of these recordings were on the Vox Turnabout label, they have been rereleased in multiple anthologies and box sets in subsequent years. Boehm later released an important recording of the Variations on Balkan Themes, op. 60.
Following in the footsteps of these pioneering pianists, many performers have taken up the task of recording Beach’s solo works in the age of the compact disc. Joanne Polk recorded a three-volume anthology of the piano works (Arabesque, 1996–98). She subsequently recorded several CD recordings of songs, chamber works, and the piano concerto. Pianist Kirsten Johnson recorded a four-volume anthology of the piano works (Guild, 2007–11). The result of all this recording activity is that all of Beach’s major solo works have been recorded by at least four different pianists each, allowing listeners to compare and contrast the interpretations.
With the ice broken by these female pianists, Beach’s music began to attract the attention of male musicians as well. Violinist Joseph Silverstein and pianist Gilbert Kalish released a recording of the Violin Sonatas of Beach and Arthur Foote on the New World Records label in 1977 that has seldom been equaled in refinement and never surpassed in Romantic intensity. Pianist Alan Feinberg included Beach works on two of his albums (American Romantic, 1990, and American Virtuoso, 1991). He subsequently played the solo part of Beach’s Piano Concerto with Kenneth Schermerhorn and the Nashville Symphony (Naxos, 2003). The “Gaelic” Symphony proved to be especially attractive to male conductors, including Karl Krueger and the Royal Philharmonic (Society for the Preservation of the American Musical Heritage, 1968), Neeme Järvi and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (Chandos, 1991), and Kenneth Schermerhorn and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra (Naxos, 2003).
As these professional performances and recordings raised awareness of Beach among the general public, her works also made inroads with students. A 1977 interview with Mary Louise Boehm entitled “Where Was Amy Beach All These Years?” was published in Clavier Magazine, the leading periodical for piano teachers.21 The years since then have seen a host of articles on her piano music aimed at teachers and students, most recently in the Summer 2022 issue of Piano Magazine, the journal of the Frances Clark Center at the New School for Music Study.22 The Journal of Singing, the publication of the National Association of Teachers of Singing, published a substantial article by Katherine Kelton in 1996 and another by Susan Mardinly in 2014.23 Pedagogical editions of easier piano works were published by Alfred Publishing Company (edited by Maurice Hinson), Hal Leonard and Mel Bay (Gail Smith), and Dover Publishing. The International Music Score Library Project (imslp.org)/Petrucci Music Library has made free downloads of most of Beach’s public domain scores easily accessible online. As a result of these efforts, Beach’s music is now heard regularly on programs in music schools throughout the country.
Naturally, there were detractors in the face of Beach’s newfound prominence. For reviewers who view the classical music canon as a zero-sum game, the addition of new music from previous eras can seem like a threat to the existing order. Critic Allan Kozinn explored this issue in a 1998 review of a Beach piano concert by Joanne Polk. He rather cynically assessed the Beach revival at that time:
There are reasons to cheer along the Beach revival. One is a desire to extend American musical history from the Copland generation backward into the 19th century. Beach fits that bill. She lived from 1867 to 1944, established herself as a pianist and composer before she was 18, composed prolifically – her catalogue includes more than 300 works, most published under the name Mrs. H. H. A. Beach – and had works performed by major orchestras in her lifetime. She is equally useful, of course, to anyone trying to construct a repertory of female composers. But those reasons, however well-intentioned, are historical and political, not musical, and if room is to be found in the standard repertory for Beach’s music, only musical reasons will matter.24
While he admitted that it was tempting to “join the growing Beach appreciation society,” he offered two principal objections, both of which were founded on subjective reasons. First, as reviewers have been doing since the early nineteenth century, he claimed that European influences were too pronounced and “overshadowed her own voice.” Throughout American musical history, American critics have been slow to appreciate cosmopolitan music by their compatriots because it sounded too – well, cosmopolitan. Second, Kozinn claimed that Beach’s Romantic style did not speak to listeners of his era: “There is a grandiose quality to Beach’s music that rings false to late-20th-century ears. Huge chordal flourishes, bombastic themes, chordal figures running up and down the keyboard and other varieties of sheer Romantic steaminess were meant to make music majestic, yet beneath all the clatter, much of it was a not particularly durable variety of salon music.” This bias against Romantic music is a relic of the anti-Romantic campaign of 1920s Modernism, which was useful for young composers trying to carve a niche beside the seemingly unassailable Edward MacDowell but can now be recognized as a limiting factor to a full appreciation of the musical history of the United States.
Significance of the Beach Revival
Recent years have confirmed the growth of Beach’s reputation on multiple fronts. Since 2014, the Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy has maintained an informative website devoted to news and information about Amy Beach (www.amybeach.org). The brainchild of Dr. Liane Curtis of Brandeis University, the site was begun in anticipation of the sesquicentennial of Beach’s birth in 2017 but has continued since that time. Curtis led a group of scholars in planning another conference on Beach in September 2017, this time in conjunction with the centennial of Teresa Carreño’s death. The event took place at the University of New Hampshire and was covered by the New York Times and other national publications.25 The growth of music streaming services has expanded the audience for Beach’s music. Subscribers who may not attend concerts but like to listen to classical music as they work, travel, or relax at home are given a variety of musical selections in a particular genre suited to their tastes. The music of Beach is similar enough to cosmopolitan music in the European classical tradition to sound familiar while still being new in origin and inspiration.
Beach has been the subject of two recent documentary films. New Hampshire filmmaker John Gefroerer created a historical introduction to Beach’s life entitled Composer: Amy Beach that was first aired on Vermont Public Television in Fall 2021.26 Featuring interviews with musicologist Sarah Gerk of Binghamton University and pianist Virginia Eskin, the film traced the composer’s life with archival documents and compelling visual images from New England. Particularly stunning was a juxtaposition of the sight and sound of a live hermit thrush superimposed over Eskin’s performance of the Hermit Thrush at Morn, demonstrating the source of Beach’s inspiration. The second film aired on public television stations nationwide in April 2022 as part of the series Great Performances: Now Hear This. Entitled Amy Beach: American Romantic, the film was hosted by violinist Scott Yoo in the context of concerts performed at the Festival Mozaic in California. It is not so much a historical overview as a passionate defense of the artistic qualities of Beach’s music. In rehearsal sequences with other chamber musicians, he urges them to promote Beach as the equal of better-known contemporaries, stating, “This is a first-rate genius, and if people get that, then we’ve done our job.”27 He clearly feels a strong emotional connection to the works of Beach, and he also argues that their constructive complexity makes them worthy of attention from today’s audiences. In keeping with efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, Yoo unabashedly demands a place for Beach in the canon of classical music.
In twenty-first-century America, questions of canon are perhaps less relevant than to generations past. The former primacy of classical music has been eclipsed by both scholarly study and critical acceptance of the range of styles that used to be designated “popular.” As the audience for European classical music continues to shrink, what is the relevance of an American composer whose reputation is clearly holding its own, if not growing? As noted by Judith Tick, the reimagining of Amy Beach was an inherently political act led by feminist scholars who saw her as a viable symbol for their movement in the 1970s. But that advocacy does not explain the persistence of her music itself and its ability to attract new advocates in the twenty-first century. It seems that Kozinn’s ambivalent 1998 assessment was premature, as the emotional sincerity and constructive integrity of Beach’s music continue to draw supporters as diverse as Gefroerer, Yoo, and Curtis. Beach’s reputation in the third decade of the twenty-first century has exceeded anything she could have imagined as her career neared its end in the 1940s.
