One of the most remarkable dimensions of Amy Beach’s prolific career is that she composed so little orchestral music despite writing a string of pieces in rapid succession early in her career: Bal Masqué (1893), the “Gaelic” Symphony (1896), and the Piano Concerto (1900) – her only three major works for orchestra alone (see Table 8.1).1 The symphony, in fact, prompted George Whitefield Chadwick, one of Boston’s leading composers at the time of its premiere, to welcome Beach as “one of the boys” for having written such a “fine work.”2 Beyond this immediate praise, both the symphony and the concerto experienced a relatively high number of performances during Beach’s lifetime compared to many analogous pieces by her contemporaries. Why no second effort in either genre? Why no tone poems, or even short concert overtures?
Table 8.1 Amy Beach, orchestral works
Perhaps the simplest explanation is that while orchestral writing might have been prestigious, it was not profitable. In the 1890s, securing commissions from orchestras was typically a fool’s errand, as was seeking publication.3 Biographer Adrienne Fried Block has explained, however, that Beach was among a small coterie of American composers of her generation who benefited from the generosity of publisher Arthur P. Schmidt. Sympathetic to the difficulties they faced in the international arena, Schmidt subsidized their large orchestral scores (including Beach’s symphony) with receipts from music sold for home use.4 Beach’s relationship with Schmidt cooled after her husband’s death in 1910, but this change cannot fully explain why she might have turned her efforts away from the orchestra since her published music remained in demand.5
Beach also faced the substantial hurdle of widespread bias against women. Though not an absolute barrier to staging her works, gender figured prominently in their reception, including in Chadwick’s casual erasure when he called her “one of the boys.”6 In 1904, an astute critic named Berenice Thompson called out the obvious double standards Beach faced, noting,
Despite the apparent impossibility of the task for a woman, Mrs. Beach has composed a successful symphony in E minor, called “Gaelic.” … After listening to this work, nearly all of the critics forgot momentarily about “whistling girls,” for they wrote such encomiums, as “This symphony stamps the composer as a writer of great ability,” and that it is “full of strength and imagination.” … A great argument in its favor is that one of the critics who condemned the symphony after its first performance was loudest in its praise after the second hearing.7
And Thompson believed that Beach’s best years as an orchestral composer were yet to come. “Mrs. Beach’s talent finds its truest expression in large forms,” she argued, and was “a striking exception in an age given over to miniature work.” Urging Beach to persist against the negativity directed toward her gender, she added, “Her own instincts and predilections are those which will make for the most supreme accomplishments in her art. Her publisher, if he is a man of intelligence, will allow her genius full sway.”
Beach, of course, did not take Thompson’s advice and focused for the rest of her career on solo piano works, songs, and choral pieces – genres in high demand among women’s music clubs.8 On a practical level, she preferred to create in circles that appreciated her unconditionally without the constant barrage of sexism.9 After her husband’s death, moreover, she resumed touring as a concert pianist and often found herself too busy to compose in larger genres, once remarking that “I am too enthusiastic a traveler yet to settle down, too fond of my audiences to give them up.”10 But there is still more to the story than mere avoidance of a male-dominated orchestra culture and a restless spirit. Orchestras continued to perform Beach’s music well into the twentieth century, after all.
Aesthetics also appeared to play a key role in Beach’s move away from orchestral music. Thompson had encouraged Beach to continue subverting prevailing gendered attitudes that classed orchestral works as “masculine” and miniatures as “feminine.”11 But Beach herself developed distinct artistic priorities in her works that overturned this binary altogether. At their core, all three orchestral pieces are explorations of song, suggesting that song itself held pride of place in Beach’s aesthetic outlook. By the 1890s, composers and critics had developed a wide-ranging discourse about the relationships between songs and instrumental music that informed Beach’s approach to all three pieces and, as I argue here, helps explain her orchestral music’s longevity as well as her lack of urgency in composing more. Viewing – and hearing – Beach’s orchestral works with songs’ centrality in mind ultimately offers a new framework for reassessing American orchestral music dating from her lifetime.
Song as Symbol
The incorporation of songs into instrumental music, whether through direct quotation or more subtle allusion, creates a rich (if slippery) symbolic matrix that offers listeners multiple layers for aesthetic and interpretive engagement.12 While the practice has spanned at least two centuries, from Franz Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet (1819) to Philip Glass’ “Heroes” Symphony (1996), it reached an important crest during the 1890s in ongoing transatlantic discussions about the capacity of folk songs to suggest a national identity in instrumental works. Antonín Dvořák famously asserted in 1893, for example, that “the future music of [the United States] must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. … These are the folk songs of America, and your composers must turn to them.”13 Noting the ubiquity of the practice, he added, “All of the great musicians have borrowed from the songs of the common people.” Yet, references to preexisting songs in instrumental music did not always point in the direction of national identity. Even composers known for writing so-called absolute music, such as Johannes Brahms, used song-based allusions to generate symbolic depth.14 Indeed, referencing song in instrumental music was a pervasive stylistic strategy that heavily shaped the context in which Beach composed her orchestral works.
In the United States, the practice of referencing songs in instrumental works is nearly as old as the country itself. William Gibbons has shown that at least two generations of early American composers quoted “Yankee Doodle” for its “powerful symbolic value” – in this case, as a symbol of the nation.15 Among orchestral writers, both Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781–1861) and Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–69) used a variety of patriotic songs, including “Yankee Doodle,” for this very purpose.16 Other early symphonists, notably William Henry Fry (1813–64) and George Frederick Bristow (1825–98), referenced songs that facilitated the construction of picturesque narratives – the Christmas hymn “Adeste Fidelis” in Fry’s Santa Claus: Christmas Symphony (1853) and “Tallis’s Evening Hymn” in a movement of Bristow’s “Arcadian” Symphony (1872) meant to depict nighttime on the prairie.17 By the latter part of the century, then, finding orchestral inspiration in song was certainly not out of the ordinary.
The specific use of folk songs to construct an American national identity emerged at mid-century in the piano music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk and blossomed across genres over the next several decades. Brooklyn composer Ellsworth Phelps’s “Emancipation” Symphony (1880), for example, took inspiration from African-derived folk music but did not quote any songs directly.18 John Broekhoven’s Suite Creole, which premiered in Cincinnati in 1884, hewed more closely to Gottschalk’s style by quoting Creole songs directly.19 By 1893, when Dvořák made his famous argument that “negro melodies” would be the most suitable foundation for an American national style, such works had long been at the center of debates about the relationship between the folk and the national. Boston composer George E. Whiting’s remarks at the 1884 Music Teachers National Association meeting typified the terms of debate:
There is one field of local color in this country, and which has been but little used, which I would like to call to the attention of composers. I refer to the melodies of the Creoles of the South and Cuba. Gottschalk is really the only American who has ever succeeded in producing compositions founded on subjects from his own land.20
The intensity of these discussions would only grow through the 1890s as commentators, including Beach herself, debated which folk music repertoires should be considered representative of American national identity.21
While these debates would certainly prove important for Beach in time, their prominence often obscured a parallel discourse about the relative artistic value of song references, regardless of their source. Failing to acknowledge the symbolic potential of direct quotation, critics often argued that it was tantamount to plagiarism or else signaled a lack of melodic creativity. Writing in 1873, one reviewer of Bristow’s “Arcadian” Symphony called quotation “inartistic,” adding that “the poverty of resource indicated by the borrowing practice, even in minor works, is aggravated in the symphony.”22 Of course, certain composers agreed with this sentiment since it granted artistic superiority – and true individuality – to those with a boundless gift for melodic writing. Dvořák himself explained that when he engaged with folk music, he attempted to transcend direct quotation with suggestive allusion, thus forging a piece solely from inner creativity. “I study certain melodies until I become thoroughly imbued with their characteristics,” he said in an 1893 interview, “and am enabled to make a musical picture in keeping with and partaking of those characteristics.”23
By the time Amy Beach sat down to write her first orchestral works in the 1890s, longstanding debates about the construction of national musical identity and the relative value of song references had converged in response to Dvořák’s 1893 pronouncements. But she, among others, recognized that while national identity was a pressing political issue, the notion that song could symbolize national identity presumed the artistic desirability of instrumental song references in the first place. Writing in 1941, music historian Eileen Jackson (whose married name would later be Eileen Southern) maintained the power of this desirability by dividing certain folk-inspired orchestral works into two analytical categories: “Musical Works Containing Themes from Negro Folksong” and “Musical Works in the Negro Idiom.”24 More recent treatment of the same material has tended to elide the difference between “theme” and “idiom,” thus blurring the artistic significance of direct song references in orchestral repertoire from the era.25
Song as Compositional Fundament
The deployment of song in an instrumental context presents distinct interpretive challenges for performers, listeners, and analysts. In some instances, the song’s text might offer a clue about its meaning as a musical symbol. In others, the very removal of the text might illuminate other expressive dimensions of the tune that recast, or even thwart, the text’s meanings. In others still, preexisting tunes might simply provide a source of creative inspiration irrespective of the text, with a motivic fragment serving as a point of departure for further musical elaboration and exploration. Among all three strategies, moreover, the song’s presence in the score might range from wholesale quotation to nearly complete fragmentation. Beach’s three orchestral works display virtually all the possible combinations at various moments, leading to a small but rich site for investigating how she might have perceived songs’ value in an instrumental context.
Given Beach’s expansive catalog of songs – nearly 150 – we can be reasonably certain that she held the genre in high esteem. It carried the potential to reach a large public through domestic and stage performances while offering composers distinct opportunities for honing their craft. “A small gem,” she once claimed, “may be just as brilliantly cut as one weighing many carats.”26 Yet, vexingly, she left few direct clues about why song became such a fundamental element in her approach to large-scale instrumental works as well. Anna Poulin Alfeld has emphasized that Beach’s avoidance of public remarks about self-borrowings in the symphony and the concerto strongly suggests that she wanted listeners to evaluate these pieces on “purely musical and compositional terms.”27 Nevertheless, other available evidence demonstrates that Beach approached the act of composition with certain methods that offer a fuller explanation of what these “purely musical and compositional terms” might have been.
In her later career, Beach’s visibility as a leading composer afforded her many public opportunities to share ideas about the act of composition. For example, in a 1918 piece for The Etude called “To the Girl Who Wants to Compose,” Beach divided the act into three distinct domains – the emotional, the intellectual, and the spiritual:
To begin with the emotional – which is the side of music most easily understood by the average human being – music plays an enormous part in our whole lives, from the lullabies which our mothers sing to us in our cradles to the funeral march played after we have reached the end of our earthly course. … Then there is the intellectual side. This can only be best understood by those who have entered in all seriousness into the composition of music in its most abstract forms. … Then there is what I have called the spiritual side of music. Of course, this has two aspects, the point of view of the listener, and that of the creator. There is music which uplifts us to a point far above and beyond the mere emotional plane.28
Twenty-five years later, again in The Etude, she described the ideal compositional process in much the same way:
The composer must have emotional and spiritual feeling to put into his work; he must achieve a comprehensible translation of his feeling through form; and he must have at his disposal a tremendous background of technical, musical craftsmanship in order to express his feelings and his thoughts. Thus, the craftsmanship, vital though it is, serves chiefly as the means toward the end of personal expression.29
Both formulations were conventional descriptions of the compositional process and in many respects echoed Joseph Haydn’s well-known explanation from over a century earlier. As Haydn put it, he extemporized at the keyboard, “according to whether my animus was sad or happy, serious or playful,” and then devoted his “entire effort toward elaborating and sustaining [a compelling idea] according to the rules of art.”30 Like Beach, he moved from emotion to idea to elaboration as technical skill hammered unbridled feeling into a meaningful musical shape.
Yet the nuances of Beach’s first step – accessing an emotion – departed significantly from Haydn’s fanciful improvisations. In one published explanation, she argued that memories of long-past events could erupt from the unconscious, creating “not only an art-form, but a veritable autobiography.”31 This observation traded in nineteenth-century tropes about the role of life experience in musical creativity that would have been foreign to Haydn.32 In other commentary, she remarked that poetic texts often generated sufficient emotional sparks for composition. After procrastinating on a setting of a Robert Browning text, for example, she finally found inspiration while she “simply sat still on the train, thinking of Browning’s poem, and allowing it and the rhythm of the wheels to take possession of me.”33 For Beach, ruminating on the emotional content of a song or text was a perfectly legitimate way to “get in the mood” for composing, even away from the keyboard.
Of course, a spark for composition and composition itself are two very different things – a sharp distinction that Beach understood all too well. On the advice of Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Wilhelm Gericke when Beach was a teenager, her parents dissuaded her from pursuing formal training in composition, leaving her to figure it out for herself.34 Beach was a uniquely successful autodidact from a young age because she possessed the ability to assimilate large amounts of musical information on a single hearing and could retain it with a prodigious memory. After her marriage in 1885, when she was only eighteen, her husband Henry curtailed her emerging career as a concert pianist, essentially compelling her to pursue composition even more vigorously but still without formal instruction.35 Looking back in 1943, she explained that to learn her craft, she would write out music from memory and then compare it to the score while occasionally making certain manipulations to challenge herself.36 At the same time, she cautioned that careful study was not sufficient for writing an effective composition. Study has “nothing to do with ‘inspiration,’” she observed, “but provides the only means of enabling [a composer] to project ‘inspiration’ into the minds and hearts of listeners.” The emotional spark was fundamental, and she sought that spark in songs.
Song in Beach’s Orchestral Works
The pervasiveness of songs in Beach’s orchestral works suggests that they served as her “sparks.” Several previous scholars have tracked and analyzed the source material in this repertoire, and their collective findings are reproduced in Table 8.2 for easy reference. Drawing several strong inferences from this analysis, Adrienne Fried Block has viewed Beach’s engagement with songs in the symphony and the concerto through the lenses of national identity and autobiography, respectively, while giving the most interpretive weight to song texts from allusions in the concerto.37 Sarah Gerk, Anna Poulin Alfeld, and E. Douglas Bomberger have challenged aspects of Block’s interpretations by marshaling new evidence to reinterpret Beach’s selection, structural placement, and compositional elaboration of material derived from song.38 Despite the depth of these interpretations, the fundamental question, “Why song?” remains unaddressed. Zooming out from a detailed examination of the scores, my assessment here is that despite substantial differences between the three pieces on nearly every compositional level, the presence of song served as an intentional artistic binding agent that resonated with the public throughout Beach’s lifetime.
Table 8.2 Song allusions in Amy Beach’s orchestral works
| Location | Song | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Bal Masqué | “Wouldn’t That Be Queer” | Beach, op. 26, no. 4 (1894) |
| “Gaelic” Symphony, I |
|
|
| “Gaelic” Symphony, II | “Goirtin Ornadh” | The Citizen (1841) |
| “Gaelic” Symphony, III |
|
|
| “Gaelic” Symphony, IV | “Dark Is the Night!” | Beach, op. 11, no. 1 (1890) |
| Piano Concerto, I | “Jeune fille et jeune fleur” | Beach, op. 1, no. 3 (1887) |
| Piano Concerto, II | “Empress of Night” | Beach, op. 2, no. 3 (1891) |
| Piano Concerto, III | “Twilight” | Beach, op. 2, no. 1 (1887) |
Bal Masqué
Bal Masqué, Beach’s first work for orchestra alone, was written as a prelude to a Boston revival of the musical theater piece The Black Crook, which had premiered in New York in 1866.39 Beyond this utilitarian function, it was also an experiment in orchestration that formed a feedback loop in Beach’s autodidactic process. Part of this effort involved eliminating the variables of a text and choir that had shaped her approach to the Grand Mass in E-flat major, op. 5 (1890), and Festival Jubilate, op. 17 (1892). In both earlier works, the texts themselves offered a significant emotional spark, while European works from the standard choral repertoire served as occasional models or templates.40 In contrast, writing for orchestra alone presented an open field for emotional content, and she ultimately chose a comic text, “Wouldn’t That Be Queer,” by Elsie Jones Cooley, as a key source of inspiration:41
Published in 1894 as op. 26, no. 4, Beach’s waltz-like setting of this text, which rarely rises above a mezzo forte dynamic, is suitably whimsical, like a child whispering an imaginative secret. It is no surprise, then, that she could draw an emotional connection between the song and the socially topsy-turvy world of a nineteenth-century masked ball.42
Although Bal Masqué and “Wouldn’t That Be Queer” share nearly identical melodies, Beach exploited the potential for smoother melodic shaping, more interesting counterpoint, and vivid coloration in her orchestral arrangement – variances that suggest she was attempting to draw more of the song’s emotional content from the orchestra than she felt was possible in the vocal setting (Example 8.1). Regarding these types of transformations, she once observed, “When one sees how it looks, it is quite possible that the melodic line may not seem at all suitable for the voice. Its appearance (not its character) may suggest the violincello – the combination of violin and harp – and lo! the original theme may develop into something quite different from the song that was first planned.”43 In this case, the two versions display only subtle musical differences but share the same underlying emotional character despite the variance.
Example 8.1 Comparison of the opening melodies of Beach’s “Wouldn’t that be Queer,” op. 26, no. 4, and Bal Masqué.
Riding a wave of positive reviews of Beach’s large choral works, Bal Masqué was one of eight pieces programmed on the Manuscript Society of New York’s opening concert of the 1893–94 season. Critics had widely praised the Mass setting, particularly its orchestration and emotional alignment with the texts.44 Unfortunately for Beach, however, they did not appreciate Bal Masqué – an unexpected misfire after the previous acclaim. William Thoms, for example, lamented that it “proved a disappointment to those familiar with the gifted Boston lady’s larger achievements in works of a more serious character, which have led us to expect higher things from her pen than the sketch presented.”45 A writer for the Evening World said it “has a pretty theme” but dismissed it as “trivial.”46 The general audience, on the other hand, loved the piece so much that it reportedly “set the saltatorial nerves of the young people right on edge.”47
The fact that Beach declined to share the source of her emotional spark – Cooley’s text – can help explain the polarized reactions. With only the title and an unusual genre designation (“sketch”) to guide expectations, critics familiar with her earlier work might have assumed it would contain elements appropriate for a tone poem: a narrative, inner drama, thematic transformations, and other displays of musical elaboration. When the piece ultimately reminded them of a “Strauss waltz” – a common refrain – the piece’s “triviality” became a disappointment. Average listeners, on the other hand, took the title at face value and perceived the piece as Beach had intended it – as droll accompaniment to a masked ball, not a portrait of the ball itself. Hence dancing in their seats!
More broadly, the mixed responses to Bal Masqué show that a composer’s intent to convey specific inner emotions with music is not self-revelatory. Disclosing this intent often relies on certain expectations generated with clues beyond the notes of the score: an epigraph, a genre designation, or a sheet music cover (to name a few examples). Would sharing the source of her inspiration have prompted dissatisfied critics to hear the piece differently? Either way, the electric audience reaction to Bal Masqué proved to be useful market research for Beach and Arthur P. Schmidt, who published the underlying song and an arrangement for solo piano a few months later while quietly leaving the orchestral “sketch” behind – save for an 1895 Boston Pops show led by Antonio de Novellis where the program specifically directed antsy audiences to “preserve silence during the performance of this number.”
“Gaelic” Symphony
Beach greatly expanded her compositional engagement with song in her next orchestral work, the “Gaelic” Symphony in E minor, op. 32. With the conventional four-movement symphonic template at her disposal, she used several songs to generate large-scale formal structures in which the tunes take on a pervasive presence beyond direct quotations. Couching this procedure as a commandment for aspiring composers, she once remarked, “Learn to employ as much variety in form as possible. Above all things, avoid becoming stereotyped in the expression of melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic ideas.”48 The weighty demands of the symphonic genre – length, monumentality, cohesion, and variety – gave Beach an appealing sandbox for a kaleidoscopic treatment of intriguing emotional sparks. As with Bal Masqué, however, Beach’s sources of musical inspiration were obscured at early performances, leading to substantial mishearings in the heated political context of its premiere.
Beach began writing a new symphony in January 1894,49 just a month after the controversial world premiere of Antonín Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony in New York – a long-awaited event that served as a capstone to a months-long public debate about folk song and American national identity. Like many of her contemporaries, Beach considered folk songs an especially abundant source of bare emotion that lent themselves well as sparks for compositional inspiration. But she also believed that the emotions they contained were not universally shared, or at least not universally accessible. In response to Dvořák’s contention that “negro melodies” could inspire a distinctively American national style, she retorted that “if a negro, the possessor of talent for musical composition, should perfect himself in its expression, then we might have the melodies which are his folk-songs employed with fullest sympathy, for he would be working with the inherited feelings of his race.”50 She would later critique the “New World” Symphony on these very grounds in a private notebook, remarking that the piece “seems to me light in calibre and to represent only the peaceful, sunny side of the negro character and life. Not for a moment does it suggest their suffering, heartbreaks, slavery.”51 Regardless of the composer’s ability to develop themes or create effective counterpoint – the “machinery,” as she put it – a piece would fall short if it could not effectively convey the appropriate core emotions.
Beach believed that Anglo-American composers would stand a greater chance of merging craft and expression if they drew from their own folk heritage for compositional inspiration. “We of the North,” she wrote in response to Dvořák, “should be far more likely to be influenced by old English, Scotch or Irish songs inherited with our literature from our ancestors, than by the songs of a portion of our people who were kept for so long in bondage, and whose musical utterances were deeply rooted in the heart-breaking griefs attendant upon their condition.”52 Previous scholarship has emphasized this statement’s centrality in Beach’s decision to compose a “Gaelic” symphony: it would be her version of a more appropriate – and more emotionally effective – vehicle of national expression than Dvořák’s “New World.”53 Sarah Gerk has since made a convincing case that Beach’s engagement with Irish folk music was as much transnational as national in character, arguing that the symphony is a “a complex example of late-century intertextuality, musical invention, and social statement that reflects the composer’s nationality to some extent, but reaches far beyond it.”54 It seems all the more noteworthy, then, that the emotional content of folk songs sparked her decision to compose the symphony with a Gaelic character in the first place. In a 1917 interview, she explained,
I can ascribe no particular reason for my choice of Gaelic subjects for my first symphony other than having been attracted by some of the wonderful old tunes in a collection of Gaelic folk-music, which came under my observation. These tunes, of course, are of unknown origin and age, and like the folk-music of every race, sprang from the common joys, sorrows, adventures, and struggles of a primitive people. Their simple, rugged and unpretentious beauty led me to “take my pen in hand” and try to develop their ideas in symphonic form.55
True to her stated compositional method, she was plainly describing a spark arising from an emotional investment – and in this case, an investment aroused by folk song.
Although Beach had consulted printed sources of Irish folk songs to jump-start her composition and then used some of them as the principal themes in the symphony, the program notes distributed at the opening night concert obscured their origins as preexisting tunes. For example, she remarked on the “Gaelic folk-song character” of the first movement’s closing theme, as well as the “strongly-marked Gaelic character” and “Keltic closing cadence” in the third movement’s principal theme. The synopsis in the program also made no reference to Beach’s source for the main themes in the first and last movements, her song “Dark Is the Night,” op. 11, no. 1 (1889), which evokes the Irish American experience of a tumultuous oversea voyage and feelings of nostalgia.56 As far as most listeners knew, the piece fell in the mold of other “national” symphonies that did not explicitly quote folk song, such as Felix Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” or Frederic Hymen Cowen’s more recent “Welsh” (1884), the inspiration for which the composer once described as “the recollections of my rambles, my broken-down old piano, the hymn-singing, and the honeymooners of the two years before.”57
The “Gaelic” provoked a wide range of responses after its premiere, from fulsome praise to outright dismissal, with nearly all remarking on the composer’s gender in some way.58 Though less visibly, the ambiguity of Beach’s source material also shaped these reviews. Believing that only the third movement quoted preexisting songs, a critic for the Globe observed that “most of [the themes] are new.”59 The second movement, the reviewer went on, “is thoroughly delightful, and pleased the audience most of all. The themes are deliciously melodious, and the graceful Siciliano is treated in the daintiest fashion imaginable.” A writer for the Daily Advertiser also enjoyed the second movement but argued that it belied the work’s title:
[The Scherzo] was entitled “Alla Siciliana,” but was rather slow in the theme for a true Siciliana – the dance-song of the Sicilian peasantry is generally about allegretto in tempo, and is usually 6–8 rhythm. The melody, not very Gaelic in character, was very attractive, and was excellently played by the oboe, appearing afterwards upon the English horn.60
After hearing a repeat performance in Brooklyn a few weeks later, New York Tribune critic (and folksong expert) Henry Krehbiel left the hall unimpressed on precisely the same grounds:
She has called [the symphony] “Gaelic” and justified the epithet by the use of some melodies with Irish rhythms and turns, but the task of stamping the whole work with a spirit which would be recognized as characteristically Gaelic seems to have been beyond her powers. In this respect, as well as in the development of the national material the symphony falls short of Dr. Stanford’s symphony called “Irish.”61
Like his Boston counterparts, Krehbiel expected one approach – a symphony imbued with the spirit of Irish folk song – and, perhaps not knowing any better, was disappointed by a symphony imbued with actual Irish folk songs.
Would these critics have changed their tune knowing that the melodies with “Irish rhythms and turns” were direct quotations taken from printed Irish sources? Krehbiel’s review, at least, suggests that expectations of originality (“the development of the national material”) overshadowed the symbolic potential of song quotations for projecting a national identity. These widely held expectations might explain why Beach ultimately shielded her sources from view at the premiere. At the same time, as in Bal Masqué, the absence of an explanation did not prevent listeners from making a strong emotional connection to Beach’s music. The critic for the Daily Advertiser remarked that the second movement – the one allegedly lacking “Gaelic character” – “evoked the most spontaneous applause of all the movements” and compelled Beach “to bow her acknowledgments from her seat.” Perhaps these listeners intuitively understood the final line of the song: “And now I and my own darling are married and live happy on what I earn every day” – a line that embodied the “common joys” expressed in Irish folk song.62
Piano Concerto
Of Beach’s orchestral works, the Piano Concerto contains the most – and the most oblique – references to preexisting songs. Each movement contains transformations of melodic material drawn from her own art songs published about a decade earlier, rather than the wholesale quotations found in previous works. An analysis of the art song texts led Adrienne Fried Block to an autobiographical reading of the concerto in the 1990s, but her interpretation would have been even more inscrutable to Beach’s original audiences at the work’s 1900 premiere than the quotations in the “Gaelic” Symphony proved to be in the 1890s. Douglas Bomberger has offered a more historicist reading that places the concerto in direct dialogue with Dvořák’s famous “New World” Symphony, which Beach had heard in Boston a few years earlier and had roundly critiqued in her private notebook.63 Of course, like the “Gaelic” Symphony, the “New World” Symphony was itself inspired by song – folk song, to be more precise. Unlike Beach, Dvořák had attempted to evoke a folk idiom without direct reference to specific songs. Following Bomberger’s lead, then, we might hear the conversation between Dvořák’s symphony and Beach’s concerto as her attempt to test the boundaries of quotation and allusion, song and idiom – a distinction that would continue to inform American orchestral composition well into the twentieth century.
The crux of Bomberger’s revision of Block’s interpretation rests on how to hear the principal theme of the concerto’s first movement. Block presents the sinewy five-measure melody as an allusion to Beach’s 1885 setting of a Chateaubriand text, “Jeune fille et jeune fleur,” and notes the shared key, “serious affect,” and “falling modal scales” of both excerpts.64 The reference is thin but is buttressed by the secondary theme’s more overt allusion to another passage in the song.65 Bomberger draws a convincing parallel between the concerto theme’s melodic and rhythmic contours and those of the principal theme in the fourth movement of Dvořák’s symphony. He argues further that Beach’s manipulation of the theme later in the movement “improves” on the technical and emotional deficiencies she had noted in private comments about Dvořák. Considering all three melodies side by side – the song, the symphony, and the concerto – we might hear that the folklike character of each theme, conveyed by modality and an accompanying sense of timeless origins, serves as a clear expressive binding agent in keeping with the matrix of allusions shared across the pieces66 (Example 8.2). In other words, rather than referencing folk songs directly, the theme’s allusions construct a folk idiom inspired by a chain of song encounters.
Example 8.2 Comparison of the principal themes of (1) Dvořák’s Symphony “From the New World,” movement IV; (2) the opening of Beach’s Piano Concerto, op. 45, movement I; and (3) Beach’s song, “Jeune fille et jeune fleur,” op. 1, no. 3.
The program note distributed at the concerto’s premiere, given by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Wilhelm Gericke with Beach at the piano, offers a rather dry technical analysis of each movement’s form with no descriptions of the melodic character found in any of the work’s several main themes. Presumably written by Beach herself, the note not only obscured the sources of her melodic ideas but concealed the work’s abundant stylistic connections to Dvořák’s “New World” and other inspirational models, such as Brahms’ Second Concerto. While this framing presumably placed the concerto on an even technical playing field with similar pieces – an understandable desire for Beach, who would almost certainly have faced sexist accusations of plagiarism or derivativeness by disclosing her inspiration – the note’s utter decontextualization left significant holes for listeners to fill with their own impressions of where the piece “fit” in the contemporary musical landscape.
And fill they did. A writer for the Boston Transcript complained loudly that Beach had attempted to do too much at once. “In this concerto,” the critic observed,
[S]he has done pretty near everything that possibly can be done with pianoforte and orchestra; there is material – essential and ornamental – enough in it to make two concertos. It is overloaded with figural ornamentation and contrapuntal cleverness. To make some of her combinations effective and clear would take the skill of a Richard Strauss.67
Of course, perhaps Beach tacitly took these remarks as proof that she had outdone Dvořák’s “machinery” in the “New World” Symphony! Yet the distinguished critic Philip Hale grumbled even more resolutely and left no room for a positive spin:
The concerto was a disappointment in every way. … The themes were not distinguished; the development was too often vague and rambling; the moods, when there were moods, were those of other composers; thus the mood of the opening of the slow movement was palpably Wagnerian. … There were notes, notes, notes; and where there were so many notes there were inevitably a few pretty passages; but there was little or no display of vital musical thought, proportion, skill in structure, or taste or brilliance in orchestral expression.68
Notably, Hale detected something noteworthy about the opening theme – the theme under scrutiny here – but dismissed the modality and asymmetry of its folklike idiom as “Wagnerian,” a catchall epithet for any musical procedure that deviates from classical convention.69
But not all the critics hurled boulders. Writing for the Courier, Howard Ticknor specifically praised Beach’s melodic gift and handling of melody as a structural unit. “Each year,” he noted, “sees a fresher, richer and more spontaneous melody, alike in the simple salon songs and in works for the chamber, or the orchestral musician, while the variety, surety and strength of the instrumentation develop logically and agreeably, as was felt when her ‘Scotch’ symphony was presented.”70 Invoking symphony offered readers a small context for approaching repeat performances of the concerto, but Louis Elson pinpointed it with even greater precision in his review for the Daily Advertiser, worth quoting at length for its perceptiveness:
The whole first movement seemed rather indefinite at a first hearing; although there were many passages of much charm, there did not seem to be that coherency and clear scheme which one finds in the masterpieces; it was a case of the dove soaring with the eagles. … The largo, although given on the house-programme as combined with the finale, was in reality a movement of itself. It treated a figure which reminded of the fate-figure in Wagner’s trilogy (Cesar Franck has also developed this figure in his D minor symphony) and indicated a pensive melancholy. The finale seemed to us the best, most decisive and most original movement of the work. There were some phrases given in this that seemed to be in the vein of Dvorak’s “American Symphony,” although not suggesting plagiarism in the remotest degree. The entire movement was interesting and had many bold and striking contrasts.71
Although Elson made a connection between the concerto’s fourth movement and Dvořák’s symphony (rather than the first), his remarks indicated that a sensitive listener could ultimately detect Beach’s ongoing efforts to develop an orchestral idiom that partook of songlike features, whether art song, folk song, or even Wagnerian vocal lines. And the audience? Elson remarked, “The public were in the friendliest mood and recalled the composer-pianist four times and also added floral tributes.”
Beach’s Orchestral Afterlives
Louis Elson’s remarks about the concerto evidently left Philip Hale unmoved after a second hearing, but, more important, they opened the door to the possibility that Dvořák’s symphony had in fact launched a new branch of orchestral writing – a branch that Beach had followed in both the “Gaelic” Symphony and the Piano Concerto. Over the next half century and beyond, dozens of composers – Henry Gilbert, Nathaniel Dett, Daniel Gregory Mason, Frederick Delius, William Grant Still, and Aaron Copland, to name only a few – followed Dvořák’s lead by incorporating various folk song elements into their works. But while Dvořák had assiduously avoided direct quotation in favor of an idiomatic approach (save for a brief explicit allusion to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in the symphony’s first movement), many of these composers freely borrowed well-known melodic fragments and, in some cases, used entire songs as structural themes, much as Beach had in the “Gaelic” Symphony. These composers still risked accusations of plagiarism – William Dawson’s 1934 Negro Folk Symphony is a noteworthy example72 – but a critical mass of works with quotations signaled to audiences that the practice served a symbolic purpose beyond purely musical considerations. And this general relaxation rejuvenated Beach’s orchestral works, much to her benefit.
The reception of Beach’s orchestral music transformed dramatically after the turn of the century. Conductor Emil Paur, who had directed the “Gaelic” Symphony’s premiere in 1896, returned to the work in 1905 with the Pittsburgh Orchestra in a concert that also featured Beach at the piano in Saint-Saëns’ Second Concerto. Audiences and critics alike loved the performance. Charles Boyd of the Weekly Gazette remarked that “the themes are decidedly melodious and their development is logical and sensible.”73 “Strange to say,” he added, “the four movements met with almost uniform approval, though one would predict a preference on first hearing to the second movement, with its naïve siciliana and dainty scherzo” – the movement with the most explicit allusion. Another happy reviewer, evidently a fan of Richard Wagner, contradicted Krehbiel’s assertion from a decade earlier that the work failed to project a Gaelic spirit:
Throughout the symphony one is strongly reminded of Wagner. Not that Mrs. Beach could be accused of plagiarism in the slightest degree, but her methods remind one of Wagner. … It has been said of Wagner that he had, in reality, only one small box of pearls, but that he understood how to arrange them, with such brilliancy and power, that one never tires of the variation. This might also be said of Mrs. Beach’s work. The symphony is entitled “Gaelic,” and it is truly wonderful how she retains the quaint Irish atmosphere throughout the work.74
This reviewer did not mention – and may not have known – that Beach’s “pearls” were published folk songs but found that her treatment of the melodic ideas had captured the emotional content she wanted to convey. In return, Beach expressed her appreciation from the stage: “To say that I am pleased with the Pittsburgh audiences is but faintly conveying my delight at my reception here and the enjoyment I have found in the recitals.”75
About a decade later, the Kansas City-based composer and conductor Carl Busch programmed Beach’s symphony in an ambitious season-long series exploring national identity that included symphonies by Beethoven, Schumann, Franck, Glazunov, Sibelius, Svensen, Sinding, and Stanford. As one commentator remarked, Beach’s inclusion would afford “interesting comparison,” completing “in a becoming way this highly attractive and representative selection.”76 In advance of the concert, Busch’s orchestra sponsored a class for audiences to hear an analysis of the symphony given by Sarah Ellen Barnes, a noted preconcert lecturer. And whatever she said must have worked. A reviewer for the Kansas City Times gushed about the piece’s suggestion of a national identity brought on by folksong references:
The Beach symphony is a work of impressive beauty. … While much of its material is of Scotch origin, as the skirl of the bagpipes in the third movement and the mingling of austerity with sentiment in the second and last, the work is in reality more American than Scotch, and very much more universal than American. … An unprejudiced ear must concede that Mrs. Beach has written a symphony that is likely to live.77
And it would go on to lead a happy life alongside Beach until her death in 1944.
Meanwhile, Beach’s concerto would also experience a significant critical rebound after its disastrous Boston premiere. Beach had taken the piece on a successful tour through Germany in 1913 and returned with it eighteen months later to great acclaim in a performance with the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra.78 One local reviewer, Luella Keller, was so enthusiastic that she declared, “This is perhaps the greatest feat an American woman has performed in the musical world, and will be long remembered by those who saw it.”79 The war in Europe had catalyzed nationwide interest in American compositions at this very moment, leading Beach and her concerto to be included on a program held at San Francisco’s Panama–Pacific International Exposition in August 1915 that featured music by seven other Americans, including Frederick Stock, who doubled as the conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Although Beach’s performance received scant notice – and what notice it did receive was poor – Stock himself took up the piece in Chicago a few months later.80
The momentum from Los Angeles that had stalled in San Francisco ramped up again in Chicago, where Stock was already well known for programming music by a wide array of American composers.81 Another budding composer, Eric DeLamarter, was enthralled after her performance. In a world now open to orchestral pieces inspired by song, he wrote in the Chicago Tribune:
Everything was thoroughly proper, O, thoroughly! yesterday afternoon at Orchestra Hall. … The concerto itself is frank and ingenious, relying on its melodic facility and on its approved effects of the salon composer – a work, to draw comparison, developed to the ultimate degree of finesse in scores like Saint-Saëns’ G minor concerto, or the Grieg concerto. It is plausible in its orchestral setting, and as grateful under the fingers as it is in the ear.82
Although he did not detect (or at least did not mention) any of the folklike qualities permeating the first movement, the piece’s debt to song was clear to him, as if he fully grasped her compositional process from the inside. A few weeks later, however, an enthusiastic reviewer in St. Louis, Richard L. Stokes, heard something particularly evocative – national sounds:
Still another American influence was shown in her free use of syncopation in the first movement. Despite its prevailing chromatic hues in melody, harmony, and counterpoint, the concerto abounded in clearly discernible tunes, for Mrs. Beach holds that the soul as well as the body requires its quota of sugar. The consequence is that although the work is technically most difficult – only a pianist and orchestra of the utmost expertness could perform it – there is also a fascinating popular appeal.83
Though not with Louis Elson’s precision after the work’s Boston premiere, Stokes was emphatically trying to make sense of a work that did not quite fit into a conventional orchestral idiom. DeLamarter had pointed toward Grieg as a suitable comparison, but the best words Stokes could divine were “American” and “popular” – just as Beach might have hoped.
Although opportunities for Beach to perform her concerto faded with time despite audiences’ newfound admiration for it, the “Gaelic” Symphony practically became close to a canonical fixture as Beach earned a place as one of the country’s most distinguished composers in any genre. Some of the symphony’s most noteworthy performances during the later part of her career included those by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra (1915 and 1919), the Woman’s Symphony Orchestra of Chicago under Ebba Sundstrom (1928 and 1934), Henry Hadley and the Manhattan Symphony Orchestra (1931), and the Women’s Symphony Society of Boston under Alexander Thiede (1940). At a concert in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, honoring Beach’s seventy-fifth birthday in 1942, the local orchestra and its founder, George King Raudenbush, programmed the symphony as a keynote. It was a smashing success – one with a critical response that echoed DeLamarter in its vindication of Beach’s song-based compositional approach. “While the symphony has all the richness and technical intricacies of an elaborate tapestry,” a critic for the Evening News began,
Its charm is found in the total effect of wholesome simplicity. Solo instruments throughout the work give the effect of a narrator telling in a straightforward manner, “This is the way the sea rolls up on our North Irish coast” and “These are the songs our people sing when they are happy or sad.” … Mrs. Beach says that her symphony is founded on folk music of the Gaelic people; but while these simple melodies are used freely and with the skill of a highly intelligent musician, they do not overshadow the compelling moods and descriptions which the composer has so deftly written into her work.84
By this time, Beach was freely sharing the symphony’s folksong-based origins to guide listeners, ensuring they would make no mistake about what emotions she was trying to convey. That her themes were direct quotations had finally become a decided strength.
The Power of Song
The virtual disappearance of Beach’s orchestral music in the period between her death and the sustained revival of the 1990s betrays the fact that Beach’s orchestral music, written as a very early response to Dvořák’s ideas, was in certain respects ahead of its time in the 1890s, only to find its stride in the 1910s. This curious asynchrony suggests that certain compositional values emerged in the decades after Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony that rose and fell in tandem with Beach’s orchestral music. As I noted in the opening of this chapter, one of the first rigorous scholarly investigations of orchestral music from this period that drew on Afrodiasporic folksongs, written by a graduate student at the University of Chicago in 1941, three years before Beach’s death, noted:
From the beginning [i.e., 1893], composers in this field of musical composition have been impelled by an earnest desire to use folk material but have had rather vague notions concerning the actual process. With the early composers, often a work in Negro idiom meant that a Negro folksong theme was set into a musical work which might be of contrasting style and no attempt was made to integrate the theme into the music. … As the years passed and the movement grew richer with experience, composers began to formulate definite ideas of how to incorporate Negro material into the composition. There emerged the general feeling that the Negro material should always be an integral part of the whole; a work in Negro idiom.85
Although the author, Eileen Jackson, focused her observations more specifically on compositions inspired by folk music of the African diaspora (“Negro folksong”), the more general compositional problem she described – how to integrate any song into a larger orchestral framework – had animated Beach’s approach to orchestral composition from Bal Masqué through the Piano Concerto. In each case, and as Beach herself explained, song provided her with an appropriate emotional “spark” that she would then attempt to grow into glowing embers and eventually a roaring fire with the “machinery” of counterpoint, developmental variation, and other advanced technical procedures.
As luck would have it, this very problem came to animate an entire generation of composers. Some of these composers, as Jackson goes on to explain, hewed more closely to Beach’s approach in the “Gaelic” Symphony by quoting songs, possibly hiding their origins, and working the melodic material sufficiently to retain the underlying emotional depth of the source tune. Others attempted to transcend their source material, as Beach was able to do in the first movement of the concerto with her invocation and transformation of Dvořák’s theme. Just as a critical mass of composers threw their proverbial hats into the arena of this style, Beach returned from Germany and was able to show that she had already created workable solutions to a seemingly vexing compositional challenge. Her work could then hold its own alongside an entire generation of composers who were tackling similar stylistic problems, many of whom, such as Texan Radie Britain (1899–1994), have likewise remained absent from most histories of American concert music from this period despite stunning popularity.
By 1944, Beach’s “Gaelic” Symphony and Piano Concerto certainly would have sounded very old-fashioned next to Aaron Copland’s folksy but angular Appalachian Spring or even Florence Price’s cinematic Songs of the Oath, both of which date from that time. Yet the persistent vitality of Beach’s orchestral works during the three decades prior to her death signals that conductors, critics, and audiences valued something in this music that not only allowed it to remain on concert programs but also convinced Beach that writing new orchestral music might be self-defeating. That something was a kernel of song clothed in the garments of conventional symphonic structures. With two successful, popular, and idiomatically current pieces always at the ready, why would Beach risk disrupting a sterling compositional reputation with something new? Perhaps, ironically, song had made her orchestral career.
