On July 9, 1921, Amy Beach wrote to her publisher, the Arthur P. Schmidt Company, asking them to send a selection of her scores to the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where she was working as a resident artist for the first time. “I have promised to contribute some of my music to the Tea Room, which opens on Friday, the 15th, to be sold for the benefit of the Colony, among books, etc. written by people who have worked here,” she wrote. The Nubanusit Tea Room was a new venture at the MacDowell Colony. It offered refreshment to the tourists who motored through the area during the summer months, while providing information about the Colony and its artists in hopes of gaining new supporters. Beach concluded her letter to the Schmidt Company with enthusiasm for her first Colony experience: “I am having a wonderful month of work here, and love the place beyond words.”2
Founded in 1907, the MacDowell Colony embodied Edward MacDowell’s dying wish to turn his New Hampshire farm into a gathering place for creative artists, where they could work undisturbed in a community of their peers. The plan was but a vague idea when the composer became ill. Marian MacDowell, the composer’s wife, established the Colony shortly before her husband’s death to prove to him her commitment to the project. She was a talented pianist who had once been MacDowell’s student. For almost four decades, she managed the Colony from June through September, and then traveled the country during the off-season, promoting the Colony and playing her husband’s music as only she could.3
The MacDowell Colony became an important part of Amy Beach’s life. Facilitated by her friendship with Marian MacDowell, Beach held eighteen residencies at the Colony between 1921 and 1941. She worked well there. Inspired by the woodland setting and the uninterrupted solitude of a studio of her own, her time at the MacDowell Colony guaranteed productivity. Beach felt a great debt to the Colony, which she repaid by becoming one of its fiercest supporters.
Amy Beach was twenty-one years old, in her third year of marriage, and living at 28 Commonwealth Avenue when, in the fall of 1888, Edward and Marian MacDowell returned to the United States from living abroad and settled in Boston. The MacDowells lived in Boston for the next eight years. While it is easy to imagine Beach and the MacDowells moving in the same musical circles during this time, the existence and extent of a friendship between Beach and the couple remains speculative. There are no known letters or other documents from these years that suggest that Beach knew either Marian or Edward MacDowell. Later in her life, Beach remembered her acquaintance with Edward MacDowell as “slight” and recalled only “two occasions when we met.”4 The sole evidence of a possible acquaintance is an undated letter Beach preserved in her scrapbook from Edward’s mother Fanny, written on stationery of the Copley Square hotel in Boston. Fanny writes: “My dear Mrs. Beach I send back the jar & napkin. The broth was the most delicious I ever ate – will you accept the roses with my deepest gratitude to your dear husband for his care of me. Faithfully always Fanny D. MacDowell.”5
The earliest known correspondence between Beach and Marian MacDowell dates from 1906, a year after the national press publicly announced Edward MacDowell’s tragic illness and deteriorating condition.6 Beach had long admired MacDowell’s music, and now she intentionally included it on her recitals in support of the ailing composer. In a letter dated November 27, 1906, Beach discusses plans for two upcoming programs. She also offers encouragement to Mrs. MacDowell in her decision to teach the coming winter: “There are so many people who would naturally go to you for the best understanding of your husband’s music, that I feel sure of your success in a unique field.” In closing, Beach expresses her admiration for Marian’s “great courage” in the face of difficult circumstances. “It is needless to assure you again of the deep sympathy which Dr. Beach and I feel for you in this terrible experience. You are much in our thoughts, as you must be in those of all people to whom the music of your dear one has meant many, many hours of happiness.”7
Edward MacDowell died January 23, 1908, leaving Marian MacDowell a widow at age fifty. Two years later, on June 28, 1910, Henry Beach died. Amy Beach was forty-two. Neither woman had children. Widowhood conveyed a freedom to start life anew, unfettered by the prevailing strictures of marriage. Marian MacDowell styled herself the matriarch of what would become America’s premiere artist colony. Amy Beach pursued life as an itinerant concert artist and composer, and she became celebrated as the Dean of American Women Composers.
The paths of Amy Beach and Marian MacDowell did not cross for several years after their husbands’ deaths. Beach cared for her ailing mother until she died in February 1911. This double loss of both her husband and mother, occurring so close in time, proved the catalyst that led Beach to head to Europe, where she traveled and performed for the next three years. During this time, Marian MacDowell focused on the growth and development of her fledgling Colony. From 1910 to 1914, she produced a series of summer pageants and music festivals to publicize the Colony and draw new talent and supporters. The first of these productions was the 1910 Peterborough Pageant, an outdoor drama that used Edward MacDowell’s music in a retelling of the town’s history. A phenomenal success, it garnered national press coverage and was the impetus for Mrs. MacDowell’s first lecture–recital tours.8 World War I eventually brought an end to these summer Peterborough productions. The growing conflict made it increasingly dangerous for Amy Beach to remain abroad. She returned to the United States in September 1914.
Beach’s success overseas buoyed her career back home. In 1915, her tour schedule took her to the West coast, where she heard her Panama Hymn, op. 74, performed at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Her music was featured at the 1915 biennial meeting of the National Federation of Music Clubs in Los Angeles, June 24 through July 3, and included a performance of her piano concerto, with the composer at the piano. California feted her, and Beach maintained a base there for over a year. In 1916, she came back East for good and moved to Hillsboro, New Hampshire, seven miles from her girlhood home of Henniker and roughly twenty miles due north of Peterborough and the MacDowell Colony.
Beach’s return to New Hampshire coincided with the launch of an endowment campaign to secure the financial future of the MacDowell Colony. By now, it was recognized as a critical success. But financial stability remained elusive. As the Colony approached its tenth anniversary in 1917, Marian MacDowell was nearing sixty. She did not know how much longer she could continue her grueling lecture–recital schedule. In the fall of 1916, appeals for support began to appear in newspapers and popular music magazines. These often portrayed the MacDowell Colony as a uniquely American institution, with an important role in fostering a national cultural identity. Writing in The Musical Courier of September 7, 1916, composer Carl Venth suggested: “If ever a real national American art is born, and I believe the time is near, the ideal conditions for a demonstration of genius loci are offered in Peterboro, which in a very short time should mean as much to America as Bayreuth means to Germany or Stratford-on-Avon to England.” He considered the MacDowell Colony “a national asset of the greatest value” and believed it was “the duty of every musical organization and of every woman’s club to take a share in supporting this splendid effort.”9
Amy Beach’s name first appears in the annual reports of the MacDowell Colony in 1917, listed among the contributors to the endowment fund “raised by Mrs. MacDowell.” This was the first of many donations that she made annually thereafter. And when Marian MacDowell invited the National Federation of Music Clubs to hold their 1919 biennial meeting in Peterborough, Beach performed on the program, playing her Suite Française in a special recital at the Peterborough Town Hall on July 2.10
Amy Beach came to work at the MacDowell Colony as a resident artist in 1921, at Marian MacDowell’s personal invitation. By then, the Colony had nineteen studios that accommodated close to fifty artists per season. Most were chosen by an admissions committee from close to 300 applications. Beach, however, was always invited by Marian MacDowell. In the early years Marian chose all the artists. As Colony founder and resident manager, she continued to have great latitude in extending invitations to artists of her choosing. While Beach benefited from her friendship with Marian MacDowell, the Colony benefited as well. Beach was an established composer at the height of her career, and her presence lent the still-young institution a certain prestige.
A typical day at the MacDowell Colony started with a communal breakfast in Colony Hall, a refurbished barn that served as the social hub of the Colony. Artists then headed to their assigned studios for a day of uninterrupted work. A cardinal rule stated that no artist should disturb another while at work in their studio unless they had been invited. Lunch baskets were quietly delivered to studio doors at midday. At the end of the day, residents relaxed in Colony Hall, where a rousing game of cowboy pool was routine after the evening meal. Beach worked in the Regina Watson studio exclusively when she was in residence. The studio was built in memory of the composer and beloved piano teacher from Chicago, Regina Watson, funded by her friends and former students.11 Designed in the neoclassical style, it remains one of the largest studios at the Colony, and at that time served as both a music studio and a small recital space for informal performances.
A basic tenet of Colony life was Edward MacDowell’s belief in the correlation between the arts. He thought that artists from different disciplines had much to learn from one another, and a Colony residency brought together a unique group of visual artists, writers, and composers each season. During the summer of 1921, Beach met poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935), a regular at the Colony who became a friend, and sculptor Bashka Paeff (1889–1979), who years later sculpted a bust of the composer. Writer Padraic Colum (1881–1972) was translating old Irish songs and introduced Beach to the tune she later arranged in her piano piece “The Fair Hills of Éiré, O,” op. 91. Beach encountered the poet Katharine Adams and set two of her poems, “The Moonpath” and “I Shall Be Brave.” Marion Bauer (1882–1955) was also in residence that summer and composed her “Prelude in D major,” for the left hand alone, the first of her Six Preludes, op. 15, which she dedicated to Beach.
By Beach’s own account, her first season at the Colony was magical. It was the summer of the infamous hermit thrush that sang so insistently that Beach transcribed the bird’s song and wrote two piano pieces based on the melody: “A Hermit Thrush at Eve” and “A Hermit Thrush at Morn,” op. 92. She annotated the manuscript of “A Hermit Thrush at Morn” with a statement of authenticity: “These bird calls are exact notations of hermit thrush songs, in the original keys, but an octave lower, obtained at MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, N.H.”12 Beach began performing these pieces that fall and implored her publisher to expedite publication. “If you can only do two of the piano pieces early in the year, I should prefer the two Hermit Thrush pieces, as the interest in them is really remarkable everywhere I play them, either in public or private. They appeal to the musician and bird-lover alike, and I am constantly asked when they are to appear in print.”13 The pieces count among her most popular piano works. In 1998, critic David Wright singled them out for praise in an article on Beach’s music for the New York Times: “In this music, Beach does for the Romantic piano piece what Ives did for the symphony: express human longings for nature and the divine through a polytonal mix of natural and artful sounds. Such discourse came readily to these successors of the New England Transcendentalists.”14
Beach told the hermit thrush story often when she spoke about the MacDowell Colony. It captures perfectly the inspiration that she found in nature and illustrates the ideal environment that the Colony provided for her creative work. The studios were strategically situated on the grounds, almost 500 acres, tucked into the woods and far enough apart to ensure that Beach had what she most needed to compose: “silence in solitude.” Beach elaborated on this idea in a speech she gave to the Music Teachers National Association in 1932, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the MacDowell Colony. “It is not merely the absence of noise or any other distracting influence. It is the actual communication which we receive from some source outside ourselves, which can only reach us through ‘the innermost silence.’”15 In her speech, Beach twice mentions The Garden of Vision, a book by L. Adams Beck, published in 1929. Lily Adams Beck was a pseudonym of Canadian author Elizabeth Louisa Moresby (1862–1931). Moresby traveled throughout Asia and lived in the East most of her life. She was a devout Buddhist and published on themes of Eastern culture and philosophy under the pseudonym L. Adams Beck. Beach quotes from The Garden of Vision: “To live with lovely things is not a part of the Cosmic Law, but the whole of it when rightly understood. For art and true spirituality are one.” Later in her speech, she quotes from it again: “Why do the spiritually minded seek solitude? Because Divinity sits in solitude, weaving happy spells.” This comes from a paragraph that begins: “Nature holds the secret, for Nature is not the veil of the Divine but Divinity itself and being so can interpret man’s own divinity to him.”16 We do not know how Beach became acquainted with The Garden of Vision, but the ideas it espoused, equating art and spirituality, and nature and divinity, clearly spoke to her. Beach had spent a decade’s worth of summers at the MacDowell Colony when she made this speech, and it is evident that her Colony experience shaped her personal artistic credo.
At the MacDowell Colony, Beach found that “music poured out of her that had been all but dammed up.” Beach’s biographer, Adrienne Fried Block, has documented the increase in Beach’s productivity that dates from her early residencies. In the five years following her first residency, Beach wrote nearly fifty works (opp. 83–117), doubling her output from the previous ten years. Almost all of Beach’s music going forward was written or sketched at the MacDowell Colony.17 Figure 3.1 shows her in the idyllic atmosphere that came to mean so much to her.
Figure 3.1 Amy Beach in the New Hampshire woods.
In the summer of 1922, Marian MacDowell and Amy Beach presented a joint program at the biennial convention of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, held in Chautauqua, New York, from June 20 to 30. The women’s club movement was vitally important to the success of both Amy Beach and the MacDowell Colony. There were clubs across the country, in towns big and small, all of them with potential audiences ready to lend their support to the latest cause. In the years following World War I, one of those causes was American music. The backlash against German music and musicians that surfaced during World War I, and lasted long after, resulted in a new appreciation for American composers and their music. American music was featured at the convention in a series of “Hearing America First” programs.18 In what was called “one of the outstanding programs,” Mrs. Edward MacDowell spoke about the MacDowell Colony and appealed to her listeners for financial aid to make it a permanent institution. She followed her talk with a performance of eight works by her late husband, and then introduced Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. Beach spoke about her Colony experience and played three pieces she had composed there the previous summer: her two hermit thrush works and “The Fair Hills of Éiré, O,” op. 91.
Around this time Beach became involved in the National League of American Pen Women and led the formation of the Composers’ Unit within the organization in 1924. That summer Dorothy DeMuth Watson, the League’s convention chairwoman, paid a visit to the MacDowell Colony, where both Beach and Mrs. MacDowell showed her around. Watson spearheaded what was billed as “the first annual festival by American woman composers” in 1925, held in conjunction with the League meeting in Washington, DC. The three-day festival, April 28 to 30, featured several works by Beach: her songs “A Mirage” and “Stella Viatoris,” op. 100, and her choral pieces “Peter Pan,” op. 101, and The Sea-Fairies, op. 59. The composer accompanied all the performances. On the final day of concerts, Mrs. Edward MacDowell was featured on the program, giving a “Tribute to the American Woman Composers.”19 There is no doubt that Marian’s speech was specific to the MacDowell Colony, which was welcoming women artists in all disciplines from its earliest years. Some of the women composers who held residencies before Beach include Helen Dyckman, Mabel Daniels (1878–1971), Margaret Hoberg (1890–1948), Frances Marion Ralston (1875–1952), Ethel Glenn Hier (1889–1971), and Marion Bauer. During Beach’s tenure at the Colony, she mentored many of the young women composers in residence, who called her “Aunt Amy” at Beach’s request. When the Society of American Women Composers was founded later in 1925, roughly half of the founding members had spent time at the MacDowell Colony.20
Many of these women composers held multiple, consecutive residencies at the Colony. Summer in Peterborough became an annual routine; it was a second home where they came to do their creative work without the distractions or responsibilities of daily life. Musicologist Denise Von Glahn elaborates on this idea of the Colony as a second home when she writes about “nature as a summer home.” Von Glahn notes that “unmediated access to all of nature remained an elusive experience for women in the early years of the twentieth century.” The MacDowell Colony provided “an opportunity to engage with nature in ways denied them in their more urban and busy lives.”21 Too often, escaping the city during the summer was an option only for those with the financial means to do so. While Colony artists were asked to pay a nominal daily fee toward room and board, there were stipends and fellowships available to anyone in need of assistance. The only requirement for acceptance was talent. The support that the Colony extended to women composers was unprecedented at this time.
As soon as Beach was eligible, she joined the Allied Members of the MacDowell Colony, an alumni group of Colony artists first organized in 1911, to “promote the general welfare of the Colony, preserve its traditions, and perpetuate the ideals upon which it was founded.”22 With the launch of the endowment campaign, the Allied Members were increasingly involved with fundraising. Beach spoke eloquently about the Colony on formal programs and organized benefit performances, such as the concert that was held on Saturday, March 7, 1925, in Washington, DC. Billed as “the first formal recital of her compositions in Washington,” Beach was assisted by composer and pianist Mary Howe and soprano Gretchen Hood. The concert featured the Washington, DC, premiere of Beach’s Suite for Two Pianos Founded upon Old Irish Melodies, op. 104. All musicians donated their services “to the cause of the famous MacDowell colony.”23
By the 1930s, Marian MacDowell’s failing health prevented her from touring any longer, and her loyal network of clubwomen was diminishing. The Colony marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1932, facing the economic consequences of the Great Depression along with the rest of the world. Beach, in her aforementioned speech to the Music Teachers National Association that year, appealed for support with this clarion call: “It rests with us all, who appreciate the value of that to which we have devoted our lives, to see that this flag of our country’s art-life never touches the ground!”24 The Colony survived the Great Depression, only to face devastation when a hurricane made a rare new England landfall in September 1938. Beach headed for Peterborough as soon as she could to check on her dear friend and assess the damage. The buildings held up remarkably well, with only minor repairs needed. But downed trees were everywhere. The Colony was forced to close in 1939 for the first time in its history. With clean-up costs estimated at $40,000, Marian MacDowell wasted no time. She assembled a team of lumbermen, built a sawmill on the property, and began fundraising. In an undated letter, likely from January 1940, Beach writes: “Dearest friend, Just a look at you, and the sound of your voice would coax the bark off a tree! I cannot be happy a moment In beginning the new year, without sending something to help even a little in the heroic work you are doing in your own heroic way.”25
The Colony reopened in the summer of 1940, but without Amy Beach. She had fallen ill in late March with bronchitis and was diagnosed with a serious heart condition. On May 14, 1940, Beach wrote to Marian MacDowell, updating her friend on her medical condition:
the bronchial condition is practically normal, but the heart is weak and therefore everything must be cut down to its lowest terms at present, so far as exertion is concerned. Now – of course that rules out the Colony for June!! It hurts to write this more than you can ever know, but you must know the facts and then be able to pass on the bliss that would have been mine to someone else.26
A year later she published a letter to the editor of The Musical Courier, an appeal for MacDowell Colony Aid in the name of her “Hermit Thrush,” to repair the chimney on the Regina Watson studio.27 Beach returned to the MacDowell Colony one last time in 1941, but she suffered a bout of extreme weakness caused by her heart condition and was unable to stay.
In her final years, Beach split her time between New York and Centerville, Massachusetts. Just weeks before the composer’s death, playwright Esther Willard Bates reported on her recent visit to Beach at the annual meeting of the Allied Members of the MacDowell Colony, which occurred each December in New York City: “She was sitting up in bed with a lovely pink jacket on and said in a firm voice, ‘Give them all my love, my very dear love, my very best love; be sure to give them my love.’”28 Seriously ill by this time, Beach had managed to call Marian MacDowell only a few days earlier, surprising her friend. Marian paid one last visit before Amy Beach died on December 27, 1944.
Amy Beach left the rights to her music to the MacDowell Colony, a gift that earned thousands of dollars each year in royalties and performance fees for roughly a decade after her death. The money was deposited into a special Amy Beach Fund. Amounts declined substantially in later years as Beach’s music lost favor and the fund was subsumed into the Colony’s general operating budget. But Beach biographer Adrienne Fried Block notes “a startling change” that occurred in the early 1990s. Performance and recording fees increased greatly; income from Beach’s music tripled between 1992 and 1995. In the early twenty-first century, Beach’s music continues to earn income for the MacDowell Colony. In 2022, royalties averaged $2100 annually over the last five years, a remarkable feat considering so much of her music is now public domain. No doubt, Amy Beach would have been elated to learn that almost eighty years after her death, her music continues to support her beloved MacDowell Colony.29
