The eighteenth-century ideal of a master musician equally skilled as performer and composer – exemplified by Bach, Haydn, and Mozart – became increasingly rare in the nineteenth century. Despite noteworthy exceptions like Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff, most musicians specialized in one or another aspect of musical production, and their choices were reinforced by the expectations of critics and audiences. In assessing the life and career of Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867–1944), it is enlightening to view her as one of those rare individuals who achieved fame as both a performer and a composer. The decision to vacillate between composer’s desk and piano bench was not entirely her own, but it is crucial to a complete understanding of her significance.

Beach’s origin story – like those of Mozart and Mendelssohn – centers on her role as a child prodigy. Her mother reported that the precocious child had a repertoire of forty tunes before her first birthday, and that she could improvise a simple harmony to her mother’s melody before her second birthday. She exhibited early evidence of perfect pitch, along with a synesthetic association of colors with pitches and keys. This association was so strong that as a toddler she cried if adults sang a song that she knew in a different key than she had learned, and as a six-year-old she transposed a piano piece up a step to accommodate for an out-of-tune piano at a friend’s house.²

In a 1914 article entitled “Why I Chose My Profession,” Beach recalled that her mother, “who was a fine musician and wanted to raise one,” subscribed to Gerald Stanley Lee’s “top bureau-drawer principle” of education, in which a student’s motivation is stimulated by keeping a desired object just out of reach.³ In her case, this meant that the family piano, which Clara Cheney played often, was off limits to her daughter Amy during her toddler years. The future composer and pianist was obsessed with music and thought about it constantly, but she was limited to singing until the age of four or five, when a visiting aunt granted her access to the instrument. Amy was then able to play the songs that she had been singing and to improvise accompaniments as she had seen her mother do. When she was six, her mother consented to giving her lessons, and by the age of seven, her playing of a Beethoven sonata and Chopin waltz was sufficiently advanced that her parents received offers from several music managers. These were declined, and Amy’s public performances were curtailed.

The family moved from her birthplace of Henniker, New Hampshire, to Chelsea, Massachusetts, around 1871, and from there to Boston in 1875. This opened a new world of educational possibilities, and Amy had the opportunity to study piano with professional teachers, first Ernst Perabo (1845–1920) and later Carl Baermann (1839–1913). Both had been trained in German conservatories, and it may have been they who reportedly advised Beach’s parents to send her abroad for a European musical education. By this time, German musical education had become the preferred professional training for any American who could afford it,⁴ but again Amy’s parents refused to consider this course of action.

Adrienne Fried Block explored the motivations and results of the restrictions placed on Amy’s musical opportunities by her parents. She argued that the “top bureau-drawer principle” was an outgrowth of Protestant religious practices in child-rearing, and that her parents’ decisions prioritized Amy’s eternal salvation over her musical development.⁵ There is an additional explanation, however, that may have unconsciously played into their deliberations.

Amy’s parents, Charles Abbot Cheney (1844–95) and Clara Imogene Marcy Cheney (1845–1911), were members of the Progressive Generation (born 1843–59), whose worldview was shaped by the political polarization and harrowing losses of the Civil War. When they became parents, this cohort of Americans prioritized home comforts and security over adventure and risk. Their children, known as the Missionary Generation (born 1860–82), grew up in the 1870s loved and protected in ways that would not be replicated until the Baby Boomer childhood of the 1950s. When the Missionary Generation reached adulthood, full of confidence and accustomed to having their wishes fulfilled, they set out to change the world as missionaries, civic leaders, and reformers. These generational characteristics help to explain Clara’s need to restrict her daughter’s public activities as well as Amy’s desire for a public career.⁶

Beach’s recollection of the next stage of her life is telling. She wrote, “When I was sixteen, I was allowed to make my début in Boston. I played the Moscheles G minor concerto with a large orchestra. Life was beginning!”⁷ This October 1883 debut, so long deferred, was an unalloyed triumph. The Boston Transcript gushed:

Praise like this can open doors for a young performer, and now that her parents’ permission had been granted, Amy played frequently in solo recitals, chamber music, and concerto performances throughout the Boston area. On March 28, 1885, she debuted with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Wilhelm Gericke in the Chopin Concerto in F minor, op. 21, earning praise for her sensitive interpretation of this notoriously challenging work. A month later, she famously impressed America’s leading conductor, Theodore Thomas, when he conducted her in a performance of the Mendelssohn Concerto. He assumed that a seventeen-year-old girl would not be able to handle the brisk tempo of the finale, but when she heard his slow tempo, she “swung the orchestra into time,” to the amusement of all present.⁹ She proved herself equally adept at solo recitals and chamber music, making inroads with the most prominent musicians in Boston’s close-knit professional circle.¹⁰ It seems that in her teens she already possessed the technique, artistic sensitivity, and fearlessness that are the essential ingredients of a successful performance career. She also possessed unusually large hands, with broad palms and very long thumbs, as shown in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Wedding photo of Dr. and Mrs. Beach. Box 17 envelope 15, Amy Cheney Beach

(Mrs. H. H. A. Beach) Papers, 1835–1956, MC 51, Milne Special Collections and Archives, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham, NH.

But on December 2, 1885, Amy’s career trajectory shifted dramatically with her marriage to Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach (1843–1910). Their engagement had been announced in the Boston papers in mid-August, but it is unclear how the two met.¹¹ A prominent surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and lecturer at Harvard University who was actively building a private practice treating Boston’s wealthiest and most socially connected residents, Beach was a 42-year-old widower when he married the 18-year-old Amy. She moved into his home at 28 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston’s exclusive, tree-lined counterpart to New York’s Park Avenue. She immediately took his name, and for the rest of her life was known in the United States as “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.” Her new home came with a staff of servants, allowing her to devote all her time to music and her husband. The spacious second-floor music room contained a grand piano, ample shelf space for her growing collection of books and scores, and a bay window facing north onto the trees of Commonwealth Avenue. A reporter who described the room in 1897 noted, “A quaint empire desk inlaid in various light woods tells the place where all Mrs. Beach’s best and most serious work has been done, and it is considered a family friend and treasure.”¹²

Dr. Beach’s position in Boston society was worth protecting, which may help to explain – but not justify – the stipulations he placed on his young bride. She was not to play concerts for money, but rather to donate her fees to charitable causes. During the twenty-five years of their marriage, she averaged one solo recital per year, often advertised prominently as a benefit for a specific charity. She was allowed to accept invitations to play chamber music or concerto performances with orchestra more often, but again the fees were donated to charity. She was also not to teach piano lessons, which were associated with working women of a lower class. She was expected to serve as hostess on social occasions as appropriate for a female member of Boston’s elite Brahmin set. These stipulations clearly changed her status in the city. When Amy played the Mozart Concerto in D minor with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on February 20, 1886 (less than three months after her marriage), she donated her fees to the free-bed fund of the Massachusetts General Hospital, and her concert two weeks later was for the “kindergarten entertainment at Mr. Robert Treat Paine’s.”¹³ The Boston Transcript review of the BSO concert was considerably less specific about her playing than that of the previous year. The reviewer stated: “Mrs. Beach, who was enthusiastically received by the audience, played it very beautifully indeed; especially fine was her playing of the Romanza (second movement); she struck the true keynote of Mozart’s grace.” He then went on a lengthy diatribe about the cadenza chosen for the performance, without another word about her playing.¹⁴ The impression is of a reviewer who does not wish to say too much.

Again, Amy found her career path circumscribed by a member of the Progressive Generation. If Dr. Beach restricted her performance career, however, he had bold plans for her compositional career. It is unclear why he saw potential in her as a composer, since at the time of her marriage she had published only two songs with piano accompaniment. “The Rainy Day” (published by Oliver Ditson in 1883) was a setting of a Longfellow poem whose vocal line begins with a direct quotation from the third movement of Beethoven’s “Pathetique” Sonata, op. 13, transposed from C minor to F minor. “With Violets,” op. 1, no. 1 (Arthur P. Schmidt, 1885) was a setting of a poem by Kate Vannah dedicated to the opera star Adelina Patti. Dr. Beach also had intimate knowledge of a third song, however: on January 16, 1885, he had sung her unpublished song “Jeune fille, jeune fleur” on a recital of voice students of Mr. L. W. Wheeler.¹⁵ These songs are pleasant and sentimental but do not show the maturity and technique that reviewers had praised in her piano playing. More to the point, they contain no inkling of the large-scale works that would eventually become her most distinctive creations. Nonetheless, the couple agreed that she would devote the bulk of her time to composition rather than performance. As an added incentive, she was allowed to keep the publication royalties her compositions generated.¹⁶

Beach’s composition training had been limited to one year of harmony and music theory lessons with Junius Welch Hill (1840–1916). In 1885, Amy’s parents had consulted the recently appointed conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Wilhelm Gericke (1845–1925), who recommended that she learn composition by studying scores of European masters rather than studying with a composition teacher.¹⁷ After her marriage, Henry urged her to follow the same course. A conscientious student, she acquired the best books available on orchestration and counterpoint, along with a substantial collection of scores. These she studied carefully to develop the skills she would need to go beyond songwriting. It is a testament to her discipline and innate talent that her autodidactic approach yielded remarkable results and gave her the tools for a successful compositional career. In later years, she gave credit to her husband and mother for developing her into a composer:

The following twenty-five years saw Beach’s most productive period of compositional activity and a steady trajectory of growth. Her first major work – which will be discussed in the chapter by Matthew Phelps – was a setting of the Latin Mass for choir, soloists, and orchestra. The work was premiered by the Boston Handel and Haydn Society on February 7, 1892, a reflection of the Boston musical establishment’s support for their hometown composer. Her next major work was a symphony that made extensive use of Irish folk themes. Known as the “Gaelic” Symphony, it was written in the shadow of American debates over musical nationalism spurred by the New York residency of Antonín Dvořák from 1892 to 1895 and was premiered by the BSO on October 31, 1896. This performance elicited a much-quoted note of appreciation from her fellow Boston composer George Whitefield Chadwick, who confirmed her position in the inner circle of local musicians: “I always feel a thrill of pride myself whenever I hear a fine new work by any one of us, and as such you will have to be counted in, whether you will or not – one of the boys.”¹⁹ The experience she gained in orchestrating her symphony prepared her for her next orchestral work, the Piano Concerto in C-sharp minor, completed and performed with the BSO in 1900. These two works will be analyzed in Douglas Shadle’s chapter on the orchestral works.

Beach enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the Kneisel Quartet and its first violinist, Franz Kneisel (1865–1926). She performed major chamber works with them, including the Schumann Piano Quintet, op. 44, in 1894 and the Brahms Piano Quintet, op. 34, in 1900. Her familiarity with these works, along with her relationship with Kneisel, informed the composition of her Violin Sonata, op. 34 (1896), and Piano Quintet in F-sharp minor, op. 67 (1907). Both are serious works whose virtuosity is used not for empty display but for the exploration of serious thematic connections. Beach’s engagement with the European cosmopolitan tradition in these works will be the subject of Larry Todd’s chapter on the chamber music.

The major works that Beach wrote and premiered between 1892 and 1907 represent much more than the determined efforts of an autodidact. Beach (and by extension her principal patron, her husband) directly confronted the assertions of George P. Upton in his influential 1880 book Woman in Music. Writing five years before Beach’s marriage, Upton acknowledged that women had successfully created serious works of painting, poetry, and fiction but had achieved nothing comparable in music:

He went on to assert that the proper role of women in music was as muse to great men. In the home at 28 Commonwealth Avenue, this hierarchy was reversed, as Dr. Beach played the role of muse and his wife created works in the major cosmopolitan genres that Upton had declared to be the province of men alone because of their ability “to treat emotions as if they were mathematics, to bind and measure and limit them within the rigid laws of harmony and counterpoint.”²¹ Beach’s choral, orchestral, and chamber works put the lie to Upton’s claim that women lacked the intellectual facility to plan and create works of integrity in these genres. Of her husband’s role in her compositional development, Beach later recalled,

As Beach produced ever more ambitious concert works in the major genres of Western music, she continued to broaden her pianistic repertoire in her annual benefit recitals. These events sometimes included her own piano works, but their primary focus was European solo piano literature from the Baroque to Romantic eras. During the 1890s and 1900s, she composed a steady stream of shorter solo works with programmatic titles, including the Four Sketches, op. 15 (1892) and the Trois morceaux caractéristiques, op. 28 (1894). Curiously, she never composed a piano sonata, but in 1904 she produced a solo piano work that was a worthy companion to her major works in other genres. The Variations on Balkan Themes, op. 60 (1904), is a 30-minute compendium of virtuoso techniques that introduces and develops four songs shared with her by a missionary to Bulgaria. The poignancy of the first of these songs, “O Maiko moyá,” inspired some of her most evocative pianistic writing. Her extensive catalog of piano compositions is explored in Kirsten Johnson’s chapter.

The preceding works demonstrate that Beach took seriously the imperative of composing in the major concert genres, but it was her solo songs that gained her a national following. In a 1918 interview, she explained how her composition of songs differed from her work on more “serious” genres:

As Katherine Kelton discusses in her chapter, Beach’s art songs spanned the entirety of her career and drew from a vast array of textual sources. At their best, they contain tuneful melodies that lie well in the voice, supported by piano accompaniments that enhance but do not overpower the vocal lines. Her early song “Ecstasy,” op. 19, no. 2 (1892), was so successful that its royalties financed the purchase of a vacation home in Centerville on Cape Cod.²⁴ Several of her song sets strike a balance between the serious aspirations of her instrumental works and the lighter tone of her parlor songs, most notably the Three Shakespeare Songs, op. 37 (1897), and the Three Browning Songs, op. 44 (1900). Her setting of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “When soul is joined to soul,” op. 62 (1905), illustrates her Romantic penchant for communicating emotion through harmony in procedures reminiscent of her contemporaries Wolf and Mahler.

As Beach’s reputation grew, she found herself in demand as a composer for women’s events at international expositions outside of the Boston area. She was commissioned to write Festival Jubilate, op. 17, for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago as well as a Hymn of Welcome, op. 42, for the 1898 Trans-Mississippi International Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska. She would later be called upon to write a Panama Hymn, op. 74, for the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. These occasional pieces were too specific to have a significant afterlife, but they reflected her reputation as a leading American composer.

Beach’s growing stature in Boston circles and her national reputation were materially aided by the support of Arthur P. Schmidt (1846–1921), a German immigrant who made his fortune as a music publisher in Boston. Schmidt was so grateful for the opportunities afforded him in the United States that he made a practice of promoting American composers, even when their works were not highly remunerative.²⁵ He was also a patient of Dr. Beach who was grateful for the medical care he received. The extensive correspondence between the publisher and the two Beaches demonstrates a close friendship as well as an important professional relationship.²⁶ Schmidt was Amy’s sole publisher during her twenty-five-year marriage, and his carefully prepared editions of nearly all the works she composed during this era contributed to her growing reputation. He afforded her the courtesy of multiple proofs, allowing her to develop high standards and an assiduous skill at proofreading. In 1906, he published a handsome 134-page booklet with a biographical essay by the eminent music theorist Percy Goetschius (1853–1943), a complete work list, and extensive excerpts from positive reviews.²⁷ She used this pamphlet frequently for publicity purposes in the following years. Bill Faucett’s chapter chronicles the importance of Schmidt to her early career as well as her subsequent turn to other publishers.

The death of Beach’s husband on June 28, 1910, brought an end to her comfortable life in Boston society and initiated a series of events that proved transformational for the rest of her life. Adrienne Fried Block’s detective work has demonstrated that Beach was not a wealthy widow, as was generally assumed. She speculates that – unknown to Amy – the couple may have been living beyond their means, as Dr. Beach left her only a small inheritance, including the heavily mortgaged house on Commonwealth Avenue. Within a short time, she dismissed the servants and moved with her ailing mother to the Hotel Brunswick. In October, Beach declined Schmidt’s offer of an advance on future royalties, writing instead:

In a subsequent letter freighted with symbolic as well as practical significance, Beach offered to return the works of art that Schmidt had given to her husband as gifts over the years of their friendship.²⁹ He refused to take them back, but there is no evidence that he acceded to her wishes for increased advertising of her works.

Her mother’s death on February 18, 1911, deepened her grief while paradoxically removing the last impediment to a new life, and she took a bold step in that direction by sailing for Europe on September 5, 1911, her forty-fourth birthday. She had never been out of the country before, and she sailed with the intention not of taking a grand tour but rather of reestablishing her career as a performer. She lived for the next three years in the Pension Pfanner in Munich, the same hotel as soprano Marcella Craft (1874–1959), who had accompanied her on the transatlantic crossing. Dr. and Mrs. Beach had known the Indiana-born Craft since her days as a vocal student in Boston in 1898; now she was a leading singer with the Bavarian Opera, where she had sung under the direction of Richard Strauss. Beach spent her first year soaking up the culture by attending concerts and playing in private gatherings at which Craft introduced her to prominent German and expatriate American musicians.

By the fall of 1912, Beach had engaged a concert manager, who scheduled a series of concerts for her under the name of Amy Beach. She later described to an interviewer her reluctance to drop her husband’s name after so many years, but the decision was made in the interest of promoting her to a European public that had no knowledge of her husband or his position in Boston society.³⁰ In the fall of 1912 she played her Violin Sonata on chamber concerts in Dresden and Leipzig to encouraging reviews. On January 17, 1913, she performed an entire concert in Munich, again playing the Violin Sonata and two sets of songs, along with songs by Brahms and piano solos by Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms (Block notes that this was a program of “the four B’s”).³¹ The reviews of this concert and another five days later on which she played her Piano Quintet with the Munich Quartet were mixed, as critics struggled to assess her work as composer and performer. Her playing was deemed technically brilliant but lacking in tonal warmth. Her chamber works – the lengthy and virtuosic Violin Sonata and Piano Quintet – were praised for their artistic aspirations, while her songs were criticized for being pleasant, accessible, and unworthy of her talent.

Nevertheless, it was the songs that piqued the interest of the public, and she wrote several letters to Schmidt asking him to send more copies of her songs to European distributors so that she could capitalize on their newfound popularity. Schmidt had established a branch office in Leipzig, Germany, in 1889 and had actively promoted the works of Edward MacDowell and other American composers there for decades. In 1910 he had sold the rights to his European catalog to B. Schott’s Söhne, perhaps explaining why he was unresponsive to Beach’s pleas for better support. The correspondence tapered off in 1913 without satisfying her demands.³² From 1914 to 1921, Beach’s new works were published by G. Schirmer, a New York rival to Schmidt.

Beach continued to expand her reach that spring with concerts and private performances in Breslau, Meran, and Berlin, all of which were reported in the American music journal The Musical Courier. At a Berlin gathering hosted by the journal’s European correspondent Arthur Abell, she made the acquaintance of American conductor Theodore Spiering, whose advocacy proved decisive in the following year.

The fall 1913 concert season allowed Beach to hear her major orchestral works performed by three German orchestras. Concerts in Leipzig on November 22 and Hamburg on December 2 both featured her “Gaelic” Symphony and Piano Concerto. Her performance of the concerto with Spiering and the Berlin Philharmonic took place in the Prussian capital on December 18. After each of the three concerts, critics lavished praise on her playing and compositions. There were none of the complaints about her tone quality that she had received in chamber concerts the previous year, perhaps a reflection of the power and strength needed to project the solo part of a piano concerto. Her compositions were universally praised, and the words of the eminent critic Ferdinand Pfohl after her Hamburg performance proved useful for publicity materials for years to come. He characterized her as

Beach’s European stay had been extended from an initial plan of one year to a third year with no definite end in sight. The entry of Germany into World War I on August 1, 1914, however, forced the cancellation of a planned tour of Europe that fall, and although she remained in Munich for another month, she reluctantly sailed for America, arriving in New York on September 18.³⁴ During her absence, the musical press had publicized her activities regularly, and she was about to discover the value of a European reputation with American audiences.

Beach returned immediately to Boston, where she received a warm welcome from friends and many potent reminders that her professional standing had grown rather than shrunk during her three-year absence. She was greeted by a standing ovation when she played for 700 persons at the Boston MacDowell Club on November 18. An all-Beach concert on December 16 (the first of many that would be given throughout the country in the years ahead) brought out Boston’s musical and social elite. But despite – or perhaps because of – the many memories of her Boston years, Beach chose to leave her home and take up residence in New York instead. She relinquished the calm and settled life that her parents and her husband had envisioned for her, opting instead to travel the country, with the bustling musical center of New York as her home base.

During the next few years, Beach finally achieved her childhood dream of making her living as a touring piano virtuoso. Thanks to the reputation she had burnished in Europe, along with the efforts of a competent manager, she could state in a December 1914 interview, “I have now enough dates to be quite satisfied, especially as I want some of my time left for composition.”³⁵ She crisscrossed the country, playing with major orchestras, accompanying singers in lieder recitals, and playing for the innumerable music clubs that formed such an important part of urban social life in the early twentieth century. Continuing her association with world’s fairs, she was commissioned to write her Panama Hymn, op. 74, for the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, and she was honored with two “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach Days” by the Panama–California Exposition in San Diego on June 28, 1915, and May 2, 1916. One commentator called her the “lion of the hour” in February 1915.³⁶

Owing to the decades she had spent at the quaint inlaid empire desk in her music room at 28 Commonwealth Avenue, Beach had an extensive list of works to offer in concert. She was widely regarded as America’s leading female composer, and she had compositions in various genres that could suit nearly any recital or concert setting. As a consequence, she now played primarily her own works, which in turn helped promote sales of the musical scores. Her songs were perennial favorites, and her playing of her solo piano compositions earned accolades from amateur club members and professional critics alike. The Violin Sonata and Piano Quintet were featured on chamber concerts, while her “Gaelic” Symphony was played by prominent orchestras, including twice by Leopold Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra.

But none of her compositions was as personally gratifying as her Piano Concerto in C-sharp minor, op. 45. After its April 1900 premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the work had languished, with just one subsequent performance (this time in a two-piano arrangement with Carl Faelten) in Boston on February 17, 1909. She revived the work with great success on her German concerts, after which it became a staple of her American tours during the mid-teens. She played it with at least five major orchestras, in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. In these performances, she truly attained the ideal of the Romantic pianist–composer who was thoroughly skilled in both disciplines. Chicago reviewer Stanley K. Faye wrote of her performance there:

As she approached her fiftieth birthday, she was clearly at the height of her pianistic powers, and the large, muscular hands that were evident in the marriage photo with Dr. Beach allowed her to compete on equal terms with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

This invigorating new career path – deferred since her teens – lasted for only three years. In part because of wartime restrictions, but primarily because of the need to care for a terminally ill cousin, Beach drastically curtailed her concert engagements and took over the management of her own career in February 1918. For the next two years she lived in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, and restricted her performances to nearby venues. Though she returned tentatively to touring in the early 1920s after the death of her cousin, she never rekindled the frenetic pace she had embraced after her return from Europe in 1914.

The decade of the 1910s began and ended with personal tragedy, but it had given Beach the opportunity to pursue her dream of a performance career. The demands of that career meant that her compositional output was reduced significantly. Although she wrote several virtuoso piano works and some of her most compelling songs during her time in Germany, she lacked the time and space for concentrated efforts in composition after returning to the United States. In the summer of 1921, a new source of inspiration reinvigorated her compositional activities and resulted in the second most productive period of her life.

Marian MacDowell (1857–1956), widow of the eminent composer Edward A. MacDowell (1860–1908), had turned their farm in Peterborough, New Hampshire, into an artist’s colony in 1907. After declining several previous invitations, Beach finally agreed to spend a month as a fellow of the colony in 1921. There, in an isolated cabin in the New Hampshire woods, she found the conditions that had been lacking for artistic creation in the previous decade, and she released a flood of new compositions. Block attributes this inspiration to the fact that “in the following five years, nearly fifty works appeared (opp. 83–117), twice as many as in the previous ten years.”³⁸ Her pattern was to compose or sketch new works during her summer residencies at the colony and to revise, perform, and publish them during the winter seasons. She returned to the colony nearly every summer until declining health forced her to discontinue her residencies in 1941. Robin Rausch’s chapter discusses the fruitful interaction between Beach and Marian MacDowell.

The solitude of the MacDowell Colony was crucial to Beach’s renewed productiveness, but the natural surroundings also proved to be an important source of inspiration. Among the works created during the summer of 1921 were a pair of impressionistic piano pieces incorporating the song of the hermit thrush. This native bird was an insistent visitor to Beach’s cabin, and its triadic song forms a striking counterpoint to the dreamy textures of the first piece, “A Hermit Thrush at Eve,” op. 92, no. 1. Continuing in the impressionistic vein, Beach also wrote a set of five piano pieces entitled From Grandmother’s Garden, op. 97. These evocative works are harmonically adventurous and emulate the pianistic textures of Debussy and Ravel. Both of these sets were published by the Arthur P. Schmidt firm, now under the leadership of Henry Austin since the death of the founder on May 5, 1921.

The compositions of the 1920s also included several of the large-scale works that had been vital to her early career but absent during the 1910s. Her Suite for Two Pianos Founded upon Old Irish Melodies, op. 104, was an expansive virtuoso work of 106 pages. It was dedicated to the duo piano team of Rose and Ottilie Sutro, who featured it on their tours of the United States and Europe. The Canticle of the Sun, op. 123, was a twenty-five-minute choral setting with orchestral accompaniment of a text by St. Francis of Assisi. It proved to be enduringly popular with both amateur and professional choirs, especially at churches in New York City. The Quartet for Strings in One Movement, op. 89, was begun in 1921 and completed during a visit to Italy in 1929. Block notes that this work is the most modern and tonally unstable of Beach’s works, perhaps inspired by the Italian composer Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882–1973), but certainly influenced by the sparse textures of Inuit melodies she worked into the composition.³⁹

Following the loss of her remaining close family members in the early 1920s and the reduction of her touring activities, Beach increasingly expanded her engagement with musical organizations. She helped establish a Beach Club for music students in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, part of the nationwide movement of music clubs. She took leadership roles in the Mu Phi Epsilon music sorority as well as the Music Teachers National Association. Her extensive association with the National League of American Pen Women led to the founding of a Society for American Women Composers, for which she served as the first president in 1925. Her work with these organizations is chronicled in Marian Wilson Kimber’s chapter.

After more than a decade in New Hampshire, Beach relocated in the fall of 1930 to New York City. There she spent her winters living at the American Women’s Association Club House, filling her time with practicing, performing, and attending concerts. Summers were divided between the MacDowell Colony and her home in Centerville. She was surrounded by a circle of younger female professional musicians who provided companionship and musical collaboration. Perhaps most important to her musical life during this decade was her close association with David MacKay Williams (1887–1978), organist and choirmaster of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church. He and the church’s soprano soloist, Ruth Shaffner (1897–1981), were close friends and active supporters of Beach, who wrote numerous sacred works for the services. Religion had long been important to her, and the combination of musical stimulation and religious solace at St. Bart’s allowed her to become, in Block’s words, “virtually a composer in residence.”⁴⁰

Beach continued to derive inspiration from her summers at the MacDowell Colony throughout the 1930s. Her still-formidable piano skills were a valuable support during chamber music evenings at the colony, and she appreciated the associations she made with younger artists in various fields. Among the most fruitful was her connection with novelist and playwright Nan Bagby Stephens (1883–1946), who wrote the libretto to Beach’s 1932 one-act opera, Cabildo. Stephens was a native of Atlanta, Georgia, whose works focused on Southern themes and often featured African American actors. As discussed in Nicole Powlison’s chapter, the opera was a reworking of Stephens’ 1926 play of the same title set in New Orleans during the early nineteenth century. The opera was premiered in Atlanta on February 27, 1945, two months after Beach’s death.

Beach developed serious heart problems in 1940, causing her to end her performing career and virtually all travel for the last four years of her life. She was forbidden by her doctor from all piano playing, an ironic bookend to a life that began with her mother’s forbidding of the family piano. She was remembered fondly by her fellow MacDowell colonists, and she received several important honors, even as World War II raged in Europe. On May 8, 1940, she was honored with a testimonial dinner and concert at Town Hall, attended by about 200 persons. Two months later, Musical Quarterly published a lengthy article by Burnet C. Tuthill, which summarized her career and praised her compositions.⁴¹ Though acknowledging that the music of the American Romantic composers was out of style at the time, he urged performers to revisit it in search of unanticipated beauties. In November 1942, a two-day festival in honor of her seventy-fifth birthday was presented at the Phillips Gallery in Washington, DC, by violinist Elena de Sayn. The programs featured a representative sampling of her most important compositions, with emphasis on the chamber works.

After months of declining health, Beach died on December 27, 1944, surrounded by friends in the Hotel Barclay. The New York Times published a generous obituary in which she was designated “most celebrated of American women composers.”⁴² It listed several of her compositional “firsts” and described in detail some of the highlights of her performing career. In death as in life, Beach was remembered as both an accomplished pianist and a trailblazing composer. Not surprisingly, the obituary is devoted primarily to her nineteenth-century career, with scant mention of her recent activities. As the United States entered the final months of World War II, musical tastes had shifted decisively away from Romanticism, and the music of Amy Beach would need to wait for a more receptive generation to rediscover it later in the century.

On the evening of June 5, 1906, women from all over the United States gathered at the Armory in St. Paul, Minnesota, a building that held 3,000 people. There they were treated to a concert of women composers performed primarily by professional musicians.¹ On the concert program, dominated by European composers, were multiple pieces by the American, Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, including several compositions she had arranged for cello and her cantata, Sea-Fairies, op. 59. Sea-Fairies had recently been commissioned by and was dedicated to Boston’s Thursday Musical Club.² Many of the performers on the Minnesota program, among them soprano soloist Jessica De Wolf and two pianists, were members of St. Paul’s Schubert Club, founded in 1882; Elsie Shawe, who had helped to arrange the entire event, was its past president.³ The concert took place at the eighth biennial meeting of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), a national organization made up of over 5,000 women’s groups.

That the 1906 performance of Amy Beach’s recent music was made possible by multiple women’s organizations is emblematic of much of the composer’s career. Beach’s position as America’s foremost woman composer initially came about because she produced two large-scale compositions, her Mass, op. 5, and her “Gaelic” Symphony, op. 32. The success of these works, performed by leading musical ensembles, suggested that she had transcended the musical restriction of women to the domestic sphere, the space in which they were encouraged to compose only songs and piano music, and that her music would henceforth be heard in the public world dominated by men. Yet this position, achieved at the beginning of the composer’s professional life, overlooks the roles of women’s organizations and women musicians in her ongoing success.⁴ Beach’s life paralleled the rise of women’s clubs in America, and the movement played an important role in the way that her career unfolded. That a composer of her stature was active in numerous gendered musical communities underscores the multiple ways in which such clubs served as the American infrastructure for women musicians during this period. For Beach, clubs were not only a place for her to appear as a professional pianist and to present her music, but also a source of commissions and, more broadly, they represented an audience interested in purchasing and performing her music. Some groups in which Beach was involved provided her with a community that was social as well as musical; they were made up of like-minded women, some of whom became her collaborators. Because of Beach’s special cultural position, she was viewed as an important leader and a role model for other women in music. Her appearance at events organized by women validated them and legitimized their activities, and clubs took full advantage of Beach’s fame and status.

Although late nineteenth and early twentieth-century women’s clubs had a major role in suffrage, temperance, labor reform, and other social movements, their widespread influence on American music is frequently overlooked. Women often justified their collective entrance into public activity as “municipal housekeeping,” merely extending their domestic care into the civic arena, and some music clubs’ activities – organizing community singing, providing scholarships, or outreach to settlement houses – served to overshadow the opportunities they provided for musical professionals. Clubs have been discounted due to the supposed “amateur” status of their members, though the amateur/professional distinction is often artificial when it comes to women’s organizational networks, which Karen Blair has described as shaping “the context in which professionals marketed their artistic wares.”⁵ Women’s club members generally performed music for each other without pay; despite some clubs’ demanding audition requirements, their semiprivate nature and the race, gender, and class status of the participants caused them to be publicized in the society pages rather than newspapers’ entertainment sections.⁶ Yet some clubs, particularly in urban areas, could be quite substantial in size, and those that had paying but nonperforming “associate” members functioned like a concert series, either through scheduled performances of members or through bringing leading professional artists to their city to appear before large audiences. That many clubs are now perceived to have been “amateur” in nature is largely due to assumptions related to the gender of their members; many clubwomen were, in fact, professionals, including music teachers or church musicians. Clubs not only provided opportunities for women musicians, some of whom were very accomplished, but also served to connect professional and amateur musicians by linking private teachers with potential students and creating audiences before which professionals could perform.⁷ Clubs across America were sometimes named for successful female composers (including Beach herself, but most often French composer Cécile Chaminade), suggesting that not all women were content with their supposed “amateur” status.⁸ Clubs thus served as important venues for women whose access to the larger musical world was made more difficult by their gender. Not only did clubs provide opportunities locally, but also the large networks created through the meetings and publications of two federations, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), founded in 1890, and the National Federation of Music Clubs (NFMC), established eight years later, shaped the careers of Beach and many other women musicians; the National League of American Pen Women (NLAPW) was particularly influential for women composers. Beach recognized “the value of women’s clubs as a factor in the development of our country” early in her career; in an 1898 article in The Etude, she noted that “American audiences display a power of judgment in marked advance of that shown fifteen years ago” due to clubs’ “unceasing toil” in cultivating “a true appreciation of great music and musicians.”⁹

The earliest women’s clubs were literary societies and study groups for self-improvement, though they clearly had a social function as well. As a young married woman in the 1890s, Beach was a member of such clubs, and though they were not specifically related to music, many featured music in their meetings as a matter of course. Adrienne Fried Block has described Beach’s involvement in an unnamed lunch club, and in 1894 the composer became a founding member of New Hampshire’s Daughters, a fifty-member club of women who, like her, had been born in the state.¹⁰ The group combined literary, social, and charitable work, and each of its regular programs was organized by women born in the same New Hampshire county.¹¹ Both of Beach’s clubs contained more notable writers than musicians; novelists Margaret Deland and Sarah Orne Jewett were members of the lunch group, and writer Kate Sanborn served as the first president of New Hampshire’s Daughters. Although Beach’s marriage purportedly prevented her from undertaking a public career, in 1897 she could be heard performing her own songs with Mrs. Heinrich Unverhau between recitations and talks on the state’s history before 200 fellow clubwomen at the Hotel Vendome, followed by a tea.¹² That this occasion was semiprivate and perceived as less than fully professional made it socially acceptable for a musician of Beach’s gender and class. In 1900 the club hosted the New Hampshire Federation of Women’s Clubs, and Beach’s two new Browning settings, “The Year’s at the Spring” and “Ah, Love, But a Day!,” were sung by Margaret Murkland. Originally commissioned by the Boston’s mixed-gender Browning Society, the two songs would become staples of women’s clubs’ repertoires.¹³

When she lived in Boston, Beach became well known among men’s clubs, women’s clubs, and clubs made up of both genders. Several clubs programmed concerts entirely of her music after the turn of the century, including the Chromatic Club, founded by Edward MacDowell, the Amphion Club (a male vocal ensemble), the College Club, and the Thursday Morning Musical Club; both the latter club and the Chromatic Club made Beach an honorary member.¹⁴ However, even before Beach began to make appearances at clubs outside of New England, her reputation preceded her. The premiere of her Mass with the Boston Handel and Haydn Society in 1892 was reported in pro-suffrage women’s journals and was the subject of a paper at a meeting of the Women’s Press Association in San Francisco in 1892.¹⁵

Beach’s appearance at the Women’s Musical Congress of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 undoubtedly helped solidify her national reputation among women’s organizations. The impetus for the NFMC, of which Beach was a member, is frequently attributed to Rose Fay Thomas’ address, “The Work of Women’s Amateur Musical Clubs,” at that gathering. Beach’s Festival Jubilate, op. 17, had been commissioned for the dedication of the Woman’s Building, and she returned to the Chicago Congress for three performances, so she, along with over 1,000 other women, presumably heard Thomas’ address.¹⁶ When the Federation was formally established five years later, the women gathered at Chicago’s Steinway Hall read a letter from Beach before moving on to their musical program.¹⁷ The composer maintained close ties with the group as it grew into its national role, particularly after 1911 when her husband and mother had died and she undertook a more active professional career. The Federation’s magazine, Musical Monitor, frequently reported on Beach’s activities, including those in Europe, and published notices of her availability as a composer-pianist, citing the leading orchestras with which she had appeared. One article profiled Beach’s manager, M. H. Hanson, who arranged her European appearances with soprano Marcella Craft, noting that he had taken special interest in music clubs.¹⁸ Beach seems to have used the Monitor deliberately to keep her name before the club members, for in 1917 it published a letter from her merely describing the landscape in New Hampshire where she was working during the summer.¹⁹

The National Federation provided Beach with numerous performing opportunities, and she sometimes presented her own music at its biennial meetings. She appeared at the 1915 NFMC meeting in Los Angeles, playing her Piano Concerto with the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra; her music was also heard on a choral program, and the Brahms Quintet performed her Piano Quintet.²⁰ In the teens, Beach assisted in judging NFMC competitions, and she appeared before clubs in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Boston, and elsewhere. Beach was less involved with the larger GFWC than with the NFMC, though she did appear at its June 1922 meeting in Chautauqua, New York, performing her own compositions as well as music by Marion Bauer and Marion Ralston. As it was typical practice for the GFWC to mix music in with its lectures, the composer followed addresses on “woman and moral idealism” and “woman and public health.” Beach also made one of her numerous appearances promoting the MacDowell Colony, which received much financial support from women’s clubs, appearing with Marian MacDowell and performing compositions she had composed while in residence there.²¹ After attending the GFWC’s meeting, Beach was impressed enough with the organization to agree to become head of its Aid to American Musicians Committee, though she largely served as a figurehead in order to bring notice to its work.²²

Although the compositions that clubwomen most often performed were Beach’s songs and character pieces for piano, her other works were programmed by them as well. The rise of female string players resulted in violin being the third most common performance medium in clubs, behind voice and piano.²³ Many of Beach’s songs, like those of other American composers of the period, were published with violin obbligato, and although cellists were less frequently part of women’s clubs, a few featured violoncello.²⁴ Thus, Beach’s Two Songs, op. 100, from 1924, were scored for an ensemble of the most widely available women’s club members: soprano, violin, cello, and piano. More importantly, many clubs had women’s choruses that could perform the thirty compositions Beach produced for that ensemble as well. Some works resulted from clubs’ commissions, such as The Rose of Avon-town, op. 30, by the Caecilia Ladies’ Vocal Society of Brooklyn, and The Chambered Nautilus, op. 66, by Victor Harris, the conductor of the St. Cecilia Club of New York.²⁵ Sea-Fairies was probably the most performed of the larger works, and women’s clubs’ programs frequently featured the two choral arrangements Beach did of her most popular songs, “The Year’s at the Spring,” and “Ah, Love, But a Day!”

Clubs were also important as audiences for Beach’s largest works. Longtime music critic Charlotte Mulligan, who founded Buffalo’s formidable Twentieth-Century Club, reported that “through the instrumentality of a musical club of women” the “Gaelic” Symphony “was secured for presentation” by the Buffalo Orchestra in 1897 and that “at the matinee it was most interesting to see one club, then another, come down the aisle and take reserved seats.”²⁶ Likewise, the 1901 performance of Beach’s Symphony by the Baltimore Symphony on an all-women composers’ program came about because of the organization, United Women of Maryland.²⁷ Even when Beach’s musical appearances were in conjunction with larger professional ensembles, women’s clubs in cities where she performed served as additional venues for recitals and as social hosts, housing her and providing receptions. For example, in 1915, when Beach appeared at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco to hear her Panama Hymn, op. 74, sung at its opening ceremonies, she was received by the wealthy Century Club, where she was treated to a play by four of its members.²⁸ In November 1928, when the Women’s Symphony of Chicago programmed two movements of the “Gaelic” Symphony, Beach stayed in the home of composer Phyllis Fergus, who was a Symphony board member and president of the Musicians Club of Women. The Club’s published program of Beach’s ten-day residency lists a series of social and musical events (see Figure 2.1). The composer was hosted by not only the Musicians Club of Women but also the Melodist Club, the MacDowell Society and the Cordon Club, Mu Phi Epsilon, and Pro Musica.²⁹ Thus, the club network greatly enhanced Beach’s opportunities. As Beach’s invitations to appear with leading orchestras faded in the 1920s in the era of Modernism and jazz, she continued to appear before women’s organizations.³⁰

Figure 2.1 Musicians Club of Women program for Beach’s 1928 Chicago appearances.

Box 16, folder 27, Amy Cheney Beach (Mrs. H. H. A. Beach) Papers, 1835–1956, MC 51, Milne Special Collections and Archives, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham, NH.

Beach’s compositions also figured heavily in the educational agendas of American women’s clubs, which aspired to create a culture of American music on par with that of Europe. The advertisements of Beach’s longtime publisher, Arthur P. Schmidt, marketed Beach’s music and that of other American composers to clubs. Not only did Schmidt’s notices in the Musical Monitor indicate that he had women’s compositions available, but they sometimes grouped pieces by possible club program themes, such as nature or “inspirations from the poets.”³¹ Many clubs included Beach as they worked to familiarize themselves with women composers, such as the Woman’s Club of Evanston, Illinois, which in 1900 heard a presentation on Beach along with reports about Clara Schumann, Fanny Hensel, Cécile Chaminade, Jessie Gaynor, and others.³² However, particularly after World War I, nationalism, more than gender, shaped clubs’ study and performance agendas. Clubs regularly studied what they perceived to be America’s music history and performed the music of its composers; thus, Beach’s music appeared alongside that of Edward MacDowell, George Whitefield Chadwick, Ethelbert Nevin, Charles Wakefield Cadman, and many others. Beach’s national identity made her the ideal figure to represent the success of both American music and women’s musical efforts.

When the GFWC prepared publications to assist members with their musical educations, Beach was included. In 1919 Ida Gray Scott, head of “Club Development in Music,” published a suggested year-long program for clubs in the General Federation Magazine, the ninth program of which was devoted to Beach; the plan was circulated and republished regionally, such as in the Illinois Club Bulletin.³³ The same year, Mrs. William Delaney Steele of the GFWC Department of Music reported circulating 4,800 copies of a list of available materials; a tiny pamphlet providing a brief overview of Beach’s career into the 1910s found in the GFWC’s archives probably dates from around this time.³⁴ Three years later the Music Department sent out 20,000 study club outlines of monthly programs, so information about Beach was able to circulate widely.³⁵ The leading figure in the General Federation’s ongoing music initiatives in the 1920s was the music chair, Anne Shaw Faulkner [Oberndorfer]. Faulkner’s book What We Hear in Music, designed to be used with Victor Recordings, presented Beach’s “Ah, Love, But a Day!” and “The Year’s at the Spring,” both of which had been recorded, as evidence that music could be popular and also represent the classical music tradition.³⁶ The book went through a dozen editions.³⁷ Faulkner’s article, “American Women in the World of Music,” published in Better Homes and Gardens in 1925, concentrated heavily on Beach, noting that both songs were “bestsellers,”³⁸ and they also appeared on lists of compositions for the music appreciation classes sponsored by women’s clubs and schools. In 1936, Beach gave scores of her compositions, including her major works for women’s voices, to the General Federation’s circulating music collection. The GFWC’s loan program had been providing copies of Beach’s pieces to clubs around the country since at least 1925; also available was a six-page typed report about the composer’s achievements.³⁹ In the 1930s, Beach was the woman composer best represented in the GFWC’s music brochure, which listed suggested programs containing over twenty of her compositions.⁴⁰ The frequent appearance of Beach’s music on club programs, whether amid works of other Americans or on events devoted entirely to her, demonstrates the success of the two Federations’ efforts. The honors and accolades from women’s groups continued to the end of Beach’s life. In 1941, to celebrate its half century, the General Federation named Beach on a list of fifty-three women who “represented the great strides made by women in the last fifty years.”⁴¹ At its Atlantic City meeting that year, the Federation’s huge National Jubilee Chorus, made up of clubwomen from among its two million members, sang “The Year’s at the Spring.”⁴²

Beach was also an important figure for the National League of American Pen Women (NLAPW), an organization for professional writers, artists, and composers founded in 1897 by female journalists.⁴³ Musicians were the smallest component of the group, but by 1922 when Beach began to attend the League’s national meetings it had fifty composer members;⁴⁴ in the 1930s, its total membership was 2,000 women in fifty-three branches, located in almost every state.⁴⁵ During her early years with the League, Beach also served as the first president of the Society of American Women Composers, probably founded at the Pen Women’s 1924 meeting, perhaps because there were limited opportunities for performance of members’ works at their national conferences. Beach had larger ambitions for the very small Society, made up of only around twenty members; she wrote that it might “come to mean much in the future of American music if we go about the work in the right way.”⁴⁶ In 1925, while Beach was both Society president and the Pen Women’s National Music Chairman, the League sponsored its “First Annual Festival of Music of the American Woman Composer” at its Washington, DC, meeting. The Society presented a series of chamber music concerts in New York before it disbanded in 1932, reportedly due to financial difficulties stemming from the Depression.⁴⁷ Although the Society is frequently cited as significant in historical accounts of women composers, there were many more concerts of music by women presented by the Pen Women after its demise.

Beach must have found the company of so many other professional female composers stimulating, though she remained the leading figure among them (see Figure 2.2). She had been the Pen Women’s honored guest as early as 1922, and she became an expected feature of their Washington meetings;⁴⁸ her 1938 plans to go to France were publicized, as if to alert members in the United States that she would not be attending their conference. For the 1934 meeting, music chairman Phyllis Fergus arranged six days of concerts billed as a “Golden Jubilee” in honor of Beach’s fifty years in music. Beach performed the piano parts for her compositions on an evening concert – including Sea-Fairies – and appeared on a radio broadcast. The high point of the week was a recital in the East Room of the White House for First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; four hundred tickets were issued to attendees.⁴⁹ It took several letters to convince the First Lady and the White House staff, and part of Fergus’ approach was to emphasize that the League would be honoring Beach: “Mrs. Beach is no longer at our call as she has wont to be. She is older and we cherish the time she comes to us. With the Cherry Blossoms in April – it is easy to think of her great music to the ‘Year[’]s at the Spring.’”⁵⁰

Figure 2.2 Composer Group of the National League of American Pen Women, 1932. Back row, left to right: Reah Jackson Irion, Margaret McClure Stitt, Pearl Adams, Phyllis Fergus, Bonita Crowe, Marianne Genet, Annabel Morris Buchanan, Helen Matthews De Lashmutt, Josephine Forsyth, Gena Branscombe, and Louise Crawford. Front row: Francesca Vallejo, Amy Beach, Grace Thompson Seton (NLAPW president), Dorothy DeMuth Watson, Mary Carr Moore, Mary Howe, and Dorothy Radde Emery.

Louise Crawford Papers, Iowa Women’s Archives, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City.

Whether it was linking one of Beach’s best-known songs to Washington’s flowering trees that enticed Mrs. Roosevelt to grant permission for a “short entertainment” is unclear; however, Fergus obviously recognized that the senior composer was important to her request. In July 1935 Beach’s music was featured in another series of Pen Women concerts in Chautauqua, New York, a festival of six musical events “Honoring American Women Composers.”⁵¹ Fergus again arranged a Pen Women’s concert featuring Beach at the White House in April 1936, at which the composer performed her piano music and spoke about the MacDowell Colony.

Just as the NFMC worked to create junior clubs for children in the 1920s, establishing over 2,300 of them by the final year of the decade, Beach was likewise concerned about children’s musical education and involved in musical outreach to young people.⁵² Not only did she compose piano works appropriate for younger players, but in 1922, with the help of the music club in her mother’s hometown of Hillsborough, New Hampshire, she also sponsored two “Beach clubs” for local children of different ages.⁵³ Beach was also involved with the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA), although it was not primarily a women’s group. She initially served as an advisory member to the group’s Association of Past Presidents ca. 1918–20. In the 1930s, she published three essays in their journal, including versions of presentations she gave at their national conferences in Detroit in 1931, Washington, DC, in 1932, and Philadelphia in 1935. She was elected to serve as one of the directors on the organization’s executive committee from 1933 to 1935, and her songs sometimes appeared on the Music Teachers National Association’s contest repertoire lists.⁵⁴

Beach’s position as a role model for younger women lasted from her early years to the end of her life. In 1899, she was initiated as an honorary member of the women’s fraternity, Alpha Chi Omega, by the Zeta chapter of the New England Conservatory. Beach “remembered” the group when she performed her Concerto with the Boston Symphony, presumably supplying tickets for the event; she also produced “A Song for Class Day” for them.⁵⁵ Beach’s membership in another collegiate group, Mu Phi Epsilon, apparently came about through her visits to Chicago, as its publications indicate that she was a member of the Iota Alpha chapter of the Chicago Musical College. In 1922, she entertained young chapter members at the home of Mrs. Albert J. Ochsner, former president of the NFMC.⁵⁶ Beach’s association with Mu Phi Epsilon appears to have continued, as in 1933 she was hailed as “Aunt Amy” in an article in their publication, The Triangle, which described how “splendid citizenship is her constructive influence everywhere.”⁵⁷ Beach was an honorary “aunt” to some of the composers she knew through organizations such as the NLAPW as well, and they viewed her as a mentor. While Beach’s connections to groups such as Mu Phi Epsilon may not have been as important to her social and professional lives as those described previously, they were yet another audience who might teach and perform her music; Alpha Chi Omega subsidized the building of a studio at Beach’s beloved MacDowell Colony.

Beach’s memberships were not just a way for her to be part of national women’s networks, but also represented local means for music-making and sources of companionship. For example, she had an ongoing relationship with the Hillsborough Music Club and performed there while living in the town. In the last decade and a half of her life, Beach’s professional connections centered on a group of women who became the focus of her personal life when she settled in New York City. Then in her sixties, Beach often took a maternal role among the younger women musicians in her immediate circle, whose use of “Aunt Amy” signified their friendship and true intimacy. Of Beach’s closest “nieces” or “children,” the most prominent figures were the mezzo-soprano Lillian Buxbaum, the soprano Ruth Shaffner, the pianist Virginia Duffey, and the violinist Eugenie Limberg; collectively the performers represented the typical scorings that had been heard in women’s music clubs for decades. Beach called this circle of young women her “kittens” and preserved hundreds of letters to and from them.⁵⁸ Shaffner, Duffey, and Limberg came to live at the American Women’s Association (AWA) Clubhouse, which served as Beach’s New York home. In her years in the building on West 57th St. and later when the AWA moved to 48th St., Beach was able to socialize with some of the other women residents and to concertize for them. Beach arranged for Duffey and Limberg to pay for their room and board at the AWA (and to have access to better practice rooms) by performing short concerts there. The pair performed Beach’s Violin Sonata and recruited others to assist them in presenting her larger chamber works as well.⁵⁹ In 1935, Beach became a member of P.E.O., a sorority to which Ruth Shaffner belonged, and Beach, Duffey, and Limberg frequently performed brief recitals together for the New York chapter.⁶⁰ Although P.E.O. supports women’s education, it has never been formally associated with music. Nonetheless, in 1944 Beach composed a song, “Ballad of the P.E.O.,” for the group, just as she had for Alpha Chi Omega decades before.

When Beach first met Ruth Shaffner, she was a soloist at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church where the composer was a longtime attendee, and the dramatic soprano frequently sang her sacred music there. Shaffner came to be one of Beach’s closest friends and a regular partner in her concert life, performing her songs on over 200 recitals in the 1930s, including at the two White House performances.⁶¹ Beach’s effusive letters to her friend reveal the deep regard she had for the singer’s talents; she enthusiastically complimented Ruth’s wonderful performances, heaping praise on her singing, her perfect diction, her looks and demeanor, and her “spiritual force.” Shaffner also functioned as Beach’s surrogate family in her declining years. The two women spent holidays and vacations together and traveled to England together in 1936. Shaffner was at Beach’s bedside when she passed away in 1944.⁶²

Lillian Buxbaum was also a member of Beach’s female circles during the final two decades of her life. Beach praised her friend’s singing highly, and Buxbaum became one of the composer’s musical collaborators in club settings in New England. Although Buxbaum’s relationship with Beach was not specifically related to club activities, as a part-time singer, wife, and mother, she was the kind of female musician who frequently made up women’s music clubs’ memberships. Buxbaum’s first appearance singing Beach’s music was on a program for the Women’s City Club of Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1924. She sang on the radio with Beach in Boston in 1931 and was one of two singers who performed with the composer at a Music Guild lunch for the renowned French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger in 1937, as well as on other occasions.⁶³ However, the women’s relationship was also deeply personal, with Lillian and her husband Isidore functioning as family members for Beach, assisting her with acquiring groceries and in undertaking travel, and helping to arrange for her frequent moves from New York City to Centerville, Hillsboro, and the MacDowell Colony as she aged.⁶⁴ The depth of their intimacy and Beach’s regard for Buxbaum’s longtime friendship is apparent from her will, which provided Lillian with her Centerville home.

Beach’s singular position as the best-known American female composer of her era, whose name still regularly appears amid those of the Second New England School and other leading male figures, has made it possible to overlook the tremendous networks of women musicians who supported her throughout her life and whose countless activities contributed to her success. Though Beach made breakthroughs by composing in major genres, and her large-scale music was performed by professional male ensembles, organizations typically understood as “nonprofessional” that were founded and maintained by women, growing into national prominence during her lifetime, were equally if not more important to her career. Groups such as the GFWC, the NFMC, and the NLAPW provided Beach with ongoing performance opportunities at which she could promote her own music. The amateur and professional female musicians of the GFWC and the NFMC made up thousands of clubs across the country at which Beach’s music was regularly studied and heard. Beach’s stature made her the ideal figure around which women’s clubs could shape their promotion of American composers, simultaneously emphasizing individual female creativity and casting women’s music as a national good. In turn, Beach’s remarkable success validated their efforts to make women central to American musical life.

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:

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

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

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

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

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

The Arthur P. Schmidt Company

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

G. Schirmer, Inc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Houses of Presser, Ditson, and Church

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schmidt Redux and Beach’s Other Publishers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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