US varsity marks 150th year of a pioneer of music
As a wealthy Victorian lady, Amy Beach never cooked or cleaned. But she did do a bit of sewing — carefully stitching new musical passages she composed atop older versions.
“What man would’ve done that?” wonders Dale Valena, museum curator at the University of New Hampshire, which is celebrating the 150th birthday of the pioneering American composer with an academic conference, musical performances and an exhibit of Beach memorabilia.
Born Sept. 5, 1867, in Henniker, Beach startled her family with her musical talents from early toddlerhood. By age 2, she was improvising alto parts to lullabies as her mother rocked her to sleep. At 4, she composed her first piano pieces while spending the summer on her grandfather’s farm, miles away from a piano. According to a biography by Adrienne Fried Block, Beach told her mother she had written them in her head, then proved it by playing them.
After she married a 43year-old Boston surgeon at age 18, Beach changed her focus from performing to composing. Her Gaelic Symphony premiered Oct. 30, 1896, performed by the Boston Symphony, the first symphony composed and published by an American woman. She became known internationally as the “dean of American women composers.”
“In a way that’s insulting. Why isn’t she just one of the great composers?” said University of Iowa music historian Marian Wilson Kimber, whose research focuses on female composers. “She was very, very well known in her time, but there’s this thing where women achieve, and then they are forgotten.”
Kimber is scheduled to present a paper at the Friday-Saturday conference about efforts by the National League of American Pen Women to promote female composers during the Great Depression. She said the league chose Beach to headline a concert at the White House for first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, but the event, late in Beach’s career, attracted little attention.