In recent decades, musicologists have steadfastly deconstructed received narratives about genius composers. Instead of explaining stylistic developments through extraordinary people’s singular musical achievements, we now place individuals’ actions within broader contexts.Footnote 1 This epistemological shift has benefitted academic understanding of women and music, as women have so often operated in the shadows created by myths about towering geniuses.Footnote 2 Amy Beach’s story, however, must be contextualized within her extraordinary relationship with sound and her public identities as prodigy, genius, and role model. Her musical aptitudes are crucial to understanding the context in which she navigated a long and successful career as a pianist and a composer. Beach rose to prominence both inside the spheres of music-making that were safer for privileged women at the end of the nineteenth century (performing piano in chamber settings and composing music for home-based performance) and outside traditional women’s milieus (composing music for big, male-dominated, public spaces, including large-scale choral and orchestral works).Footnote 3 Because of her unimpeached reputation and the commercial and critical success of her music, Beach became an important figurehead and role model for women composers and pianists. Thus, her prodigious abilities formed the basis of her public identities and shaped the music she made.
As Douglas Bomberger notes in his excellent concluding chapter on the composer’s posthumous reputation, Beach faded from public attention after her death. The stories about her, nevertheless, came to us via the advocacy of a small, devoted coterie of musicians and scholars active in the late twentieth century, who asserted that Beach deserves more academic and public attention.Footnote 4 Among this group of Beach champions, we must acknowledge Adrienne Fried Block (1921–2009) for her own singular and extraordinary research and advocacy. Block was an incredibly passionate and detail-oriented musicologist whose 1998 biography of Beach is a monument of archival research and musical analysis.Footnote 5 Indeed, Block was such an important Beach scholar that her 2009 passing left a palpable absence.
Writing about Amy Beach, then, means taking on the legacies of two extraordinary women. In The Cambridge Companion to Amy Beach, editor Douglas Bomberger and a team of writers have come together to produce a volume that honors Block’s work and takes advantage of emerging analytic approaches and ever-expanding digital access to primary sources. The scholars assembled for the project bring a host of expertise in various genres of music, music clubs, the MacDowell Colony, music publishing, and contemporary song and piano performance to help expand our understanding of how Beach and her works functioned in her world.
Bill Faucett’s chapter on Beach and her publishers illustrates beautifully how the project updates earlier work with new resources. Block and others focused on the extraordinary story of music publisher Arthur Schmidt, whose patriotism for his adopted nation led him to champion work by U.S. composers regardless of their commercial viability.Footnote 6 Schmidt’s well-known support and his extensive archives in the Library of Congress have allowed scholars to understand how his commitments to publishing Beach’s work helped her disseminate her music widely. Beach then broke with Schmidt around the time of her husband’s death in 1911, an event that Block covers extensively, but after that we have previously had little information. Faucett illuminates Beach’s publications after this pivotal moment. He meticulously traces Beach’s relationship with other reputable publishers, including Schirmer, Presser, and Ditson. Faucett explains how Beach’s music might have appealed to each publisher and why the arrangement would have drawn in Beach herself. A picture emerges of a composer not dependent on a sacrificial German man for the dissemination of her music but of a composer whose status meant that she commanded power in the relationship.
Many of the volume’s chapters illustrate how Beach’s strong community and her privileged positions in society supported her work over the years. In her chapter on Beach and women’s clubs, Marian Wilson Kimber wonderfully updates our understanding of the symbiotic relationship between Beach and these crucial institutions for women in art music. Wilson Kimber finds that Beach was supported through commissions, performing opportunities, friendships, and a listener base for her music. Crucially, Wilson Kimber makes clear that many women operating at the highest echelons of musical activity—with professional-level performing and compositional work—participated in music clubs. This provided Beach with a supportive female cohort. Similarly, Robin Rausch synthesizes recent research on Edward MacDowell by Douglas Bomberger, as well as new material on the MacDowell Colony, to better understand the abiding friendship between Beach and Marian MacDowell. Such new understandings situate Beach better in her community, showing the advantages and the support from which she benefited and contextualizing the often-repeated stories about the composer’s talents within her community.
The Cambridge Companion to Amy Beach also offers much to practitioners. I very much appreciate the inclusion of work by two people whose primary contact with Beach is through their performance of her work. Pianist Kirsten Johnson and singer Katherine Kelton address Beach’s keyboard music and songs, respectively. Not only do they offer information that is practical for performers, but they also offer academics helpful insights into Beach’s development as a composer of piano and vocal music that musicologists sometimes lack the expertise to recognize. Johnson’s work is at its best when describing the pianistic writing in works like the underappreciated The Watersprites, op. 90, and From Grandmother’s Garden, op. 97. Kelton is fascinated with Beach’s love of poetry and language, describing how the composer understood vocal production and eased the singing of her music. Both authors divide Beach’s work into stylistic periods tailored for their own performance modes, providing helpful insights for the rest of us.
I am also delighted to see the extensive analytic treatment given to Beach’s works by four of the authors tasked with addressing particular genres within Beach’s oeuvre. R. Larry Todd, who has already analyzed Fanny Hensel’s music extensively, illuminates the complex ways in which Beach imbued her own works with references to the general stylistic elements of other composers and traditions, as well as occasional overt quotations and borrowings. Todd’s approach to studying her chamber music rightly acknowledges Beach’s admiration of and her deep familiarity with Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann, and Antonín Dvořák, as well as her interests in traditional music from Europe and Native American communities. Douglas Shadle insightfully acknowledges ways that Beach leveraged her established songwriting process when she composed large-scale orchestral works. His observations go deeper than considering mere quotations of vocal music in orchestral works, instead considering the aesthetic and interpretive approaches that Beach honed in songwriting before applying them in works like her Gaelic Symphony in E minor, op. 32, and her Piano Concerto in C-sharp minor, op. 45.
As the first in the Cambridge Companion series to focus on a single female composer, the volume is a welcome addition to Beach studies and work on female art music composers. Musicologists, Beach enthusiasts, and performers can all find much value here. It partners well with Block’s biography, revealing ways that studying Beach’s work in the twenty-first century continues to shed light on the composer herself and her world.
Significantly, many chapters in the Cambridge Companion start with the stories of Beach’s extraordinariness, just as I and Block have done in earlier Beach scholarship.Footnote 7 In doing so, Beach scholarship on the whole has uncritically propagated the composer’s status as a genius without considering immense amounts of scholarship illuminating the damage wrought by notions of genius, particularly in art music traditions. Beach scholarship, including this volume, broadly ignores analytic tools offered by critical race and feminist studies that could counterbalance the damaging effects of genius studies and reframe Beach’s work within her positions of relative racial and class privilege.Footnote 8 Beach successfully navigated the social and cultural spheres of Boston’s elite. Though often circumscribed by strict gender codes, her career had the support of central members of her community, including her family and Boston’s thriving musical scene. This set of circumstances was enabled by racial, class, and religious privilege that we must acknowledge. My critique does not diminish the ways that this volume moves Beach studies forward; the authors show us beautifully that Beach’s life and work remain vital research topics from which we still have much to learn. But I also call on us all to tell the stories of U.S. society’s exclusions as much as their successful inclusions so that we can continue to better serve those who lack such relative privilege, whose stories most need telling.
Sarah Gerk is an associate professor of music at Binghamton University. She researches Amy Beach as well as music, immigration, and social encounters in the nineteenth-century United States, with a particular focus on the Irish diaspora. She has published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and Nineteenth-Century Music Review. Her book project, on the Irish diaspora and nineteenth-century U.S. music, is forthcoming from University of Illinois Press.
