“Music is the superlative expression of life experience, and woman by the very nature of her position is denied many of the experiences that color the life of man.”
– Amy Beach

Shortly after Antonin Dvorak arrived in the United States in 1892, he remarked to a Boston newspaper, “Here all the ladies play. It is well; it is nice. But I am afraid the ladies cannot help us much. They have not the creative power.”

But ten days later, another paper published a rebuttal from an ambitious young composer, Amy Beach of Boston. She wrote, “From the year 1675 to the year 1885, women have composed 153 works, including 55 serious operas, six cantatas, 53 comic operas, 17 operettas, six singspiele, four ballets, four vaudevilles, two oratorias, one each of fares, pastorales, masques, ballas, and buffas.”

Amy Beach was a child prodigy, a precocious pianist who made her debut with the Boston Symphony when she was only 16 years old. Two years later, she wed Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a Boston surgeon who was 24 years her senior. Dr. Beach conditioned that she must list her names on concert programs and compositions as Mrs. H.H.A. Beach and that she must “live according to his status, that is, function as a society matron and patron of the arts.” She agreed never to teach piano (an activity widely associated with women), to limit performances to two public recitals a year, and to devote herself more to composition than performance. She wrote, “I thought I was a pianist first and foremost.”

Later in life, Amy Beach gave credit to her husband for supporting her composition career, writing, “It was he more than anyone else who encouraged my interest upon the field of musical composition in the larger forms. It was pioneer work, at least for this country, for a woman to do.”

Written in 1916, Beach's Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet borrows the theme from her earlier work, An Indian Lullaby. This quintet shows her flair for romantic invention, taking the audience on a journey through complex harmonies and gorgeous melodies that strikes me as much more forward-looking than her contemporary Dvorak’s works. It is a truly wonderful piece that deserves more performances. I can’t wait to hear mousai REMIX and Martha Long perform it!  

A few months before her death in 1944 at age 77, Beach reflected on the status of women in music. “I have no special views at all about the success or non-success of women in my field,” she said. Perhaps concerned that her legacy might endure as political instead of musical, Beach downplayed the sexism that she had fought throughout her life. “My work has always been judged from the beginning by work as such, not according to sex,” she insisted. “The question has rarely ever been raised.”

“Remember that technic is valuable only as a means to an end. You must first have something to say – something which demands expression from the depths of your soul. If you feel deeply and know how to express what you feel, you make others feel.” 
– Amy Beach

Ron Blessinger
Executive Director, 45^th Parallel Universe