47 Facts About Amy Beach

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach was an American composer and pianist.

Amy Beach was the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music.

Amy Beach was one of the first American composers to succeed without the benefit of European training, and one of the most respected and acclaimed American composers of her era.

Artistic ability ran in the family: Clara was reputedly an "excellent pianist and singer," while Amy showed every sign of being a child prodigy.

Amy Beach was able to sing forty songs accurately by age one, she was capable of improvising counter-melody by age two, and she taught herself to read at age three.

Amy Beach did not have a color for every major key, and could only associate color with two minor keys.

Amy Beach's mother sang and played for her, but attempted to prevent the child from playing the family piano herself, believing that to indulge the child's wishes in this respect would damage parental authority.

Amy Beach often commanded what music was played in the home, becoming enraged if it did not meet her standards.

Amy Beach began formal piano lessons with her mother at age six, and soon gave public recitals of works by Handel, Beethoven, and Chopin, as well as her own pieces.

Amy Beach agreed never to teach piano, an activity widely associated with women" and regarded as providing "pin money.

Amy Beach followed this up with an important milestone in music history: her Gaelic Symphony, the first symphony composed and published by an American woman.

Amy Beach's husband died in June 1910 and her mother 7 months later.

Amy Beach went to Europe in hopes of recovering there.

Amy Beach was honored often by concerts of her music and receptions during 1915, and her Panama Hymn was commissioned for the occasion.

In 1915, and again in 1916, Amy Beach visited her aunt Franc and cousin Ethel in San Francisco, who by then were her closest living relatives.

Amy Beach resumed using that married name, but used "Amy Beach" on bookplates and stationery.

The Centerville cottage had been built on a five-acre property Amy Beach had bought with royalties from one song, Ecstasy, 1892, her most successful composition up until then.

In 1924, Amy Beach sold the house in Boston she had inherited from her husband.

Amy Beach used her status as the top female American composer to further the careers of young musicians.

Amy Beach served as President of the Board of Councillors of the New England Conservatory of Music.

Amy Beach worked to coach and give feedback to various young composers, musicians, and students.

Amy Beach acted as a mentor for these young composers, encouraging them to spend time perfecting their craft through laborious practices.

From 1904 to 1943, Amy Beach published numerous articles focusing on programming, preparation, and studying techniques for serious piano players, basing many of her findings on her own practice routine.

Amy Beach worked to create "Beach Clubs," which helped teach and educate children in music.

Amy Beach served as leader of some organizations focused on music education and women, including the Society of American Women Composers as its first president.

Amy Beach went to concerts "almost daily" and found Respighi's Feste Romane to be "superbly brilliant," but disliked a piece by Paul Hindemith.

Amy Beach returned to the United States with a two-week stopover in Leipzig, where she met her old friend, the singer Marcella Craft.

Amy Beach is buried with her husband in the Forest Hills Cemetery in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.

Amy Beach was a member of the "Second New England School" or "Boston Group"; the other members were composers John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote, George Chadwick, Edward MacDowell, George Whiting, and Horatio Parker.

Amy Beach's writing is mainly in a Romantic idiom, often compared to that of Brahms or Rachmaninoff.

Amy Beach's compositions include a one-act opera, Cabildo, and a variety of other works.

Amy Beach wrote the Gaelic Symphony and the Piano Concerto in C-sharp minor.

One notable aspect of Amy Beach's musicianship was her role as a virtuoso pianist, in which she regularly performed both her own compositions and those of others.

Amy Beach toured extensively in Germany, New England, and all the way to the Pacific Coast, where she brought European-American concert music to the western states.

In January 1897 Amy Beach played with Franz Kneisel the premiere of her Sonata for Piano and Violin, Op.

In 1900, with the Kneisel Quartet, Amy Beach performed the Brahms Piano Quintet in F minor, Op.

Amy Beach wrote her own three-movement Quintet for Piano and Strings in F-sharp minor, Op.

Amy Beach performed her quintet with them in Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

Amy Beach's String Quartet is a single movement and is one of her more mature works.

The significance Amy Beach bestowed on this piece is notable, given that it did not feature a piano part which she would perform, as did many of her other works.

The piece was premiered at the American Academy in April 1929, but Amy Beach reported little on whether or not this performance was satisfactory.

Composer and biographer Burnet Corwin Tuthill offered praise of it, saying that while it was unusual for Amy Beach and lacked the emotionalism usually prevalent in her music, it demonstrated remarkable technical sophistication and skill in its handling of both string writing and engagement with thematic material that was not European in origin.

Amy Beach shared that interest with several of her colleagues, and this interest soon came to be the first nationalist movement in American music.

Amy Beach's contributions included about thirty songs inspired by folk music, including Scottish, Irish, Balkan, African-American, and Native American origins.

Amy Beach was a musical intellectual who wrote for journals, newspapers, and other publications.

Efforts to revive interest in Amy Beach's works have been largely successful during the last few decades.

The manner in which she balanced content and form succeeds where her contemporaries like George Whitefield Chadwick, John Knowles Paine, and Horatio Parker so often came up short: somehow Amy Beach's Symphony is never daunted by the long shadows Brahms and Beethoven cast across the Atlantic.