Guest Post: “Where has this music been all my life?” On Women Composers in the 20th Century by George Henderson

George Henderson was born in Scotland many years ago and has been creating music in New Zealand since the mid-1970s and releasing it fitfully since the mid-80s, mainly as The Puddle. In this our 21st Century he has taken a renewed interest in his so-called art and released a string of Puddle albums on his brother/drummer Ian’s Fishrider label. George also writes and records for/asThe New Existentialists. After correcting various self-induced health problems including those most characteristic of that occupation, he now works at PreKure. You can tweet him or read his views on the Twitter by checking him at @puddleg

He has previously written guest posts for Off The Tracks about Five Albums He Was Loving Back Then and Five Films That Have Stayed With Him. 

“Where has this music been all my life?” On women composers in the 20^th Century

By George Henderson

“Where has this music been all my life?” Amy Beach (1867 – 1944)

I own perhaps a hundred recordings of classical music, bought in op shops and second-hand shops over the past few years for as little as a few cents per disc. Until a few weeks ago, only two of these were of works by a female composer – Jenny McLeod’s soundtrack to The Silent One on LP, and her Rock Concerto on CD. I bought these because I saw the Silent One on late-night TV years ago and fell in love with its soundtrack – and if you don’t hear something you won’t know if you’ll love it or not. But at $1 a pop, you can take a risk. I’ve long been aware that I was missing female composers and wondered if they existed in the “Modern History” era of music I care about. I knew Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelsohn composed, but the music of their era interests me less and nothing about their works, listened to on YouTube or the odd radio show, had stuck.

But the other day I was op-shopping in Richmond Road and saw a 2-CD set of late romantic piano concertos. That’s my era, but the romantic piano concerto is an over-supplied item, so I could have left it, but noticed a woman’s name among the contents – Mrs H.H.A. Beach. That seemed to promise something stuffy and Victorian, but I had to give it a listen. And what a marvellous creation Amy Marcy Cheney Beach’s piano concerto is – I have listened to it over and over, in the car, in bed falling asleep, and find myself following the action from start to finish – Beach is a storyteller. I researched her history and learned that Amy Beach was a successful composer in her lifetime, honoured until her death – books were written about her during her life – but forgotten soon after. On the same CD there’s a concerto by Edward McDowell that is also brilliant, from a similar time and place, with a similar reputation; this allows us to perform a comparison in which all variables other than sex are controlled as well as possible. McDowell’s 2^nd piano concerto has been recorded 20 times between 1934 and 2002, according to Wikipedia which has probably missed a few. Beach’s concerto has been recorded 3 times, and one of those recordings is the one I added to Wikipedia, the first recording in 1976 by Maria Louise Boehm, who rediscovered the concerto that year. Boehme (who died in 2002) says in the liner notes that whenever she performs the piece people ask her “where has this music been all my life?” Where, indeed.

Amy Beach was as prodigious a talent as music has seen, learning 40 songs by the age of one, composing piano music in her head by the age of four, you get the picture. Later in life she recorded bird song and folksong melodies to inspire her composition. She was a piano virtuoso and, like many virtuosi, wrote the concerto as a showcase for her talents, but added a great deal more to it. The melodies are based on earlier song settings of poems by her husband, a successful Boston surgeon, and, according to Beach’s modern biographer Adrienne Fried Block, the concerto is a commentary on her relationship with her husband and the mother who had married her off at the age of 18. Dr Beach, like many husbands of female musicians in the olden days, extracted from Amy the promise that she would not tour on the concert circuit, unseemly for a married woman, but could instead focus on her composition. This was a better deal than that offered most earlier female composers, who were discouraged from composing if they married, and while Amy chafed, she made the most of it, despite the presence of her mother, who had moved in with the newlyweds and sat with her daughter as she composed, knitting or interrupting her as she saw fit. Now, Sergei Prokofiev, a prodigy at a similarly young age, took his mother with him wherever he travelled, but is unlikely to have let her stay in the room while he worked – besides, Sergei’s mother was doting and nurturing of his talents to an exceptional degree, whereas Amy’s was a Calvinist who had tried to restrict her access to the piano. While American male composers of the era like McDowell studied in Europe, hobnobbed with Liszt and Brahms, and so on, Beach, forbidden this experience, had taught herself composition in America, translating classic works on orchestration by Berlioz and others into English as she went.

Dr Beach died in 1910 and Amy’s mother passed away soon after – after she recovered from this loss, Beach was finally able to tour Europe, where she played her concerto to critical acclaim, fleeing Belgium during the German invasion of 1914 then returning to Europe after the War to praise Mussolini in the press, as celebrities did in those days. When she died in 1944, Beach was both internationally famous and comfortably-off; the first successful woman composer of art music in the USA.

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