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The Fredonia Shakespeare Club met at the home of Ms. Susan Westling last week. Following a business meeting, the club heard Ms. Lucille Richardson's presentation on Amy Beach.
Amy Beach (1867 - 1944), formally known during her lifetime as Mrs. H.H.A. Beach, was America's first distinguished and celebrated woman composer of high art music. Overcoming Victorian conventions that largely restricted women to writing amateur parlor songs and teaching pieces, she became one of the first American composers of either gender to achieve international stature. Over her lifetime, she produced a prolific catalog of roughly 300 works. In addition to scores of songs, choral works and solo piano pieces, Beach composed numerous large-scale works. These included a mass, a symphony (the first composed and published by an American woman), a piano concerto, a violin sonata, a piano quintet, a trio, and a one-act opera.
Prodigiously gifted, her talent strikingly apparent almost from infancy, Beach began composing at age four and made her first public appearance as a pianist at age seven. At eighteen, she made her debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. That same year, she married a prominent Boston surgeon and yielded to his wish that she limit her public concertizing to focus on composition. Because she was denied formal composition instruction, Beach was self-taught as a composer by studying the works of European masters.
Following her husband's death in 1910, Beach traveled to Europe and achieved enormous success, performing her own works in major cultural centers. Upon returning to the United States just prior to World War I, she was greeted by enthusiastic public acclaim. A major milestone in her career was her fellowship appointment to the renowned MacDowell summer artists' colony in New Hampshire in 1921. Her twenty-year association with the latter inspired a shift in her compositional style, blending her signature lyricism with elements of impressionism and expressionism.
Beach lived and worked extensively in New York City during the final decades of her life. She became closely affiliated with St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church where her choral compositions were frequently performed, making her a virtual composer-in-residence. Her works continued to be featured in other venues including the MET Orchestra Chamber Ensemble at Carnegie Hall.
Beach died in New York City at the age of 77 and is buried alongside her husband at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston. Though her music endured a period of neglect after her death, it has experienced a major revival on the concert stage with about two-thirds of her total of 300 works now having been recorded.