Fall 1999 Volume XXIX, No. 1

Copland's Hope for American Music by Howard Pollack spectral frequencies by Martha Mockus Demythologizing the Blues by David Evans New Music Notes by Carol J. Oja Behind the Beat with Mark Tucker ISAM Matters Reviews Rethinking Race in 19th-Century Blackface Minstrelsy by Maya Gibson Amy Beach: Passionate Victorian by Laurie Blunsom ISAM Home

Amy Beach: Passionate Victorian Review by Laurie Blunsom Adrienne Fried Block’s Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of an American Composer, 1867-1944 (Oxford University Press, 1998; $45) is a valuable contribution to music scholarship and an outstanding tribute to the dean of America’s female composers, Amy Beach. Block’s long-awaited biography—the first thorough scholarly study of Beach’s career—bestows upon Beach her rightful place among the important musical figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Block’s narrative can be divided into three parts. The first part chronicles Beach’s upbringing and years in Boston. Particularly significant are her discussions about Beach’s relationships with her mother, Clara Cheney, and her husband, Dr. Henry Beach. Block also examines Beach’s development as a composer, focusing on her first large-scale works, the Mass in Eb and the “Gaelic” Symphony. The second part deals with the period after the deaths of her husband and her mother when Beach left Boston and embarked on a career as a pianist, undertaking European and American concert tours. This period ends with Beach caring for her terminally ill cousin and then for her dying aunt in New Hampshire, during which time she wrote and performed little. The third part revolves around her stay at the MacDowell Colony and in New York where she eventually settled, continuing to write and perform in limited engagements. Block’s command of the biographical material is commendable. Beach left a wealth of letters, scrapbooks, journals, diaries and other personal papers that chronicle her life. Block, however, moves beyond the readily available and digs deep into the sources, consulting public records, obscure nineteenth-century periodicals, and small archival collections. She is thus able to fill in previously unknown details about Beach’s life, such as a relationship she calls one of Beach’s “best-kept secrets:” “Cryptic clues in her diaries ... consist of repeated remembrances of ‘A’—of his birthday, his death, his leaving Boston, and other signal events of his life. Finally, in one entry she names him as ‘Arthur’ but still does not provide his last name. There is no question, however, that he was as important to her as Henry Beach had been ...” Block’s mastery of Beach's repertoire—consisting of roughly 200 works—is also exceptional. Her incisive discussions of the compositions, along with the numerous musical examples reproduced in the book, familiarize the reader with the composer’s music. Unfortunately, one rarely glimpses Beach’s inner life through her private thoughts. But this is not the fault of the biographer: Beach’s diaries exist only for her later years, 1926 to 1944. Consequently, how she felt about various figures in her life, most notably her husband and her mother, goes unsaid. Block is left, therefore, to speculate about Beach’s feelings and motivations about significant events, such as her sudden unexplained move from San Francisco, a city she loved, to Hillsborough, New Hampshire, which isolated her from cultural life. Two underlying themes in Block’s narrative highlight the importance of Beach’s life for music scholarship and women’s studies. First and perhaps foremost is the issue of gender. Throughout the book, the reader is acutely aware of the problems faced by a female composer and performer. The effects of gendered attitudes on Beach’s career—most notably on the performance and reception of her works—are often accentuated by the author’s commentary, as when she challenges one critic’s response to the Violin Sonata by asking, “Would he have said that of one of Haydn’s monothematic movements?” Block’s voice comes out most clearly on these issues, though it is at times too forceful. Nevertheless, she succeeds in bringing the problem of gender bias to the forefront, and the reader is led to contemplate what Beach’s career might have been like in a more equitable society. More importantly, Block’s biography allows the reader to consider the extent to which Beach’s life and career were continually shaped by her social role as a woman. Clearly, all of the characters in the story of Beach’s life acted according to fundamental assumptions about gender that were integral to their social environment. Beach’s mother raised her daughter according to Victorian standards of female behavior. Her husband expected her to fulfill the duties of faithful wife and helper in spite of his support of her musical activities. Later in life, Beach transformed herself into “Aunt Amy,” a maternal figure for younger female composers and performers. Daughter, wife and aunt were the roles that Beach took on and they significantly affected the course of her career. One sees finally that her life was a weaving together of two threads, one professional—composer and pianist—and the other social—woman. Block also broaches critical issues in cultural history. Nurtured in the environment of late nineteenth-century Boston, Beach found her voice in the late Romantic style. But since Beach lived well into the twentieth century, Block is faced with the thorny issue of positioning the composer’s works in the modern musical world. Here Block chooses to present Beach as an experimenter, attempting to dispel the general perception of her as an old-fashioned composer and to give her work relevance in the new century. This approach is most apparent in the chapter “Beach the Modernist?,” which begins, “Beach a modernist? How can that be? No discussion of her as a composer has ever judged her anything but a Victorian, a late Romantic composer and, during her later years, an anachronism in a new age. What has been almost universally ignored has been the adventurousness of some of Beach’s music written during her last decades ...” Although her argument is intriguing, it is not entirely convincing. Beach’s attempts to integrate some contemporary techniques late in her career seem too little, too late. As Block herself points out, “her first modernizing experiments followed well behind those of European colleagues.” Furthermore, Beach publicly rebuked the modern movement, making it difficult to imagine that she would have wanted to be considered a modernist composer. While the reader can appreciate the changes in Beach’s style, Block essentially demonstrates that even her musical experiments were conservative and that her writing remained fairly conventional throughout her career. In the end, Block’s attempt to place the composer in the context of modernism is a historiographical problem for the biographer: perhaps it was easier to try to fit a square Beach into a round modernist hole than to reformulate cultural history and to recognize that Beach’s world—her music, her style and her artistic circle—formed a counterpoint to the more avant-garde world of the 1920s and 1930s. Ultimately, the story of Beach’s life—as well as her subsequent obscurity and the recent revival of her music—is most informed by gender issues and the changing cultural landscape. Block’s biography opens up the possibilities for inquiry into both issues, forcing us to re-evaluate Beach’s career and her music on terms that recognize the complexity of her life and of the times in which she lived. —Northeastern University