[music playing] I got a phone call in 1985 from an organization in San Francisco called the Women's Philharmonic asking if I would come out and conduct a concert of all women composers.

I was flummoxed because I said to them, I'm embarrassed to say this, but I said to them, what women composers?

She was clearly very gifted at taking a concept, be it a concept in a poem or a concept or an idea that is in a liturgical text in a hymn or even a theological one.

She could take those ideas and create an extraordinary musical fabric to really bring that to light and to enable you to hear those words in a way that was unique to that experience with fresh ears.

That's the mark of a great artist truly.

The first word that comes to mind is Ernest.

Ernest, because I'm thinking of those the melodies that she gives us.

From my way of thinking, they're so from the heart.

[music playing] Amy Marcy Cheney was born September 5, 1867 here on Western Avenue in Hancock, New Hampshire.

The first and only child of Charles and Clara Cheney.

Her father, Charles worked at a paper mill, two miles up the Kentucky river from their home, which he owned with his father, Moses.

Clara Cheney took care of the house, was active in their church and church choir, and taught piano to local students.

By the time she was one-year-old before she could say a word, she could hum at least 40 tunes in the key that she had originally heard them in.

Amy's intelligence and musical talent was evident at an early age, but the Cheney family followed a strict fundamentalist spirituality and raised Amy guided by those teachings.

There was a popular child rearing philosophy that children should be kept from things that they really want to do in order to instill a sense of working very hard, like wanting something a lot.

And it was obviously identified pretty early that Amy beech loved music the most.

And what she really wanted to do was play the piano, because her mother played the piano and she saw her mother playing the piano and she loved it so much.

So she was intentionally kept from playing the piano.

The mother was so punishing and would make-- didn't allow her to go to the piano.

What a terrible thing to do to a two or three-year-old who wants to be expressive?

She would sit on the stairs and pretend it was a piano and play on the stairs.

And then finally, I think when she was four, they let her at the instrument.

Though Amy was now allowed to play the piano, her parents continued to control her time at the keyboard following the philosophy that by denying it, they would increase their daughter's determination to play.

They also used Amy's musical sensitivity to control her behavior.

Her mother actually used it as a punishment to play music differently.

It would upset Amy so much that it was like it was a disciplinary tool that they used.

Her intelligence went beyond music.

By the time she was three years old, she knew the alphabet and was reading.

But music was her foremost passion and her talent for composing appeared at an early age.

When beech is 2 and 3, she's writing pretty advanced pieces mama's wall.

[music playing] She was such a prodigy and she was somebody who was really thinking through the technicalities of music and how pitches relate to each other, how music sounded, how chords and intervals sounded.

[music playing] In 1871, her father's paper mill burned down.

Charles was offered a position with a paper company in Boston and the family moved to Chelsea, Massachusetts bringing Amy closer to the resources and people that could help advance a musical gift.

Her mother continued to oversee and guide every aspect of Amy's education, home schooling her daughter in reading and writing.

Most importantly, Clara controlled Amy's development at the piano.

She didn't want Amy to become an exploited child prodigy.

She wanted her daughter to become a musician.

And she understood that Boston was a place where this could happen.

She got a piano teacher.

She was able to go to concerts.

She also started more and more to gain access to Boston's communities, Boston's musical infrastructures.

[music playing] Europe was the world's center of musical culture in the 19th century.

Vienna, Paris, Salzburg, were home to Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, and many more.

Meanwhile, America at that time still staggering in the aftermath of a Civil War didn't even have a full-time Symphony Orchestra.

But in the later half of the century, Boston began to emerge and seize the mantle of America's cultural center with musical organizations like the Handel and Haydn Society, art galleries, and educational institutions such as Harvard and MIT.

Boston began to see and promote itself as the Athens of America.

This was the cultural dynamic of the place that young Amy Mercy Cheney was experiencing and becoming a part of.

It was Henry Lee Higginson, our founder and sustainer who fulfilled his lifelong dream of founding a permanent orchestra in his hometown of Boston, modeled on the great orchestras of Europe that he had heard while he was a student.

And the idea was there would be a set make up of the players.

They would rehearse together consistently and therefore improve their abilities in the context of just fitting together, working together balancing getting a Blend and all of those things.

And at that time, there was no orchestra in America that anything like that.

I think it worked in Boston because of the Boston culture.

Under-girding all of that was the Brahmin aristocracy that there was a community of very wealthy folks in Boston.

Sometimes very close, sometimes very socially exclusive.

Being from a small family from a small town in New Hampshire, now living in Chelsea under modest means was not the ticket to becoming part of exclusive Boston society or gaining the access and privilege that society presented.

But a gift of musical talent could be a spark that could draw recognition.

Amy Chaney had that spark and a talent that gained notice.

She started to perform a little bit here and there in Boston.

And so folks around Boston started to become more aware of this very young female piano prodigy that was growing up in their town.

Among those who supported this young pianist was poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who after hearing her play gave her permission to set one of his poems to music.

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary.

It rains, and the wind is never weary.

The vine still clings to the mouldering wall.

But at very gust the dead leaves fall.

And the day is dark and dreary.

The rainy day written in 1883 became Amy's first published musical composition.

Later that year in October, 16-year-old Amy made her formal Boston debut at the piano in the Boston Music Hall.

Performing Marshallese G-minor concerto with an orchestra and Chopin's Rondo and E-flat for solo piano.

The performance expanded Amy's growing reputation as a gifted Boston pianist that the city could be proud of.

On March 28, 1885, 17-year-old Amy Chaney had her debut with Boston's newest orchestra, The Boston Symphony.

Then only in its fourth season, she performed The Piano Concerto No.2 in F minor by Frederic Chopin.

Even now, it's very unusual to have a teenage performer as a concerto soloist in a professional orchestra.

But it was probably all but unheard of at that time.

It's important to understand that here's a sort of a couple who are from the middle class who were rather humble in their own means, who had this piano prodigy who was all of a sudden quite well known in Boston's elite circles.

And there is a dynamic there that Clara was trying to navigate for the family's benefit but also for Amy's benefit as well.

On December 2, 1885 at Trinity Church in Boston, Amy Marcy Cheney married Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a prominent Boston physician who loved music and dabbled in writing poetry.

At 42 years of age, he was 24 years older than Amy, who at the time of their marriage was only 18.

Still just a teenager, Amy moved from her parents' house into her husband's home at 28 Commonwealth Avenue, where servants were on call to take care of her every need.

The instinct of teenage rebellion is ubiquitous whenever you're born whether or not you can act it out.

And I don't think that that was ever realized with her.

So she goes from mom to husband.

So there's never a point there where she's on her own.

It was a mark of arrival certainly into the Brahmin class.

It also meant something in terms of her public image that she became Mrs. HHA Beach that she became a married woman.

Unmarried women touring around in concerts housing were frequently met with some suspicion.

Amy's marriage put an end to any possible career as a concert pianist.

Her husband deferring to societal norms of the day didn't think it appropriate to have his young wife touring the country giving concerts, spending nights away in hotel rooms earning money.

He needed to be the perceived primary source of income and support for his family.

For the duration of their marriage, Amy's public performances were limited.

And any fee she received were donated.

And then she writes a song called Are yer.

And she asks the pianist, in the music, it's early.

It's opus 1.

It's so beautiful.

It says, make the piano sound like the strumming of a guitar.

[music playing] Denied the very thing which defined her identity and reputation in the eyes of the Boston Public.

Amy Beach turned to composing.

Her first compositions were created when she was just four years old.

And in the intervening years, she wrote songs and a few small piano works.

But composing had always taken second place to performing.

Now, it would become her primary identity and occupation.

In any discipline science, medicine, navigation, you need proper education.

And she's not.

She never has that sort of bulwark template laid down.

In the long list of her compositions, it's worth noting that opus 1 is dated 1885, the year of her marriage.

And while she had trained as a pianist, she was not trained in the art of musical composition.

There are a lot of discussions about what was appropriate for Amy to do in order to learn how to compose.

One option that was the most frequent option for people who were as successful as Amy was to go to Europe and to study in German conservatories.

And that door was closed pretty quickly probably on account of her gender that she wouldn't have been allowed to study in a composition class in Germany, anyway.

Because women were allowed to take part in performing classes.

They were allowed to learn how to perform.

But in most German conservatories, they weren't allowed to study composition anyway.

What were the capacities of women's brains?

Could they compose?

Not, did they compose but could, should and would.

So could they compose has to do with biological theories that we need to relate to the race theories in America at the time.

Because just as women were stereotyped through limited understanding of biology and its intersections with culture, so theories about race and what it meant to be Negro were predominant in the United States.

And there were just as many theories about the inferiority of Black people as there were about the innate inferiority of women.

Denied an education in any aspect of composing, Amy Beach said about to teach herself.

She would memorize full orchestral scores of entire symphonies.

Symphonies that took sometimes 30 minutes, 45 minutes to be performed, she would study them, she would memorize them, she would copy them out from memory.

And then if the Boston Symphony was performing it, she would do all of that and then she would take her copy of a score that she had copied out from memory to the concert and study that score as the symphony was playing it to check her mistakes.

But she was able to understand those scores from a composing point of view.

[music playing] In 1889, when she was just 22 years old, Amy published her Opus 5, a mass set for chorus, quartet, organ, and orchestra.

It was premiered by Boston's Handel and Haydn Society on February 7, 1892.

At the conclusion of this 70-minute piece, Beach received a royal ovation and was overwhelmed with flowers.

The mass established her as a rising composer not only in Boston but in all America.

One reviewer struggled to explain how Beach was able to rise so far above her limitations as a woman.

However, suffragette leader, Julia Ward Howe said, ''The mass made evident the capacity of a woman's brain to plan and execute a work combining great seriousness with unquestionable beauty.''

Though never embracing the politics of women marching for the right to vote, Amy Beach became a symbol of the creative power of women.

[music playing] Signed we be with you.

I live with you.

I live on to you.

Marriage dramatically altered Beach's career path as a pianist, but opened up an ideal situation for a composer.

She didn't need to worry about money or even domestic chores.

Hired servants took care of her needs from cleaning to cooking allowing her life to be focused on composing music.

Like the piano, composition came to her naturally.

She was taken on by a publisher, Arthur P. Schmidt, who began publishing her songs and sending them around the country.

And her husband Henry encouraged this pursuit, even writing poetry that Amy would set to music.

While most of her compositions were for solo piano or songs or pieces for small ensembles, Henry encouraged Amy to take on larger works as well, such as the mass.

He also suggested she try writing a symphony.

I think it says a lot that a 23-year-old Amy beach decided to embark on writing a symphony that she is a really bold thing.

A symphony is the mark of a great composer, Beethoven Mozart, Brahms, Schubert Dvorak, nearly all the 19th century composers known today secured their place in musical history by writing symphonies.

The big difference of course, with those people is they were men who were able to go and study studied all their lives with professional composers.

Went to Europe, studied with the greatest European teachers I contrasted it with Amy beech self-taught, because no one really thought it was going to amount to much to teach the woman.

So they didn't.

And her piece remains for me, the greatest of all of those.

There's a kind of freshness to it.

There's a sort of passion and strength that she taught herself.

[music playing] And this is where we've arrived.

OK. And somebody heroic is over here and over here amid all this tumult.

And we have these four bar phrases that we'd like to really layer on top and really respond as we go-- as we build this portrait.

She knows how to add instruments to change colors but also how to add them to create intensity.

And intense as a word I would use for the symphony.

It's very intense.

And that first movement, she did what the German masters felt you needed to do.

When someone comes in to hear a symphony, you've got to get them right at the beginning.

You've got to take them on this journey.

So what's happening?

You hear something rumbling and you want to follow it.

[music playing] In writing a symphony, she was trying to make a statement about her own compositional prowess that she was able to take on a genre like that.

That's really the beginning of American music.

It's the beginning of an established American cultural life.

The Boston Symphony was just formed.

Our composers are starting to think of themselves as Americans rather than copying Robert Schumann.

They're starting to begin to understand that they need to reflect who they are and where they are.

And of course, there was the influence of Dvorak.

Antonin Dvorak was brought to the United States with an express mandate to foster American and American symphonic tradition, an American symphonic style.

He decided eventually that the way forward for an American national style much like he had himself already done in Bohemia in Prague was to use traditional tunes, and to apply them to symphonic writing.

The question in the United States is what traditional music would one use?

So she thought, well, I can write a piece based upon Irish traditions, Gaelic traditions.

That I can use.

And that was the genesis for this piece.

It's a quarter note, 1/8 note, a quarter note and an 1/8 note.

Where it has this gentle pulsing, that maybe is rocking.

But it has that lilt and that it moves things along in a very natural way.

[music playing] It starts out in strings and then it goes to the woodwinds.

That to me is the most magical moment.

The strings start out and then all of a sudden it's like, let them sing on their own.

If you're going to do a scherzo in a symphony, you started right out with the fast tempo.

She doesn't.

She gives you-- she tricks you a little bit.

She tricks you into thinking, Oh, this is the slow movement.

That's the way it should be.

The second movement is a slow movement.

No.

Because she gives you this beautiful introduction, woodwinds.

Her treatment of woodwinds is exquisite, really exquisite.

And then somehow this beautiful introduction ends.

And this is just this kind of-- [music playing] She only has three piano.

bum bum bum.

I decided one performance and I liked it.

Bum bum bum.

This feeling of-- it disappears.

This is a fully professional piece of work that was written at a time when most of us didn't think there was any professional music going on in America.

That is simply our ignorance.

The Gaelic symphony was opus number 32 in Beach's growing catalog of works.

Still not yet 30 years old, her music was becoming recognized and performed around the country and around the world.

Compositions included sacred music such as Her Mass, solo works for piano, hymns, and over two dozen songs.

One song, Ecstasy, became so popular that the royalties enabled her to purchase a parcel of land in Centerville on Cape Cod.

She and Henry built a small cottage on the site which became their getaway.

Beach said, ''We wanted to live in a tent, but the piano couldn't.

So we built a cottage around the piano.''

Situated on a small pond surrounded by woods and near the ocean, this was the place where they could relax and be together away from city life.

They named their place on the Cape, The Pines.

Amy Beach was born into a society where home music making something that was valued in women.

I think there's a reason why people love her songs in particular as much as they do in her solo piano music.

[music - amy beach] In Beach's music really is it's a solo line times 4.

And then also in that solar line, first of all, you have the responsibility to bring out your own line.

And then you have the responsibility to do chamber music.

So you're connecting with the other musicians which is incredibly difficult.

You have to have trust, vulnerability, in order to connect.

And only if we trust each other can we then break down the walls of insecurity and really make meaningful music.

Let's do the crescendo towards the end.

And we're going to sing and dance.

And can you similar to what we did with the first.

What if you were children, how would you express the word sing and dance?

Sing and dance.

Sing and dance.

Yes.

Beach's next major composition would be a piano concerto.

Its premiere performance was on April 6, 1900 with the Boston Symphony orchestra.

Amy was at the keyboard.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be a woman composer, getting to be the soloist in the world premiere performance of your own piano concerto with the Boston Symphony orchestra?

[music playing] Listen up.

The concerto is massively creative.

Four movements, the second one is you say, the perpetual is just a nightmare.

This-- [music playing] And that goes on that never stops.

It's called perpetual mobility because it never stops.

And underneath that is this.

[music playing] That's empress of Knight, which was a song of hers.

She threw in thirds and octaves, and sixths.

It's like a nightmare.

It's like every Chopin etude in that movement.

That is one dangerous movement to play.

It is scary.

That is really scary.

It's like meet you at the finish line.

Meet you at the end.

That's what we always say to each other, meet you at the end.

[music playing] The piano concerto was the last major orchestral piece by Amy Beach.

Over the next decade, she produced a few large scale pieces for orchestra and chorus such as the Chambered Nautilus.

But the bulk of her output were songs, small ensemble pieces and works for solo piano.

She certainly loved Henry.

She was very close with Henry.

All of her writings suggest that it was a very close relationship that the two of them had.

In April 1910, Dr. Beach was making a house call when he took a wrong turn in the dark and fell down a flight of stairs causing serious injury.

While recovery was expected, complications arose.

He died in his Commonwealth Avenue home on June 28.

Amy had little time to fully mourn the loss.

Her mother was also ill.

The following January, Clara Cheney died.

In less than a year, the two most important people in her life were gone.

At 42 years of age, Amy Cheney Beach needed to begin building a new life for herself.

And she wrote the pro-union fugue based on A-B-E-A-C-H. H being natural in German right after he died.

It's in A minor, and it has this A pedal tone.

So it starts.

[music playing] And then it goes on.

But then she does this theme with the A.

[music playing] So pounding the A.

And I keep hearing that as, I'm Amy.

I'm Amy, I'm not Mrs. H.H.A.

Beach.

The whole thing is based on A.

And even when she does the actual fugue, that's the prelude.

But the fugue is A B E A C A. Yeah.

I think she's saying I want to be known as Amy.

And I think she's grabbing her identity back at this point.

Because this is written in 1912 and it's right after he died.

Major changes to Beach's life came quickly.

She suddenly found herself needing to take charge of her finances, her house, and her future.

Three months after Henry died, she decided to be baptized and joined Emanuel Episcopal Church, which was directly behind their house on Commonwealth Avenue.

She started thinking about traveling abroad, something she had never done.

And she began thinking about resuming her career as a concert pianist.

The idea that one doesn't perform for a couple of decades, and then all of a sudden, he's ready for the concert stage again, that takes tremendous bravery.

Beach set sail for Europe with a friend in September 1911.

Her first European concert performance was given at the end of October in Dresden.

She would spend the next three years traveling between Germany, France, and Italy, meeting new friends, performing, composing, and enjoying the musical culture of Europe that had been denied her up until that moment.

[music - amy beach] It would take a World War to pry her from Europe and bring her back to the United States.

And even that didn't happen instantly.

The outbreak of the war in July, 1914 forced her to cancel a planned European concert tour.

But still she insisted on remaining in Munich, where she volunteered with the Red Cross and regularly saw German troops marching off to battle.

Finally, in September, she decided to return home to the United States.

Amy Beach's returned to the United States was at a time of radical change in the world, in society, and in the arts.

New inventions such as automobiles, airplanes, motion pictures, and sound recording, were taking root and about to revolutionize every aspect of society.

Women were marching in the streets demanding the right to vote, and America, though not in the war at the beginning was expecting to take its place on the world stage.

Artists such as Pablo Picasso and Ali Matisse shown for the first time in 1913 at New York's Armory show challenged and changed the definition of visual arts.

And young composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Claude Debussy, and Igor Stravinsky were creating new sounds, vibrant with a bold modern energy never before heard, such as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring which had its premiere in May 1913 in Paris.

[music playing] They had to make a career for themselves.

And the way they do it is say, well, we're the up and coming modern style.

Those folks back there are very old fashioned, and their music we don't need to listen to that anymore.

She's forgotten.

She's forgotten because she's not interested in ragtime or jazz.

Schoenberg and Bartok and all the more modern music coming along was the way that you had to write if you wanted to be a contemporary composer.

I think that she had such an ear for music, and she grew up learning the diatomic system.

And it was hard for her to give up on that.

So I don't think she ever fully bought into the modernist turn.

As change was happening in the world of music diminishing her popularity, so too was it happening in Amy Beach's personal life.

Upon her return to the United States, she moved back into the home on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston.

But perhaps the house felt empty without her husband or maybe it had too many memories.

Even Boston, where she had lived nearly all her life no longer felt like where she wanted to be.

In February 1915, Amy left the Commonwealth Avenue house and moved to New York City.

She would never again live in Boston.

I think she was torn in her heart a lot.

I think she was longing in her heart a lot.

There's a lot of longing.

The long line, the keeping the line going, I think she was longing-- I'm not sure I know what she was longing for.

Even the move to New York, did not quiet the disruptions in Beach's life.

The next few years would bring more changes and personal loss.

Her compositional output fell and lean more towards spiritually-based music.

She moved for a brief time to San Francisco to live with her aunt, Frank and cousin, Ethel, even registering to vote for the first time.

But before election day came around, she, her aunt, and cousin abruptly moved back East to Hillsborough, New Hampshire.

[music playing -amy beach] In 1917, the United States became a combatant in World War I.

Beach spent this time in Hillsborough helping in the war effort by volunteering with the local Red Cross.

She also devoted herself to caring for her cousin, Ethel, who had become sick with a terminal illness.

Beach canceled concert engagements and even her composing seems to have been curtailed.

Ethel passed away in April 1920.

Beach later said that after her cousin's death, she felt as if the song had left her heart.

In June 1921, Beach settled into a residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

The artist retreat had been founded just a few years earlier by Marian MacDowell, the widow of composer, Edward MacDowell.

Well, certainly Mrs. MacDowell and Amy Beach were of the same era.

And neither of them followed the guidelines that were laid down for them.

They defied the expectations of a very gendered social doctrine of the time.

And they did it on their own terms.

The Colony offered a place for artists to focus deeper into their art.

And for Beach, it also became a place to find solace from the difficult years just passed.

To other colonists, she wanted to be known as Aunt Amy.

And when not in her studio, she could be found organizing an afternoon game of croquet or an evening game of pocket billiards.

Over the next 20 years, Amy Beach would spend part of every summer at the Colony.

Here in the Watson Studio, she began composing a new.

She again found that song in her heart.

In the five years after her first stay at MacDowell, Beach published nearly 30 new works, more than the output of the previous 10 years.

Almost all this music was written or sketched out at MacDowell.

Amy beech found out who she was by composing in that late 19th century style that understood the possibilities inherent in every sound experience that filled her world [music playing] So the bird song is in the beginning.

All those little things.

But then what she does in the middle part she puts her regular piano piece.

[music playing] That's the morn and here's the thrush at Eve.

So if the morn thrush is that, she says the thrush at Eve, she puts it in.

That was in D minor, which is like an opaque key.

But then the thrush at Eve, she puts an E flat minor which is very darker.

[music playing] Beach's life took on a seasonal routine between concert engagements around the country.

She would spend winter in Hillsborough, June or September or both at MacDowell, and summer in Centerville at the Pines.

Beach did no cooking or housekeeping and hired people to take on these chores at each location except MacDowell.

And she never learned to drive.

So she was always in need of drivers to get her from place to place.

Though her popularity had been overshadowed by new and more modern musical sounds and composers, that did not diminish her compositional spirit or output.

Every year there were new additions to her catalog, from art songs to solo piano works and large scale works such as a short opera and the canticle of the sun written for chorus and orchestra.

She also began experimenting with new sounds herself.

It opens with this open fifth.

And then it evolves with, it's a lilting melody bum, bum, bum, bum, bum throughout.

And the instruments all weave that same rhythmic motif.

[music playing] In addition to composing, Beach continued touring and performing including two more trips to Europe.

Always eager to nurture new talent, she was a co-founder and the first president of the Society of American Women Composers.

In addition to concert halls, she appeared regularly on radio broadcasts performing and offering her commentary on the world of musical composition.

In 1930, she again moved to New York City and continued her relationship with St. Bartholomew's church.

Amy Beach's sacred choral music spans a number of different ranges.

It spans a range in terms of style where some of it is actually quite conservative and very plain and prayerful and introspective.

And then there are other pieces that let's say, harmonically, are very visionary and/or adventurous.

[music - amy beach] Amy Beach once wrote, ''The true mission of music is to uplift.

Beyond the earthly lies the spiritual world.

To me, the greatest function of all creative art is to bring even a little of the eternal into the temporal life.''

[music playing] In 1934, Beach made her last extended concert tour.

At '67, she was starting to slow down.

She still performed but they were single concert appearances, including two with the White House where she and Soprano Ruth Shaffner presented programs of her songs for president and Mrs. Roosevelt.

As health concerns increased, her composing began to decrease.

Her last major piece was a trio for piano, violin, and cello composed in just 15 days while at MacDowell in 1938.

[music playing] On March 19, 1940, Beach was at the keyboard performing the piano trio at the neighborhood club in Brooklyn.

Three days later, she became seriously ill with bronchitis.

And soon after, was diagnosed with a severe heart condition.

The Brooklyn recital was her last public performance.

By year's end she was told by her doctor that she should no longer play the piano.

In June 1941, Beach wrote, ''I have taken no formal farewell from public performances nor do I intend to do so, but I face the fact that I shall never again be strong enough for it.''

In the spring of 1941, she went to Hillsborough then to MacDowell.

But soon after leaving MacDowell, she became ill again.

She was forced to slow down even more.

From that point on, her life was divided between Centerville, Cape Cod and New York.

In 1942, she published her last composition based upon an earlier work for piano.

It was a prelude written for the organ at St. Bartholomew's.

Really explores all the possibilities of the instrument in a piece that comes across as being straightforward in its surface.

But despite that, it explores so many colors and textures and a wonderful harmonic range.

On November 6, 1944 in her suite at the Hotel Berkeley in New York, just a block away from St. Bartholomew's, Beach wrote in her diary.

Not feeling well.

Hip aches.

It would be her last entry.

Five days later, she was confined to bed.

Over the next few weeks there was a steady stream of visitors and phone calls from Beach's many friends around the country.

One reported that Beach was sitting up in her bed wearing a pink jacket surrounded by flowers and asked the visitor to give everyone her love, her very dear love.

She was just very passionate and she was very passionate about music.

But she also really intensely loved people.

As Christmas approached, Beach slipped into a coma.

With her dear friend Ruth Schaffner sitting at her side holding her hand, Amy Beach died of heart disease December 1944.

Her ashes were held at St. Bartholomew's until they could be sent to Boston for burial in Forrest Hill Cemetery next to her mother, father, and her husband, Dr. H. H. A.

Beach.

I'd like to quote another historian now, John Tasker Howard who knew Mrs. H.H.A.

Beach.

Called her Mrs. Beach.

And he interviewed her I think around 1929.

And this is what he had to say, ''I once asked Mrs. Beach if she ever resented being called an American composer.

No, she answered.

But I would rather be called a composer.

Never mind a woman composer.

She was seeking universality.

She was seeking the largest possible plane on which to have her music heard.

She didn't want to be American as opposed to European.

She wanted to be judged within the tradition of classical music.''

[music playing] For 77 years, Amy Marcy Cheney beach brought music to the world.

As a composer, her output included hymns, choral works, chamber music, piano pieces, a symphony, a piano concerto, a mass, and opera, and over 150 songs.

As a performer, she played for audiences throughout the United States and Europe.

As a teacher, she inspired and nurtured aspiring composers, young and old, male or female.

And by just being herself, she redefined the role of women in music.

I don't ever get the feeling with her was to prove a point, it was just to make music in the fullest possible way.

If the second movement leaves you a little bit somber and then the third movement sort of frightens up and it almost feels like a little bit of that movement.

I don't know.

Sometimes we joke.

It always feels a little bit like circus music at times.

But then, classic Amy Beach, she'll switch and all of a sudden you'll have this impassioned octaves in the strings and then switch back to the end, which is [sings].

It's almost like a show tune.

I hope that's OK, Mrs. Beach.

[music playing]