Amy Marcy Beach

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach was an American composer and pianist. She was the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Amy Beach.

From the period sources

Amy Marcy Beach, born Amy Marcy Cheney, was recognized as a “gifted composer” residing in Boston, Massachusetts, by 1899, according to A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (1900). She received piano instruction from Ernst Perabo and Carl Baermann, and harmony lessons from Junius W. Hill, yet was “wholly self-taught in counterpoint, composition, and orchestration” (A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 1900). Beach was also a concert-pianist, making her professional debut in Boston Music Hall in 1883, playing Moscheles’s G minor concerto with orchestra, and subsequently performing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Theodore Thomas’s orchestra (Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1904).

Her compositions, which by 1903 had reached opus number 53, include a Mass in E-flat (1892), a “Gaelic” symphony (1896), and a piano concerto (1900), the latter two premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Beach as soloist (Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1904). Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1908) notes that her songs are “refined and well-written, and never commonplace or vulgar,” distinguishing them from many other American composers whose popular songs “descend almost to the lowest level of vocal music.” Beach was also active in musical institutions, serving as President of the Board of Councillors of the New England Conservatory and Honorary Corresponding Secretary of the New York Manuscript Society (A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 1900).