[미국]Amy (Marcy Cheney) Beach

 

 

     Amy Marcy Cheney Beach

(September 5, 1867 – December 27, 1944) was an American composer and pianist. She was the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music. Her "Gaelic" Symphony, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1896, was the first symphony composed and published by an American woman. She was one of the first American composers to succeed without the benefit of European training, and one of the most respected and acclaimed American composers of her era. As a pianist, she was acclaimed for concerts she gave featuring her own music in the United States and in Germany.

 

 

[작품 모음]

 

 

피아노 협주곡(1900)과 미국 여성 작곡가의 첫 번째 교향곡인 〈게일 교향곡 Gaelic Symphony〉(1894)이 유명하다. 1870년 가족이 보스턴으로 이주했을 당시 치니(본명)는 이미 어린아이 같지 않은 음악적 재능을 보였다. 피아노 교습을 받은 건 6세 때부터지만 이미 4세 이후 건반으로 단순한 곡을 작곡했다.

 

1883년 10월 16세의 나이로 보스턴 뮤직 홀에서 첫 공식 연주회를 가졌다. 이후 몇 번의 연주회를 성공적으로 치렀으며, 1885년 3월에는 보스턴 교향악단과의 협연으로 쇼팽의 〈피아노 협주곡 F단조 Chopin Piano Concerto in F Minor〉를 연주했다. 1885년 12월 그녀는 하버드대학교 교수이자 저명한 외과 전문의 헨리 H. A. 비치와 결혼한 후 아마추어 음악가로 활동했다. 남편은 아내가 작곡에 몰두할 수 있도록 격려했으며, 치니는 공식 연주회를 줄이고 독학으로 음악 이론과 작곡을 공부하기 시작했다. 그녀가 처음으로 완성한 작품들은 자신이 좋아하는 시나 소곡에 덧붙여 만든 곡이었다.

 

1892년 2월 보스턴 교향악단과 헨델과 하이든 협회는 치니가 1890년에 작곡한 〈미사곡 E단조 Mass in E-flat〉를 연주했다. 이 작품은 '작품 5'로 번호를 붙인 그녀의 첫 대표작이자 보스턴 교향악단과 헨델과 하이든 협회가 연주한 최초의 여성 작곡가 작품이었다. 이후 작곡한 주요작품으로는 프리드리히 폰 실러의 글을 바탕으로 작곡한 아리아 〈에일런드 워큰 Eilende Wolken〉(1892)과 1893년 시카고에서 열린 만국 박람회의 헌정작품인 〈페스티벌 주벌레이트 Festival Jubilate〉(1891), 〈게일 교향곡〉, 〈소나타 A 단조 Sonata in A Minor〉(1896), 〈피아노 협주곡 C샵 단조 Piano Concerto in C-sharp Minor〉(1899)가 있다.

미국의 걸출한 유명 여성 작곡가로 꼽히는 치니가 작곡을 시작한 뒤 발표한 150곡이 넘는 작품 대부분, 즉 합창곡과 교회음악, 실내악, 칸타타 등은 셰익스피어와 로버트 번스, 로버트 브라우닝의 글에 곡을 붙인 노래들이다. 1910년 남편이 세상을 떠나자 1911~14년을 유럽에서 보냈으며, 유럽에서 펼친 연주와 작곡한 작품 모두 널리 호평을 받았다.[다음백과]

 

 

 

 

Amy Beach was born in Henniker, New Hampshire into a distinguished New England family. A child prodigy, she was able to sing forty tunes accurately by age one; by age two she could improvise a counter-melody to any melody her mother sang, she taught herself to read at only four years old, and began composing simple waltzes at five years old. She began formal piano lessons with her mother at the age of six, and a year later started giving public recitals, playing works by Handel, Beethoven, Chopin, and her own pieces.

 

 

 

========Piano Concerto (1898)=======

 

Amy Beach's Piano Concerto in C sharp Minor, Op. 45, was composed in Boston between September 1898 and September 1899, and revised in the following months. The work is scored for pairs of flutes (piccolo), oboes, clarinets (bass clarinet), and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, solo piano, timpani, and strings. It was first performed on 7th April 1900, with the composer as soloist and the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Wilhelm Gericke, in Boston's Music Hall. In 1900 Arthur P. Schmidt Company of Boston published the concerto in a two-piano version. Beach later played the concerto with the Chicago, Philadelphia, Leipzig, Hamburg, and Berlin orchestras, among others.

 

 

 

In 1871, Beach's family moved to Chelsea, Boston,^[1] where they were advised to enter her into a European conservatory. Her parents opted for local training, hiring Ernst Perabo and later Carl Baermann as piano teachers. At age fourteen, Amy received her only formal training in composition with Junius W. Hill, with whom she studied harmony and counterpoint for a year. Other than this year of training, as a composer Amy was self-taught; she often learned by studying much earlier works, such as Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier

 

Career

 

 

Amy Beach in 1908

 

 

 

Beach made her professional debut in Boston in 1883, playing Chopin's Rondo in E-flat and Mosche

 

les's G minor Concerto; shortly after she appeared as a soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Following her marriage in 1885 to Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach – a Boston surgeon 24 years

older than she – she agreed to limit performances to two public recitals a year, with profits donated to charity.

 

 

 

Following her husband's wishes, she devoted herself to composition. Her first major success was

the Mass in E-flat major, which was performed in 1892 by the Handel and Haydn Society. The well-received performance of the Mass moved Beach into the rank of America's foremost composers. She composed the Jubilate for the dedication of the Woman's Building at the Columbian Exposition in 1893.

 

 

 

After her husband died in 1910, Beach toured Europe for three years as a pianist, playing her own compositions. She was determined to establish a reputation there as both a performer and composer. She returned to America in 1914, where she spent time at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

 

 

 

In 1915, she wrote Ten Commandments for Young Composers, which expressed many of her self-teaching principles. Beach later moved to New York, where she became the virtual composer-in-residence at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church, New York. She used her status as the top female

American composer to further the careers of young musicians; serving as leader of several organizations, including the Society of American Women Composers as its first president. Heart disease led to Beach's retirement in 1940 and her death in New York City in 1944.

 

Music

 

See also: List of compositions by Amy Beach

 

 

A member of the “Second New England School” or “Boston Group,” she is the lone female considered alongside composers John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote, George Chadwick, Edward MacDowell, George Whiting, and Horatio Parker.^[2] Her writing is mainly in a Romantic idiom, often compared

 

to that of Brahms or Rachmaninoff. In her later works she experimented, moving away from tonality, employing whole tone scales and more exotic harmonies and techniques.

 

 

 

Beach's compositions include the Mass in E-flat major (1892), 

 

=========Symphony in E Minor (1894)======

The Symphony in E Minor (Gaelic), Op.32, was composed between 1894 and 1896, and is scored for pairs of flutes, oboes (English horn), clarinets (bass clarinet), and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings. It was dedicated to Emil Paur, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and was first performed on 30th October 1896 by the Boston orchestra, which repeated it four times. The score was published by Schmidt in 1897. During Beach's life-time the symphony was given by the Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Hamburg, and Leipzig orchestras, among others.

 

 

 

the Gaelic Symphony (1896), 

 

 

 

=========Symphony in E-minor, Op.32 "Gaelic" (1896)==========

 

 

a violin sonata, a piano concerto,

 

 

 

=====a piano quintet ========

 

 

and a piano trio, several choral and chamber music compositions,

 

====piano music (including the Variations on Balkan Themes======

 

approximately 150 songs and the opera Cabildo (1932).

 

 

 

Theme and Variations for flute and strings, Op. 80 =======

 

 

 

Her sacred choral works include a settings of the Te Deum first performed by the choir of men and boys at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Boston, St. Francis's Canticle of the Sun first performed at St. Bartholomew's in New York, and a dozen other pieces, which were extensively researched in the 1990s by Betty Buchanan, Musical Director of the Capitol Hill Choral Society in Washington, D.C.

 

 

 

She was most popular, however, for her songs. “The Year's At the Spring” from Three Browning Songs, Op. 44 is perhaps Beach's most well-known work. Despite the volume and popularity of the songs during her lifetime, no single-composer song collection of Beach's works exists. Select works may be purchased through Hildegard Publishing Company and Masters Music Publication, Inc.

 

 

 

In the early 1890s, Beach started having interest in folk songs. She shared that interest with several of her colleagues, and this interest soon came to be the first nationalist movement in American music. Beach's contributions included about thirty songs inspired by folk music, including Scottish; Irish; Balkan; African-American; and Native-American origins, of which she composed five themes.^[3]

 

Tributes

 

On July 9, 2000 at Boston's famous Hatch Shell, the Boston Pops paid tribute to Beach. Her name was added to the granite wall on "The Shell". She joins 86 other composers, such as Bach, Handel, Chopin, Debussy, MacDowell, and Beethoven. Amy Beach is the only woman composer on the granite wall. Beach was put into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio, on April 24, 1999.^[4]

 

 

In 1994, the Women's Heritage Trail placed a bronze plaque at her Boston Address, and in 1995,

 

Beach's gravesite at Forest Hills Cemetery was dedicated.^[5]