This Women's History Month CapRadio highlights a different woman in music each weekday. Today's spotlight is on Amy Beach.
- Born in New Hampshire in 1867, Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (“Amy Beach”) was a child prodigy of the piano and, at age 17, made her debut as a soloist with the Boston Symphony.
- At 18 she married a Boston surgeon, Dr Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, who put restrictions on her performing career so she focused on composition.
- Following the death of her husband in 1910, she went to Europe to revive her career as a pianist. Her return to Boston four years later was triumphant, and she continued to tour and eventually compose some three hundred works, most published and performed.
- Beach was the only female composer in the “Boston Six,” a name given by later musicologists who viewed the group as pivotal in the development of an "American sound" in classical music that stands apart from its European ancestors.
Premiered in 1894, Amy Beach’s “Gaelic Symphony” was the first symphony composed and published by a female American composer. Using tunes from her family’s roots in Ireland and Scotland, the symphony helped define a "Melting Pot" sound of American music. Very well received and considered as good as anything composed by anyone in America at the time, it made her famous in the US and Europe. The "Gaelic Symphony" by Amy Beach is today's Midday Masterpiece.
