Amy Beach

Amy Marcy Cheney was born on September 5, 1867 in Henniker, New Hampshire, to a prominent New England family. Her mother, Clara Imogene (Marcy) Cheney, was a talented amateur singer and pianist. Young Amy was a true prodigy who memorized forty songs at the age of one and taught herself to read at age three. She played four-part hymns and composed simple waltzes at age four. By the age of six, she began studying piano with her mother and performed her first public recitals one year later, playing works by Handel, Beethoven, Chopin, and some of her own pieces. In 1875 the family moved to Boston, where Amy studied with the leading pianists. She made her Boston debut in 1883, and two years later played her first performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Wilhelm Gericke conducting Chopin's Concerto in F Minor.

In 1885, she married Henry Harris Aubrey Beach (1843-1910), a physician, Harvard University lecturer, and amateur singer. Her husband requested that she limit her public performances, so she focused her musical energies on composing. She had only one year of formal training in harmony and counterpoint with Junius W. Hill. Beyond that, she embarked on a course of independent study, analyzing the compositions of master composers as models and translating theoretical works such as Berlioz's treatise on orchestration.

In 1892, Beach achieved her first notable success as a composer with the performance of her Mass in E-flat by Boston's Handel and Haydn Society. She became the first American woman to achieve widespread recognition as a composer of large-scale works with orchestra. Beach's national reputation grew through her equally well-received Symphony, op. 32; Violin Sonata, op. 34; and Piano Concerto, op. 45.

Following the success of her Mass in E-flat, Beach received important commissions for vocal and choral works. In 1892, the Symphony Society of New York premiered her concert aria, Eilende Wolken, op. 18, the first composition by a woman played by that orchestra. For the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, she wrote the Festival Jubilate, op. 17. The 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha commissioned her Song of Welcome, op. 42.

Ater her husband's death in 1910, Beach sailed for Europe to establish her reputation there as both a performer and composer. She received enthusiastic reviews for recitals in Germany and for her symphony and concerto, which were performed in Leipzig and Berlin. She returned to the U.S. in 1914, where she concertized in the winters and composed in the summers. In 1921 she became a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where she composed most of her later works.

Beach assumed many leadership positions, often in advancing the cause of American women composers. She was associated with the Music Teachers National Association and the Music Educators National Conference. In 1925, she was a founding member and first president of the Society of American Women Composers. Following her death on December 27, 1944, Beach's royalties were given to the MacDowell Colony, as prescribed in her will.

-U.S. Library of Congress

Lili Boulanger

During the course of her short but prominent career, the composer Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) was an icon of the entrance of women into French professional society in the early part of the 20th century. The Boulanger family was something like musical aristocracy in 19th-century Paris. Lili Boulanger’s grandfather taught at the famed Paris Conservatory, and her father Ernest was a well-known opera composer in his time, as well as a winner of the prestigious Prix de Rome for composition — a competition also won by numerous other luminaries of the French classical-music world, including Hector Berlioz, Georges Bizet and Claude Debussy.

Lili Boulanger and her older sister Nadia both studied composition at the Paris Conservatory, a rare and notable undertaking for women at the time. In their careers, both sisters struggled against the constraints of gender expectations of the era. Nadia competed unsuccessfully for the Prix de Rome several times, but favoritism and noted misogyny of the judges thwarted her efforts. Lili later won the competition in 1913, the first woman to do so in the category of music composition. During the month-long competition and in subsequent press coverage, she took pains to present herself in a specifically feminine and non-threatening, even childlike, manner. This image, cultivated from the archetype of the femme fragile popular in art and literature of the time, would follow Boulanger through her short career, and be reinforced by music critics after her death in 1918 from complications of Crohn’s Disease.

The legacy of Lili Boulanger is intertwined deeply with her sister’s. Nadia herself gave up composing in 1922, but through her long career of teaching composition she arguably shaped the future of classical music more than any single person during the 20th century. Nadia was directly responsible for the performance and publication of her younger sister’s compositions. She edited and occasionally transcribed manuscripts, and oversaw recordings of Lili’s music, sharing her sister’s work with the hundreds of composition students she taught until her death in 1979 — and with the larger public through annual concerts she organized in remembrance of Lili.

Lili Boulanger composed predominantly for voice or choir, either with piano accompaniment or full orchestra, and she preferred the combination of vocal and instrumental forces over writing for orchestra alone. In much the same way that Mozart’s music is frequently described as “operatic,” Boulanger’s music has a decidedly vocal quality to it, even the instrumental pieces. Boulanger was devoutly Catholic, but notably interested in other religions and spiritualism in general. She frequently chose to set biblical or religiously oriented texts, as well as texts by French symbolist writers that reflect themes of sadness and loss, and the inexpressible mysteries of the universe and of the human soul. Her music is thus both intimate and immense, centered in the physical world but also transcendent of it.

The appeal of Boulanger’s music, 100 years after her death, is still manifest. Her compositions hint at different possibilities for the future of classical music, beyond the coldly rational rigors of serialism and atonality that reigned for much of the 20th century. Her musical evocations of spiritual anxiety and uncertainty speak to the disconnection and dissonance of our modern world as much as they resonated in the decade of the First World War. The scope of her compositions is remarkable, demonstrating substantial skill and insight beyond the 24 years she lived.

-Mary Moran

MMF Celebrates Women Composers (part 1)