This is a long listening assignment, so get comfortable.

The best information on Amy Beach can be found in Adrienne Fried Block, Amy Beach: Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of an American Composer 1867-1944. Much of the material on this page is taken from Block. Any mistakes are my own.

Here are the tracks

1-4. Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (Mrs. H. H. A. Beach) (1867-1944), Symphony in E minor, Op. 32 (Gaelic) (1896)

This is a symphony, and like many symphonies it is in four movements. Movements are short, related sections within a longer piece. The first movement of Beach's symphony, you have already heard on LA 2.

1. Allegro con fuoco
2. Alla siciliana--Allegro vivace
3. Lento con molto espressione
4. Allegro di molto

Amy Beach began writing her symphony in January of 1894, she was twenty-seven. The very idea of a woman writing a symphony in the 1890s presented a number of problems. The symphony had long been the genre in which composers proved their composing skills, and as George Upton wrote in 1880, women were not able to handle the "theoretical intricacies, the logical sequences, and the mathematical problems which are the foundation principles of music." A symphony also required an orchestra and conductor (almost always men) to take directions from the composer (in this case, a young woman). While other women had composed symphonies, Beach appears to have been aware of none of them--she worked without role models.

Beach was not just a woman writing a symphony, but an American, and in searching for a way to make her symphony American, she turned to old English, Scotch, and Irish songs, hence the work's title "Gaelic." These songs, wrote Beach, we "inherited with our literature from our ancestors." As you listen to the symphony think about the various themes (melodies) you hear. How would you describe each? Do the moods of certain themes seem to "win" by the end of a movement.

Movement 1: Allegro con fuoco (quickly, with fire)

This movement like most symphonic movements is based on a process called sonata form. In a sonata form movement, there are three main sections. First an exposition, in which the two main themes of the movement are introduced. Next comes a development, where the themes are worked out and altered. A sonata form ends with a recapitulation, in which the transformed themes bring the movement to an end. Here is an outline of Beach's first movement, all of which is based on her song "Dark Is the Night!" Notice how the movement seems to evoke the sea, perhaps setting a location around the Gaelic isles.

• 0:00 Exposition
  • 0:00 introduction
  • 0:44 a march-like first theme
  • 2:30 soaring, lyrical second theme
  • 2:56 a light, dance tune closing theme, based on the song "Connor O'Reilly of Clounish"
• 3:20 Development
• 6:25 Recapitulation (it is announced by a solo clarinet)

Movement 2: Alla Siciliana--Allegro vivace (in the style of a slow, dotted dance--quickly and brisk)

This movement is in ABA form (a first section, followed by a contrasting second section, and ending with a modified repetition of the first section). It is based on the song "The Little Field of Barley."

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:23 A section. Note that the woodwinds imitate bagpipes
• 1:59 B section. Much faster, this is a duple meter scherzo
• 4:43 A section returns
• 7:18 Coda (tail) that reintroduces the B section

Movement 3: Lento con molto espressione (slowly with much expression)

This movement is based on two themes, in a modified sonata form. It is based on two folksongs: "The Lively Child" and "Which Way Did She Go?"

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:31 First theme stated
• 3:14 First theme developed
• 7:12 Second theme stated
• 7:48 Second theme developed

Movement 4: Allegro di molto (very quickly)

This movement is another sonata form

• 0:00 Exposition
  • 0:00 Introduction
  • 0:15 First theme
  • 1:36 Second theme
• 2:28 Development
• 4:41 Recapitulation

5. Amy Marcy Cheney Beach, "The Year's at the Spring" (1900)

This is a lied, or song, set to a text by Robert Browning. Here is the text:

• The year's at the spring
• And day's at the morn;
• Morning's at seven;
• The hillside's dewpearled;
• The lark's on the wing;
• The snail's on the thorn;
• God's in his heaven
• All's right with the world!

The Concord Monitor of 25 November 1865 wrote that a farmer might make "a good investment in a piano, a melodeon, or some other instrument, to accompany the voice of his wife and children, provided always that practice on these instruments be not allowed to interfere with the practice at the kneading trough, the wash-board, or any other duty that a true woman, be she daughter, sister, wife, or mother, ought to understand."

How do you imagine male audiences and critics reacted to these pieces? What gendered criticisms do you think they might have launched?

Meanwhile, Charles Ives explained that after hearing a concert of the Kneisel String Quartet he felt that, “string quartet music got more and more weak, trite, and effeminate,” and so he had decided to start “a string quartet score, half mad, half in fun, and half to try out, practise, and have some fun with making those men fiddlers get up and do something like men.”

The last part of this assignment is a selection from Ives's quartet. How did he make the players "do something like men?"

6. Charles Ives, String Quartet No. 2 (1907-1913).

Disucssions
Arguments
The Call of the Mountains