They have not the creative power

[lennygoran]

Disappointed Dvorak said this! I see she didn't do any operas-will have to listen to some of her music which I see is available at youtube! Now I see I actually have a copy of her Symphony in E which I've never listened to. Regards, Len

Amy Beach, a Pioneering American Composer, Turns 150

By WILLIAM ROBIN SEPT. 1, 2017


Shortly after Antonin Dvorak arrived in the United States in 1892, for a historic visit that resulted in the creation of his “New World” Symphony, he made a cursory remark to a Boston newspaper about gender and the field of music.

“Here all the ladies play,” Dvorak said. “It is well; it is nice. But I am afraid the ladies cannot help us much. They have not the creative power.”

His contention that women might play but not create — that they could be performers, not composers — was commonplace at the time. Ten days later, though, another paper published a rebuttal from an up-and-coming Boston composer who would soon go on to prove Dvorak wrong.

“From the year 1675 to the year 1885, women have composed 153 works,” Amy Beach wrote. “Including 55 serious operas, 6 cantatas, 53 comic operas, 17 operettas, 6 sing-spiele, 4 ballets, 4 vaudevilles, 2 oratorios, one each of fares, pastorales, masques, ballads and buffas.”


Listing the names of dozens of female composers, Beach added that “more women are interested in the serious study of the science of music as well as the art than formerly.”

When her “Gaelic” Symphony was given its acclaimed premiere by the Boston Symphony Orchestra four years later, Beach became a national symbol of women’s creative power, and was known as the dean of American women composers. Yet Sept. 5, her 150th birthday, will not be widely celebrated with performances of that pioneering symphony. No major American orchestras have programmed her works this season. Indeed, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the last time the Boston Symphony performed one of her orchestral works in full.

That Beach was famous in her lifetime but ignored today suggests that, even if we live in a more enlightened age than Dvorak’s, prejudices still shape the symphonic repertory.

“Historical women composers have a much harder time getting people to take a chance and listen to them,” the musicologist Liane Curtis said in a recent interview. As the president of Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, dedicated to supporting women in classical music, Ms. Curtis has helped organize several Beach commemorations for her anniversary season, including a coming academic conference at the University of New Hampshire as well as the website amybeach.org. Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy is also issuing new versions of Beach’s scores, including the first edition of her career-making “Gaelic” Symphony since it was originally published in 1897.

In an ideal world, American orchestras would take up these new editions and embrace Beach’s work. But in the meantime, scholars have provided an illuminating examination of her life and significance. As the musicologist Adrienne Fried Block documented in her 1998 biography “Amy Beach: Passionate Victorian,” the composer was a remarkable prodigy. Born Amy Marcy Cheney and raised in an upper-class Boston family, by the time she was 2, Beach was singing in harmony with her mother as she was rocked to sleep; by 4, she had written her first waltzes; and by 7, she was playing Beethoven sonatas along with her own compositions.

Despite Beach’s early promise, her domineering mother at first refused to sanction a life as a touring pianist. “Careers for women outside the home were hardly the accepted practice,” Ms. Block writes of the era. “Upper-class women gifted in music were turned from any thought of such a life plan because of the stigma attached to those who appeared as performers on the public stage.”

Beach was eventually allowed to make her public debut as a performer. But when her family consulted a prominent conductor about how to further her growth as a composer, he recommended self-study. While American composers of the time typically traveled to Europe for private instruction, women were perceived as intuitive musicians and not capable of intensive training. So Beach devoted herself to an exhaustive immersion in the orchestral repertoire, systematically examining scores and comparing them to performances she heard at the Boston Symphony.

“I copied and memorized whole scores of symphonies,” she once said in an interview. “It was like a medical student’s dissection.”

At 18, she married an eminent doctor, Henry H. A. Beach. Pressured to conform to expectations for an upper-class wife, she curtailed her public recitals. Henry Beach did not want her to take composition lessons, either — he feared, patronizingly, that it might change her creative voice — but he still pressed her to work.


“It was he more than any one else who encouraged my interest upon the field of musical composition in the larger forms,” she wrote of her husband. “It was pioneer work, at least for this country, for a woman to do.”

She began publishing elegant piano works and affecting songs, including a hit, “Ecstasy,” which eventually had over 1,000 performances. And she benefited from Henry’s professional connections, as his patients included leading arts patrons in Boston.

But making a career as a composer was an uphill battle. The prevailing American view on female composers at the time is articulated in the subheadings of the first section of the critic George Upton’s influential 1880 book, “Woman in Music”: “A general view of woman’s influence on music — love attachments and home life — the failure of woman in composition — some consideration of reasons why she has produced no enduring musical work.” Upton and others believed that women were too emotionally volatile for the “exact science” of composition; they could only serve as mothers and muses for great men.

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“She will always be the recipient and interpreter,” Upton wrote, “but there is little hope she will be the creator.”

Beach herself worried that women’s limited opportunities might constrict their ability to flourish as creative figures. “Music is the superlative expression of life experience,” she said, “and woman by the very nature of her position is denied many of the experiences that color the life of man.”

Nevertheless, she persisted. The successful premiere of Beach’s first major work, an expansive Mass in E-flat, defied stereotypes. One critic praised her “deeper resources of the science of music” that were “difficult to associate with a woman’s hand”; another wrote that her “considerable ability in her orchestration” was “somewhat of a surprise to the majority of the audience.” She was quickly accepted as a member of a distinguished cohort of Boston composers, among them John Knowles Paine and George Whitefield Chadwick, both of whom wrote symphonies steeped in European idioms that are unfortunately overlooked today.


Beach achieved her breakthrough with the premiere of the “Gaelic” Symphony in 1896. The work draws on Irish folk melodies, but its crisp energy and roiling climaxes are steeped in the style of Dvorak, whose “New World” Symphony had swiftly become a touchstone for American composers, and also that of Brahms and Saint-Saëns, whose scores she had studied.
Symphony in E Minor, Op. 32, "Gaelic Symphony": I. Allegro con fuoco Video by Detroit Symphony Orchestra - Topic

The symphony was nearly unanimously praised, albeit in gendered terms. One critic wrote that it “has not the slightest trace of effeminacy, but is distinctly and thoroughly masculine in effect.” Chadwick welcomed her into the American symphonic school, tellingly, as “one of the boys.” Beach continued honing her orchestral voice in the stormily combative Piano Concerto, which Ms. Block’s biography treats as a sonic metaphor for the composer’s struggles for control in her private life.

She soon became an emblem for women’s rights. “When women were working on the suffrage movement,” Ms. Curtis said, “Beach was often pointed to as one of these symbols of women’s achievements, that women can work at the highest level in every field.” After Beach’s husband and mother died, she resumed her piano career and toured Europe, receiving accolades that further bolstered her reputation in the United States. She wrote a set of exquisitely Brahmsian variations for flute and quartet; impressionistic piano miniatures based on her transcriptions of birdsong; and a densely chromatic string quartet pointing toward modernist developments that, as an unabashed musical conservative, she otherwise never embraced.

Unlike dozens of forgotten women composers, Beach has remained a presence in musical history, mainly because of her success in her lifetime and scholarly efforts to promote her work. But her absence from the modern repertory demonstrates the pervasive, lingering influence of figures like Upton. Even as living female composers have become increasingly recognized in recent years — three of the last five Pulitzer Prizes in Music were awarded to women — the absence of older examples from the repertory can give the false impression that women simply didn’t compose before the late 20th century.

“People think the canon is a product of some really impartial meritocracy,” Ms. Curtis said. “Having read a lot of feminist theory, we know that all kinds of things are shaping our perceptions of what belongs in a canon.”

Just a few months before she died in 1944, at 77, Beach was asked to reflect on the status of women in music. “I have no special views at all about the success or non-success of women in any field,” she said. Perhaps concerned that her legacy might endure as political rather than musical, Beach downplayed the sexism that she had fought against throughout her career. “My work has always been judged from the beginning by work as such, not according to sex,” she insisted. “The question has rarely ever been raised.”

But the question was raised continually in Beach’s lifetime, and it remains unanswered today.



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/arts ... collection

[jserraglio]

I have some of Amy Beach and like it. There is Cabildo, a one-act opera which I have the Delos recording of but have yet to hear.

[lennygoran]

I have some of Amy Beach and like it. There is Cabildo, a one-act opera which I have the Delos recording of but have yet to hear.

Thanks-funny wiki didn't mention Cabildo-small segments of the opera are available at youtube-I'm listening to the symphony now and enjoying it-next up for me will be the piano concerto! Regards, Len

[jserraglio]

Cabildo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabildo_(opera)

Forgot to thank you for the NYT article. Learned a lot from it.

[lennygoran]

Forgot to thank you for the NYT article. Learned a lot from it.

And I have to apologize to wiki-the article on her does mention the opera. Regards, Len

"Beach's compositions include a one-act opera, Cabildo,[65] and a variety of other works."

[maestrob]

Have enjoyed this 2003 release: highly recommended........

[jbuck919]

The reason that women have contributed little to the arts (or science or any endeavor for that matter) is that until very recently they were relegated to another role. Anyone who thinks anything different is indulging in the fallacy of incredulity.

[jserraglio]

According to Wikipedia, when the great Wisława Szymborska was asked why she wrote so few poems, she answered, "I have a trash can in my home." The notion that women lack creative power belongs in the trash. Not hers though, which probably had plenty in it worth a second look.

[John F]

The reason that women have contributed little to the arts (or science or any endeavor for that matter) is that until very recently they were relegated to another role.

True in general but with many important exceptions, especially but not exclusively in the arts.

[jserraglio]

The reason that women have contributed little to the arts (or science or any endeavor for that matter) is that until very recently they were relegated to another role. Anyone who thinks anything different is indulging in the fallacy of incredulity.

Women Scientists Before the 20st Century This is a historical list, intended to deal with the time period where it is believed that women working in science were rare. For this reason, this list ends in 1900.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_f ... th_century

Women Heads of State or Government (elected or appointed since the 1940s) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_e ... government

[jbuck919]

The reason that women have contributed little to the arts (or science or any endeavor for that matter) is that until very recently they were relegated to another role. Anyone who thinks anything different is indulging in the fallacy of incredulity.

Women Scientists Before the 20st Century This is a historical list, intended to deal with the time period where it is believed that women working in science were rare. For this reason, this list ends in 1900.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_f ... th_century

Women Heads of State or Government (elected or appointed since the 1940s) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_e ... government

I didn't say that there were no important contributions, even occasionally great ones. What I said is that the fact that women until recently were woefully underrepresented compared to men in most fields of endeavor is because of their traditionally assigned (and enforced) roles. The fallacy of incredulity refers to the fact that many people think that such an overwhelming imbalance implies necessity. It is the same fallacy that maintains that there must be a God because all those people who believe in one can't be wrong.

Here is a multiply ironic case of a recent extremely accomplished woman at the top of an almost unfathomable field of human endeavor. First, she died way too early of something that only happens to women, and second, she was from a Muslim country, in most of which women are still generally relegated to oppressive traditional roles.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... an-dies-40

[jserraglio]

Women have creative power and regularly do important work in the arts and sciences. That in spite of efforts to confine them in a kind of gender ghetto, or when that fails, to dismiss their accomplishments as statistical outliers.

Lots and lots of women have made significant contributions in many fields of endeavor. Not just the solitary Fields medal winner, an exception cited to reinforce the general rule that because of their being relegated to traditional roles women have contributed little to the arts (or science or any endeavor for that matter), while also reinforcing the misconception that breast cancer only happens to women.

The memorial wall pictured below could be filled with the names of these women, and then some.


Maya Lin: Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982)

[jbuck919]

j, you are not writing with much empiricism to back you up. Yes, breast cancer occurs in men but it is very rare, while it is still tragically common in women. There is a difference between stereotyping and looking at the numbers. You are writing as though we were at odds on this. We are not. But there is a reason that we have lists of women of achievement and not lists of men. Historically, there have been fewer of the former than the latter by a very large factor, and it is for the reason that I indicated and that most people agree with. (You correctly cite the achievement of Maya Lin, to which could be added a number of great women artists of the last century, but how many female Renaissance artists were there of any importance? One: Artemisia Gentileschi, whose father, also an important painter, encouraged her endeavor.) Recently this has begun to change, and perhaps some day it won't be necessary to cite any specific examples at all because equal achievement will be taken for granted.

[jserraglio]

how many female Renaissance artists were there of any importance?

Who are the traditional arbiters of an art work's importance? How many names have been lost, or changed or their works mis-attributed, because society required women to surrender their birth names at marriage?

We agree about the past ghettoization of women and how that has recently changed (cases like the women-need-not-apply-till-1970 Harvard English Dept or my niece's being ridiculed by a brain-dead Dayton Univ organic chem prof in the late 1980s for majoring in pre-med occur much less frequently now); but apparently we disagree about the number of significant contributions by women in the arts and sciences and also the extent to which women have been able to overcome the barriers to their achievement.

In any event . . . Women artists of the Renaissance

Artists from the Renaissance era include Sofonisba Anguissola, Lucia Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, Fede Galizia, Diana Scultori Ghisi, Caterina van Hemessen, Esther Inglis, Barbara Longhi,[13] Maria Ormani,[14] Marietta Robusti (daughter of Tintoretto),[13] Properzia de' Rossi,[13] Plautilla Nelli, Levina Teerlinc, Mayken Verhulst, and St. Catherine of Bologna (Caterina dei Vigri).Lucia Anguissola, Doctor of Cremona, 1560, Museo del Prado, Madrid

This is the first period in Western history in which a number of secular female artists gained international reputations. The rise in women artists during this period may be attributed to major cultural shifts. One such shift was a move toward humanism, a philosophy affirming the dignity of all people, that became central to Renaissance thinking and helped raise the status of women. In addition, the identity of the individual artist in general was regarded as more important; significant artists from this period whose identities are unknown virtually cease to exist. Two important texts, On Famous Women and The City of Women, illustrate this cultural change. Boccaccio, a 14th-century humanist, wrote De mulieribus claris (Latin for On Famous Women) (1135–59), a collection of biographies of women. Among the 104 biographies he included was that of Thamar (or Thmyris), an ancient Greek vase painter. Curiously, among the 15th-century manuscript illuminations of On Famous Women, Thamar was depicted painting a self-portrait or perhaps painting a small image of the Virgin and Child. Christine de Pizan, a remarkable late medieval French writer, rhetorician, and critic, wrote Book of the City of Ladies in 1405, a text about an allegorical city in which independent women lived free from the slander of men. In her work she included real women artists, such as Anastasia, who was considered one of the best Parisian illuminators, although none of her work has survived. Other humanist texts led to increased education for Italian women.

The most notable of these was Il Cortegiano or The Courtier by 16th-century Italian humanist Baldassare Castiglione. This enormously popular work stated that men and women should be educated in the social arts. His influence made it acceptable for women to engage in the visual, musical, and literary arts. Thanks to Castiglione, this was the first period of renaissance history in which noblewomen were able to study painting. Sofonisba Anguissola was the most successful of these minor aristocrats who first benefited from humanist education and then went on to recognition as painters.[15] Artists who were not noblewomen were affected by the rise in humanism as well. In addition to conventional subject matter, artists such as Lavinia Fontana and Caterina van Hemessen began to depict themselves in self-portraits, not just as painters but also as musicians and scholars, thereby highlighting their well-rounded education. Along with the rise in humanism, there was a shift from craftsmen to artists. Artists, unlike earlier craftsmen, were now expected to have knowledge of perspective, mathematics, ancient art, and study of the human body. In the late Renaissance the training of artists began to move from the master's workshop to the Academy, and women began a long struggle, not resolved until the late 19th century, to gain full access to this training. Study of the human body required working from male nudes and corpses. This was considered essential background for creating realistic group scenes. Women were generally barred from training from male nudes, and therefore they were precluded from creating such scenes. Such depictions of nudes were required for the large-scale religious compositions, which received the most prestigious commissions.

Although many aristocratic women had access to some training in art, though without the benefit of figure drawing from nude male models, most of those women chose marriage over a career in art. This was true, for example, of two of Sofonisba Anguissola's sisters. The women recognized as artists in this period were either nuns or children of painters. Of the few who emerged as Italian artists in the 15th century, those known today are associated with convents. These artists who were nuns include Caterina dei Virgi, Antonia Uccello, and Suor Barbara Ragnoni. During the 15th and 16th centuries, the vast majority of women who gained any modicum of success as artists were the children of painters. This is likely because they were able to gain training in their fathers' workshops. Examples of women artists who were trained by their fathers include the painter Lavinia Fontana, the miniature portraitist Levina Teerlinc, and the portrait painter Caterina van Hemessen. Italian women artists during this period, even those trained by their family, seem somewhat unusual. However, in certain parts of Europe, particularly northern France and Flanders, it was more common for children of both genders to enter into their father's profession. In fact, in the Low Countries where women had more freedom, there were a number of artists in the Renaissance who were women. For example, the records of the Guild of Saint Luke in Bruges show not only that they admit women as practicing members, but also that by the 1480s twenty-five percent of its members were women (many probably working as manuscript illuminators).

by Marie Denise Villers, once ascribed to Jacques Louis David (NY Met MOA). Not from the Renaissance but neither was she male.

[jbuck919]

Well, the first composer whose name is known to us was a woman: Hildegard of Bingen.

[jserraglio]

Well, the first composer whose name is known to us was a woman: Hildegard of Bingen.

Yes, but the Abbess Saint Hildegard did not have to adopt a spouse's name, did she? Convents being places that allowed an unmarried woman to blossom intellectually.

Some paintings by women artists went unattributed for that reason--maiden names could not be matched up later to married names. Then there is the phenomenon of the anonymous medieval artist, some of whom were surely women, as in the famous Bayeux Tapestry.

[jbuck919]

She is not officially in the canon of saints.

When I was in Germany, there was a convocation of all the music teachers from Department of Defense Dependent Schools in Europe that took place in Bingen, a still existing and apparently prosperous small city on the Rhine. None of my colleagues knew about her, and there was not a shred of a sign of memorialization of her in the town. Hildegard precedes by more than a century one of the first male composers whose name we know. That would be Thomas of Celano, the composer of the morbid Dies Irae. That work is still famous because of its embedment in the traditional requiem mass and because of many settings by great composers, while the Gregorian-inspired and joyous compositions of Hildegard are all but forgotten.

[jserraglio]

She is not officially in the canon of saints.

j, you are not writing with much factuality to back you up. Saint Hildegard of Bingen is the real deal. She was canonized in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI. And canonized summa cum laude so to speak, because the pope also named her a Doctor of the Church, one of only four women saints ever so designated.



Might the term composer be stretched to include a hymnodist? Do a ancient hymn's lyrics with plainchant melody lie within the Western music tradition?

If so, then I propose a toast to Hermann of Reichenau (a.k.a. Hermanus Contractus), the lyricist of Alma Redemptoris Mater who died before Saint Hildy was even born. Likewise, kudos to liturgical hymnodist Venantius Fortunatus from the sixth century -- Pange Lingua and Vexilla Regis.

[jbuck919]

Sorry about the gaffe regarding Hildegarde. It's very unusual for a pope to reach back that far to canonize someone, but of course Benedict XVI was/is a fine musician and German. A great many saints of old on the calendar were never formally canonized at all. Your trivia question of the day is, who was the first saint to be formally canonized by a pope? Hint: It is nobody obscure. BTW the other three female doctors of the church are Catherine of Siena and the two St. Theresas (Avila and Lisieux). That's from memory so if I'm digging myself deeper into a hole, so be it.

The problem with true Gregorian is that we may occasionally have an indication of who wrote the words, but nobody knows who wrote the music. John F and I have been back and forth on this. I consider Gregorian the foundation of Western music and therefore classical music, while he has a somewhat varying opinion.

Alma Redemptoris Mater, incidentally, is not a hymn, though the setting you show is pure Gregorian and quite beautiful. It is an antiphon, sung at the end of compline in the place of Salve Regina at a certain season of the year, I can't remember which one. There are four of these seasonal stand-alone antiphons. The other two are Ave Regina Caelorum and Regina Caeli (as in the movement from Cavalleria Rusticana.) There is a spectacular setting of each by Orlando di Lasso.

[jserraglio]

Dear j, seems like we agree on little these days. Except that Gregorian chant is one of the glories of early Western music. Those who think otherwise are like those who say that Western philosophy began with Descartes.

Alma Redemptoris Mater (Ecclesiastical Latin: [ˈalma redɛmpˈtoris ˈmatɛr]; English: Loving Mother of our Saviour) is a Marian hymn, written in Latin hexameter, and one of four seasonal liturgical Marian antiphons sung at the end of the office of Compline (the other three being Ave Regina cælorum, the Regina cœli and the Salve Regina).

It appears that not all hymns are antiphons, but some antiphons are hymns. AMDG.

[jbuck919]

Never argue with a Jesuit. (AMDG stands for Ad majorem Dei gloriam--to the greater glory of God, the motto of the Jesuit order.) But here I go anyway.

I don't care whether Alma Redemptoris Mater is metrical or not (it is very obscure that way), it is not a hymn no matter what you have read in Wikipedia, the 1914 version of the Catholic Encylopedia, or anywhere else. Identifying a text plus setting in Latin as a hymn is entirely a matter of context. They occur in specific spots in specific office hours--frequently in the office of vigils or matins which takes place in the middle of the night-- and although they are all over the place in terms of complexity of both text and setting, they are clearly distinct from the rest of Gregorian. Here is one you probably know, which has a simple but historically important (to say the least) tune, but whose text is quite complicated with a meter based on the odes of Horace:

[jserraglio]

Never argue with a Jesuit . . . . But here I go anyway. I don't care whether Alma Redemptoris Mater is metrical or not (it is very obscure that way), it is not a hymn no matter what you have read in Wikipedia, the 1914 version of the Catholic Encylopedia, or anywhere else.

Perhaps you might agree, j, that antiphonology is better left to one's betters, in this case the mediaeval scholastics.

A link to the Catholic Encyclopedia, which as you imply, has been, or should have been, my constant study. Any errors I have made about the rarefied doctrine and discipline of antiphonology are mine alone and not the fault of this ineffable work: http://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/
You appear, however, to be unaware of the fact that, tragically, there was no 1914 version of that venerable publication, only an index.

Finally, on my dear grandmother's scapular, I swear, "I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the Jesuit Order or the Jesuitical Party."

[jbuck919]

Unfortunately, the medieval scholastics are all dead, and as for the older version of the Catholic Encyclopedia, a remarkable work of scholarship, the entire thing has been online for some time.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/

[jserraglio]

Unfortunately, the medieval scholastics are all dead,

Their descendants survive and thrive.