Symphony in E minor, Op. 32, "Gaelic"
Amy Beach
(b. September 5, 1867 in Henniker, NH; d. December 27, 1944 in New York, NY)
In 1896 Amy Beach was already a formidable presence in American music. When Antonin Dvořák directly encouraged American composers to draw on the music of African-Americans or indigenous people (what he himself did in his renowned New World Symphony), Beach looked back to her own ancestors to write her Symphony in E Minor, a work steeped in the folk traditions of Ireland. When it was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on October 30, 1896, the “Gaelic Symphony” was a landmark achievement: the first symphony ever composed and published by an American woman. It delivered a resounding artistic affirmation that American identity was a mosaic of many traditions.
Dvořák’s talk given December 15, 1893, the day before his New World Symphony debuted, was covered in the New York Herald. Citing publicly for the first time the sources of inspiration for his new symphony, he emphasized that these musical traditions held the key to developing a distinctively American school of classical music. The national conversation was begun.
Amy Beach took special note of an essay Dvořák wrote, published in February 1895 in Harper’s Monthly, titled "Music in America.” In it Dvořák wrote a love letter to his American experience and his high hopes for America’s musical future while he prepared to return home to Bohemia. While there is much material of interest to Americans generally and American composers in particular, this passage seemed like the one that probably resonated most strongly with Amy Beach, “The music of the people is like a rare and lovely flower growing amidst encroaching weeds. Thousands pass it by, while others trample it underfoot, and thus the flower threatens to perish. Yet it may be that a lover of music will one day notice it and carefully transplant it to his garden, where it may unfold and blossom to the delight of many.” She took it to heart. In her own words, she needed to show that the folk tunes of the British Isles, especially the Irish, were just as worthy a source of inspiration as any other. “They are,” she wrote, “as beautiful, as pathetic, as heroic, as any of the folk-music of the world.”
Gaelic Symphony was an immediate success, silencing skeptics and cementing Beach’s reputation as a composer of the first rank. It was not just a great symphony by a woman composer; it was a great American symphony.
The symphony is a masterful blend of late-Romantic grandeur and heartfelt folk simplicity. Beach skillfully uses four Irish melodies as thematic source material, weaving them into a dramatic and cohesive four-movement structure. The first movement, dark and turbulent, is built on her own themes but captures the heroic and passionate spirit of Gaelic lore. The beautiful second movement features two authentic tunes, including “The Little Field of Barley,” presented with exquisite lyricism. A playful scherzo follows, based on the lively jig “Go to the Devil and Shake Yourself,” before the finale brings the symphony to a powerful and dramatic close, reprising themes from the opening movement to create a cyclically unified whole.
There is so much more to Beach’s story, a story of perseverance and lasting impact—even here in Chattanooga—that is just as compelling. Her marriage at 18 to Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a surgeon 24 years her senior, came with a condition: she was to live as a society patron, limiting her public performances to two charity recitals per year. She saw herself primarily as a concert pianist, but had to curtail that part of her career. Her wonderful portfolio of compositions was greatly enlarged by this agreement. During her 25 year marriage Amy made important connections with her composer peers in New England. She was the youngest “one of the boys” among the Boston Six, so dubbed by another one of the Six, George Whitefield Chadwick.
Also among the Boston Six was composer Edward MacDowell. After his death, his wife Marian fulfilled their shared dream of turning their New Hampshire farm into an artists' retreat, now known simply as MacDowell. Amy Beach found a creative home there, completing 18 residencies before her death in 1944. In a final act of support, she bequeathed the royalties from her compositions to MacDowell, a gift that provides the institution with income to this day.
Marian MacDowell also promoted her husband's music and memory by traveling the country and helping found MacDowell Clubs everywhere she went. Chattanooga’s MacDowell Music Club was founded in 1916 and continues to this day, a familiar institution to most local musicians.
(c) 2025 by Steven Hollingsworth
Creative Commons Public Attribution 3.0 United States License
contact: steve@trecorde.net
