The Life and Work of an American Composer, 1867-1944

Adrienne Fried Block

"At last! A definitive study-in-the-round of composer Amy Beach, who grew up in a time that dictated abandonment of her maiden name (Amy Cheney) and use of her husband's (as Mrs. H.H.A. Beach). Block's enthusiastic, comprehensive, crystalline, and impeccably documented book will finally put to rest the misogynist image of 'Mrs. Ha-Ha Beach' as a Bostonian lady not to be taken seriously as a creative artist and virtuoso pianist. Confirming Beach's prodigious musical gifts, this biography--an informed and revelatory feminist study--puts in high relief the courage and brio of a Victorian woman who, having married in her teens a patrician physician more than twice her age, made a go of it, here and abroad, in the world of professional music. This generous book appears fortuitously at a time when Beach's music, for long a victim of the anti-Romantic bias of American musical modernism, is coming to be recognized for its integrity and expressive range."--H. Wiley Hitchcock, Distinguished Professor of Music Emeritus, City University of New York