My Reach for Fame and Glory

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

 

Mrs. H. H. A.  Beach

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach, who lived from 1867 to 1944, was a composer of music and a concert pianist, now nearly forgotten after being well-known and popular for many years. She composed music of every sort, from little songs for children’s piano studies to symphonies and an opera, with lots of concert piano music, chamber music and church music. Her husband and the rules for good manners at the time caused her to become known only as Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.

Some folks could not resist the temptation to refer to her as Mrs. Ha Ha Beach, and it was not until fairly recently that writers called her Amy Beach.

I first knew of her because of a course in American music that I took at the University of Minnesota. I was not interested in her at first, but in the Bicentennial Year of 1976 there was more attention paid to earlier American composers. Old “Etude” magazines had some of her teaching pieces included along with some interesting written material about her. John Tasker Howard in his book, Our American Music had some favorable remarks about her, and the Seattle Public Library had a few of her more ambitious works in score, plus a number of her solo songs. I wound up writing an essay about her life and works that I thought could be of use to my music history students.

A formal “Request for Papers” appeared in the mail one day in January of 1983 or thereabouts. These “Requests” very rarely come to community college instructors, but I thought I should submit my Amy Beach paper. If accepted it would be read at a three-day convention of “Women in Music” to take place at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. To my amazement, the paper was accepted, and I was to have an all-expense trip to Ann Arbor the following spring, thus rubbing elbows with the terribly important University Professors from all over the country, who were probably invited to events like this every month or so.

The trip was fun, flying to Detroit from Seattle directly over Green Bay, my former home. Someone met me at the airport to drive me and a few others to the campus, and I was given a place to stay with a family near the campus. Not the Hilton Hotel, but OK, with a super-breakfast. The University of Michigan is huge, but I finally found the place to register, get a name card, a program of events, and the official welcome to the Women in Music convention.

It was then that I learned that I was the only male to present a paper. There were perhaps four or five other men listed on the program, but they were all performers of the music. I thought I must be important, considering my status as the only male presenter. True, my paper was listed on the late afternoon of the last day of the convention when many of the attendees would have already left. Still, the only male – that had to be worth something.

At the first session I was a bit shocked to find that of the first eight women composers who performed their own works, all for piano, that not one actually sat at the keyboard. They whacked at the open (or damped or “prepared”) strings of the grand piano with various objects. I remember one composition played by the woman lying on the floor under the piano, knocking on the sound-board and orking the pedals.

In the evening of the first day, one really big, but sexy woman was to play the big pipe organ in the main concert hall. She had two male assistants with her to pull and push the stop knobs, as two hands could not possibly handle all the quick and complicated changes in the setting. Wearing garish green satin skin-tight pants and tight yellow top, she came undulating in, big hips asway, climbed up on the bench, prepared to play by pulling out all the stops and couplers, suddenly leaned forward with both arms outspread, and landed on as many keys of the four keyboards as she could reach, forearms and fingers. It is hard to imagine the incredible loud, ugly sound that came from that great instrument. It is hard to make a pipe organ sound truly awful, but her success was astounding.

The big dress-up banquet was held in the evening of the second day. There was a bar, and I remember dimly that the drinks, limit of two, were free. There were perhaps fifteen tables for six set up for participants and guests. Yes, there were a few husbands there, but hardly noticeable in the crowd of women. So I came into the banquet room which was about three-quarters filled, not really knowing anyone, receiving rather cold looks, I thought, from the seated ladies. Finally I came to a table with a couple of empty chairs and I approached, saying, “You ladies look like you have kind faces, may I sit here?” They said, not very enthusiastically, that it would be OK. I had my glass of wine in hand; they had theirs at the table, and I hoped we could have a pleasant conversation. It must have been at a given signal, or some sign, they all decided they needed to go for another glass of wine. Since my glass was still full, and I was not invited to come along, I stayed at the table and waited for them to come back. Then I waited some more, and still more, but they never showed up at that table again. So I grew discouraged, got up and started looking for another table. Luckily I spotted a lady that I had known from the University of Washington where we had both been Teaching Assistants. Her name is Lorraine Sakata and she had made a name for herself in ethno-musicology in the years since I had last seen her. So I got a place to sit with one person who knew me. I sensed that the other women at the table wanted no part of me, and were acting a bit cool toward Lorraine because she had broken ranks and accepted me. I have a faint glimmering now, of what it is like to be a part of a despised and inferior minority.

Finally on the afternoon of the last day my turn came to read my Amy Beach paper. Getting a feeling of the attitude of the audience, what I said was, “I’ll read this paper as fast as I can so we can get to the good stuff, the music.” So I did that, and the neat flute quartet (two women, two men) that followed was super-Beech, so everyone was happy, and I even got a compliment on the paper. And the audience was not as small as I had anticipated.

The very last item on the convention program was a talk, actually a fiery speech, by a woman who urged the people in charge to make this Women in Music an annual event, this being the first. She thought that the convention should be limited to women, both presenters and performers. The one concession in her proposed plan was that the participants need not necessarily be Lesbian, but that preference would be extended to Lesbians.

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The “Women in Music” convention never became an annual event.

Photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Beach