Amy Beach (1867-1944)
Trio For Piano, Violin & Cello, Op. 150 (1938)
Chamber Works by Women Composers
Vox Box Recording
Trio For Piano, Violin & Cello, Op. 150
1st movement: Allegro
2nd movement: Lento expressivo-presto
3rd movement: Allegro
Amy Beach
Chamber music and diversity—my two priorities when putting together this 52-week music calendar. So starting with this Beach Trio, the next five weeks on here is a stretch of chamber works by female composers. (Or is it women composers? There’s some grammatical error lurking in there—notice for example how odd ‘men composers’ sounds. There’s also, I believe, a conceptual error: ‘female composer’ puts the emphasis on a composer that happens to be female; whereas it’s the other way around with women composer. Both of which are perfectly fine designations, but the difference between the two nevertheless present an opportunity to ask the question: where are we trying to get to? Is it a place where the particulars of an under-represented group don’t matter, and all that matters is that they are represented? To illustrate the same point but in a different sense…I prefer lower case black rather than Black when referencing my demographic in writing. Knit picking? Yes, a little. But in light of where I believe we’re all trying to get to on equity, diversity, inclusivity—a place where your demographic should provide no expectations in regards to your ability to do a thing, and your achievements are awarded on your own individual merit—such knit picking might just be necessary. Likewise, ‘Black composer’ puts the emphasis on the demographic, a Black iteration of what it means to be a composer; ‘black composer’, on the other hand, is congruent with the definition of a composer as a profession that can be held by anyone, some of who can be be described as black. Notice the slightly klan-ish bent of capitalizing ‘W’ in ‘White people’, as a defined and exclusive community. Is it a pipe dream to imagine such a place where ‘black female’ is nothing more than a phenotypical designation rather than a nod in the direction of ineluctible barriers of experience that exist within a broader community? Perhaps. But I can’t see a goal worth committing to in this indefinite partitioning of identities based on a metric as crude as skin colour and gender. Albeit that is the way social organization has been erected for a long time and it stands as a profound and allegedly necessary contradiction that we have to employ identical methods in order to usurp legacies of exclusion and discrimination).
Back to Amy Beach: I’ve got some podcast conversations lined up in the coming weeks specifically on the topic of female composers, with musicians who can provide some anectodal context to support or refute some of the above theorizing. As an exercise to understanding the gender disparity in orchestral music, I invite you to pick up the nearest thousand-page anthology on the history of classical compositions: more often than not, you won’t find a mention of a female composer throughout the entire length of these tomes (my copy of Robert Philip’s The Classical Music Lover’s Companion is a case and point). There of course were many such female composers. Though nothing can be done to rectify their disenfranchisement, there remains much work to bring their contributions into public consciousness. Regular programming by local orchestras and ensembles go a long way, regular mentions in music history texts go even further.
That said, I found Amy Beach’s Trio to be particularly boring. Which of course has nothing to do with the fact that she’s a female composer; in fact most male composers writing boring music. At least that’s what you’d think when every biography of a classical musician always culminates in how much they shirked that status quo and struck off in unusual directions. Leaves you wondering: who is this status quo? Just who is it that’s writing the boring stuff that makes the interesting stuff stands out. Or, who are the rule-followers that make the rule-breakers rule-breakers? By boring I really mean straight, perpendicular, risk-averse, safe and stable. Aside for the sudden alacrity with which the closing Allegro is introduced, it is the overall stability of this Trio that is it’s remarkable feature. Nevertheless, it is also remarkable that not one anthology I’ve come across bothers to mention that contributions of the first female composer of symphonic music in America.
What is the view?
Does it belong to you?
Do you see the same blue as I think I do?
What will it be?
The forest or the tree?
I’m only now arriving at an appreciation for Wye Oak—after having for so long erroneously relegated them to the same mind-bin as soy milk, beanies, and the synthetic aroma of flavoured juul pods mixed in with the hint of acetone on full-blown keto-breath…Ugh, I miss eavesdropping on hipsters ordering coffee. The hipster correlation to Wye Oak isn’t quite right inasmuch as their sound leans more towards sincere than ironic distances and mere introspective self-flagellation.
Their sound is a mixed bag: the ethereality of Beach House, the confessional-poetry of Laura Marling, marched to the celestial percussions of early Florence Welch. The lyrics to this song, off their 2020 EP by the same name, have a pulsating but disjointed logic of sleep-talk scribbled down by the waking poet.
Speak softly but carry a big stick—President Roosevelt’s mantra in relation to foreign relations—was what I first thought of when I heard this back in June. The lines ‘I believe you do know me / But you are still some other thing’ adds a bit of tinder to that theory. But now I hear in it something different: the same calm but earnest pleading that ends one Yeats poem (Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven):
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
That was the first poem I memorized, yes sappy and sentimental, but also has a matter-of-factness that makes it timeless. I use to work at futon shop in the Annex years back, a small business that catered to all budgets and diy designs; the highlight of which was that day Margaret Atwood randomly stopped by to order custom shams for her pillows. I ‘volunteered’ to drop them off at her house despite the cold reticence of her secretary on the phone who, suspecting my ulterior motives, probably vetted the package and discarded the little scrap piece on which I had cheekily written the opening lines to this same Yeats poem.
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths…
Cringe, I know, but still—never apologize for a light-hearted joke, or anything else you gotta do to help a shift go by.
Throwback to: YR3, WEEK24 — YR2, WEEK24
Click here for the full 2020/2021 roster of selected recordings