The music of Amy Beach is enjoying a renaissance, and we think the time is long overdue for her choral music to be brought back into print in modern, lovingly-edited editions.

Amy Beach (1867–1944) was among the most significant American composers of her generation. A prodigy who was picking out four-part hymns by ear at four, she trained locally in Boston rather than at a European conservatory, the path nearly every serious American composer of the era was expected to take. Aside from a single year of harmony and counterpoint lessons at fourteen, she taught herself composition and orchestration entirely from books—she translated Berlioz's treatise on orchestration into English for her own use—and went on to become one of the most technically disciplined orchestrators of her generation. Her marriage at eighteen to Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a Boston physician, meant the end of her career as a touring concert pianist, but it marked the launch of her composition career in earnest. Her Gaelic Symphony (1896) was the first symphony published by an American woman, and stands as a landmark of the "Second New England School" alongside the work of Chadwick, Foote, and MacDowell, with whom she is usually grouped. Her catalogue runs past 300 works, and while the symphony and concerto get most of the modern attention, her vast output of piano music and songs, highly idiomatic and inventive, is enjoying a rediscovery.

Beach's choral music is Victorian in its sensibilities: exuberant, harmonically rich, and full of long lines and pleasing counterpoint that makes it a great joy to sing. She wrote choral music for specific uses, much of it for St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York, where she was for years the de facto composer-in-residence, alongside a substantial body of secular partsongs for women's choruses and glee clubs, including settings of Shakespeare, Browning, and Burns. Beach’s music has always enjoyed a particularly warm reception in Europe, and British choirs remain perhaps the strongest proponents of her choral music today. It's time for American choirs to catch up!

The Catchword Beach edition. Our editions use first editions and, wherever possible, Beach's handwritten manuscripts as sources. Our fresh engravings correct a number of errors in the early editions, and expand the layout into clean, modern system layouts with larger fonts for ease of reading. All of our Amy Beach editions are printed in 7" x 10.5" octavo format on bright, high-opacity American-milled paper, with elegant cover designs featuring print patterns by William Morris.

Thus far we have been proud to bring two of Beach's op. 78 canticles (Benedic, anima mea and Deus misereatur, both in English) back into print, along with her beloved op. 8 Three Choral Responses. We are hard at work engraving and editing the remaining op. 78 canticles, as well as two works that have been unavailable to ensembles since their first print runs in 1925: the carol-anthem Around the Manger, and Lord of the Worlds Above, a tour de force for choir, organ, and soloists on Isaac Watts' hymn text.

Who’s “Mrs. H.H.A.”? Many scores attribute the composer as "Mrs. H.H.A. Beach"—something that takes many people aback the first time they see it. It's a question we hear often enough to be worth a word here. The short version: this was the name she used by choice, for most of her working life. It wasn't an imposed Victorian euphemism to soften the fact of a female composer—plenty of her female contemporaries published under their own names. It was her professional identity, one she'd built over decades and evidently wasn't willing to abandon lightly, even as it came, later in her career, to mark her as a "Victorian holdover."* But it also wasn't the only name she used: she toured Europe as a pianist in the 1910s as Amy Beach, and evidently experimented more with that public identity in the final years of her life. When it came time to write her will, she set up a fund at the MacDowell Colony to receive the royalties and performance fees earned by her music as the Amy Beach Fund. In our editions, we credit her as "Amy Beach" on the cover, and as "Mrs. H.H.A. (Amy) Beach" in the composer attribution above the first system of the score.

*For a full account of Beach's life, see Adrienne Fried Block, Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of an American Composer, 1867–1944 (Oxford University Press, 1998).