Amy Cheney Beach

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (September 5, 1867 – December 27, 1944) was an American composer and pianist. She was the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music. As a pianist, she was acclaimed for concerts she gave in the United States and in Germany.

Amy Marcy Cheney was born in Henniker, New Hampshire. A child prodigy, she was able to sing forty songs accurately by age one; by age two she could improvise a counter-melody to any melody her mother sang; she taught herself to read at age three, and began composing simple waltzes at age five. Amy's mother, Clara Imogene Marcy Cheney, was herself an "excellent pianist and singer". She sang and played the piano for Amy. Despite this, her family struggled to keep up with her musical interest and demands. Young Amy often commanded what music was to be played and how. She was very particular and often became enraged if the music did not meet her demands. In addition, her mother forbade Amy from playing the family piano despite the child's wish to play, believing that indulging her would damage parental authority. At age four, she composed three piano pieces (waltzes) while spending the summer at her grandfather's farm in West Henniker, NH. There was no piano near the farm; Amy composed the pieces mentally and eventually played them at home.

Amy began formal piano lessons with her mother at age six. Fried Block (1998, p. 7) writes that in the social milieu of the time, "middle and upper class women gifted in music were turned away" from a career in it "because of the stigma attached to those who appeared as performers on the public stage." In Europe, Fanny Mendelssohn, sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, and herself a pianist and the composer of hundreds of compositions, encountered a similar stigma. But at age 7 Amy gave some public recitals, playing works by Handel, Beethoven, and Chopin, as well as her own pieces. One recital was reviewed in The Folio, an arts journal, and two or more agents proposed concert tours for the prodigy pianist, but Amy's parents declined, for which she was later grateful.

Amy's father, Charles Abbott Cheney, had forebears active in the anti-slavery and women's rights causes. Oren B. Cheney, an uncle of Charles, founded Bates College in Maine, the second-oldest coeducational college in the United States and oldest in the East, with first female graduate in 1869.

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