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Amy Beach (1867-1944) Three Choral Responses, op. 8 (1891)

Amy Beach spent much of her childhood and early adulthood in Boston. Many of her works were performed at Emmanuel Church from 1905-1908.

Her impressive musical accomplishments include several firsts: the first American woman to compose and publish a symphony and the first American woman to have a symphony performed. She is also one of the first American composers – of any gender – whose musical training occurred wholly within the United States, rather than Europe. As such, Beach’s approach to composition and her aesthetics are uniquely American, and she did not measure the quality of her work by comparing it to music by European composers. She believed that musical composition had three parts: the emotional, which reflected inner feelings and created a desire to communicate; the intellectual, in which one understood the musical form; and the spiritual, which involved the listener and the creator.

Amy Beach’s Three Choral Responses, op 8 of 1891 feature late romantic harmonic vocabulary mixed with simple homophonic elegance , thus emphasizing the clarity and meaning of the words.