Amy Beach was the first successful female American composer. She remains unsung today, but ironically this has less to do with her sex than it has to do with the year she was born.

Beach was one of the members of the “Boston Six” – Six American composers whose musical success marked a new era for Art Music in the US. After centuries of being considered a backwards musical wasteland, the United States was finally on the Art Music map. So what happened? Why are the Boston Six not household names? Well, their writing was very rooted in the European style (German, specifically), and there is little that is uniquely American about their music. This wasn’t a big deal during the height of their careers; but soon afterwards they became completely overshadowed by two things: Charles Ives and Jazz. Ives became the poster-boy for academic, aloof, cultivated Art Music, while Jazz quickly became the defining American musical idiom.

Back to Amy Beach – her music is truly fantastic; as good, if not even better, than the European masters who get overplayed.

Midsummer is celebrated various ways by various cultures on various dates throughout the week after the Summer Solstice. This is good news for my blog, because, not surprisingly, this mystical, magical, and religiously important time of year has a lot of significant music written about it.

Before Cheech & Chong, the best acid trip entertainment was undoubtedly Shakespeare‘s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Gods, goddesses, fairies, and magic potions, there is even a character named Bottom who gets turned into an ass; now that’s top-quality play-writing! Felix Mendelssohn, like many other composers, wrote incidental music for this play. Here is the overture from the suite.

Hear the rollicking scherzo from earlier this week!

June 23rd is St. John’s Eve – that is to say, the day before the Nativity of John the Baptist, the Christian Feast Day that celebrates the forerunner and baptizer of Jesus. But more on that tomorrow.

St. John’s Eve just happens to be the setting for one of the best scary pieces ever written – A Night on Bald Mountain (also titled “St. John’s Eve on the Bare Mountain”), by Modest Mussorgsky. The spooky music speaks for itself. Mussorgsky himself describes how he wrote the piece. I thoroughly enjoy his words (taken from a letter to a friend), because he makes the compositional process seem like a compulsive, drunken all-nighter, with plenty of Russian resentment against the Germans:

“So far as my memory doesn’t deceive me, the witches used to gather on this mountain, … gossip, play tricks and await their chief—Satan. On his arrival, the witches formed a circle round the throne on which he sat, and sang his praise. When Satan was worked up into a sufficient passion by the witches’ praises, he gave the command for the sabbath, in which he chose for himself the witches who caught his fancy. So this is what I’ve done. At the head of my score I’ve put its content:

1. Assembly of the witches, their talk and gossip;
2. Satan’s journey;
3. Obscene praises of Satan;
4. Sabbath

The form and character of the composition are Russian and original … I wrote St. John’s Eve quickly, straight away in full score, I wrote it in about twelve days, glory to God … While at work on St. John’s Eve I didn’t sleep at night and actually finished the work on the eve of St. John’s Day, it seethed within me so, and I simply didn’t know what was happening within me … I see in my wicked prank an independent Russian product, free from German profundity and routine, and grown on our native fields and nurtured on Russian bread.”

This piece is now pretty much universally recognized as one of the best parts of Disney’s 1940 film, Fantasia, which also included masterworks such as The Rite of Spring and the Pastoral Symphony.