Amy BEACH (1867-1944)

rom 1921 onwards, American composer Amy Beach spent each summer as Fellow-in-Residence at the MacDowell Colony, a retreat for artists pieces Op 92 Nos 1 and 2, inspired by birdcalls were both, she claimed, ‘based on exact notations of hermit thrush songs in the original keys but an octave lower, obtained at the MacDowell Colony’. Their melody, she tells us, was provided by a ‘most voluble thrush’, the song notated and played back to him. The bird would apparently then answer, and a kind of conversation ensued. Cast in the sombre key of E flat minor, the piece is headed by a quote from a poem by the American poet John Vance Cheney (1848-1922): Holy, holy! – In the hush / Hearken to the hermit-thrush; / All the air / Is in prayer.