ELIZABETH SELLARS violin
WILMA SMITH violin
HELEN IRELAND viola
ZOE KNIGHTON cello

AGATHA YIM, POLYPHONIC PICTURES filming and editing

THOMAS GRUBB, MANO MUSICA sound engineering, editing and mastering

Filmed May 2023 at Melbourne Recital Centre, Southbank

This project was made possible through support from the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, and the City of Melbourne.

AMY BEACH 1867-1944
String Quartet, Op. 89 (composed 1921-29)

Amy Beach took Dvořák’s advice to heart when he implored composers to make use of Native American tunes, but the quandary was that they often didn’t fit into the normal Western construct of major and minor tonality.

A child prodigy, Amy Beach (née Cheney) was born in New Hampshire in 1867. At the age of 18, she made her debut as a pianist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, began a lifelong association with the publishing company Schmidt, and married Henry Beach, 25 years her senior. It was Henry Beach who encouraged her to focus on composition rather than performing.

After both her husband and mother died, Beach sailed to Europe in 1911, establishing a formidable concert career before returning to America in 1914 when war began, armed with countless reviews of her performances. By 1930, she had stopped touring and concentrated largely on composition. By the time she died in 1944, she had completed over 300 compositions.

She wrote a suite for children called “Eskimos”, setting Indigenous tunes with late Romantic harmonies. In one of the tunes, ‘Exiles’, she enriched the original melodies through a “free choice of chords which while foreign to the meagre harmonic scheme has not destroyed the native flavour”.

By the time Beach came to write Quartet for Strings, she was looking for ways to exploit rather than hide the tunes’ starkness, angularity and monophonic character. Perhaps because the tunes resisted the assimilation into the familiar formulas of major and minor, they forced her to make experiments.

Her Quartet for Strings (and sole composition for this combination) was started in 1921 and finished while in Rome in 1929; but the first public performance was not until 1942 at a two-day festival of Beach’s music to celebrate her seventy-fifth birthday. Reviews of the concert found it “a beautiful work in both form and content”. Glenn Gunn said of Beach, “a significant creative personality …who unjustly but quite according to our national habit has been relegated to relative obscurity”.

Beach’s Quartet for Strings is in four sections:

Grave - Piu Animato - Allegro molto - Grave (a reprise of the first Grave)

All of the themes are borrowed Inuit tunes and she delays the resolution of certain passages, making it feel unfinished until the very end. She made a significant step towards musical modernism by normalising dissonance.

There are three tunes: ‘Summer Song’, ‘Playing at Ball’ and ‘Ititaujang’s Song’. You can hear the first and second tunes outlined by a lone viola after the opening introduction, while ‘Ititaujang’s Song’ provides the basis for the Allegro molto and the resulting fugue.

Did Dvořák realise that with his suggestion of celebrating American themes, whether Native American, African American or Inuit, that this would necessitate a revolution in harmonic thought? Most probably, yes.