3 “A Reality of Glorious Attainment”

Amy Beach’s MacDowell Colony1

robin rausch

On July 9, 1921, Amy Beach wrote to her publisher, the Arthur P. Schmidt
Company, asking them to send a selection of her scores to the MacDowell
Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where she was working as
a resident artist for the first time. “I have promised to contribute some of
my music to the Tea Room, which opens on Friday, the 15th, to be sold for
the benefit of the Colony, among books, etc. written by people who have
worked here,” she wrote. The Nubanusit Tea Room was a new venture at the
MacDowell Colony. It offered refreshment to the tourists who motored
through the area during the summer months, while providing information
about the Colony and its artists in hopes of gaining new supporters. Beach
concluded her letter to the Schmidt Company with enthusiasm for her first
Colony experience: “I am having a wonderful month of work here, and love
the place beyond words.”2
Founded in 1907, the MacDowell Colony embodied Edward MacDowell’s
dying wish to turn his New Hampshire farm into a gathering place for
creative artists, where they could work undisturbed in a community of
their peers. The plan was but a vague idea when the composer became ill.
Marian MacDowell, the composer’s wife, established the Colony shortly
before her husband’s death to prove to him her commitment to the project.
She was a talented pianist who had once been MacDowell’s student. For
almost four decades, she managed the Colony from June through September,
and then traveled the country during the off-season, promoting the Colony
and playing her husband’s music as only she could.3
The MacDowell Colony became an important part of Amy Beach’s life.
Facilitated by her friendship with Marian MacDowell, Beach held eighteen
residencies at the Colony between 1921 and 1941. She worked well there.
Inspired by the woodland setting and the uninterrupted solitude of a studio
of her own, her time at the MacDowell Colony guaranteed productivity.
Beach felt a great debt to the Colony, which she repaid by becoming one of
38 its fiercest supporters.

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 “A Reality of Glorious Attainment” 39

Amy Beach was twenty-one years old, in her third year of marriage, and
living at 28 Commonwealth Avenue when, in the fall of 1888, Edward
and Marian MacDowell returned to the United States from living abroad
and settled in Boston. The MacDowells lived in Boston for the next eight
years. While it is easy to imagine Beach and the MacDowells moving in the
same musical circles during this time, the existence and extent of a friendship
between Beach and the couple remains speculative. There are no known
letters or other documents from these years that suggest that Beach knew
either Marian or Edward MacDowell. Later in her life, Beach remembered
her acquaintance with Edward MacDowell as “slight” and recalled only “two
occasions when we met.”4 The sole evidence of a possible acquaintance is an
undated letter Beach preserved in her scrapbook from Edward’s mother
Fanny, written on stationery of the Copley Square hotel in Boston. Fanny
writes: “My dear Mrs. Beach I send back the jar & napkin. The broth was the
most delicious I ever ate – will you accept the roses with my deepest
gratitude to your dear husband for his care of me. Faithfully always Fanny
D. MacDowell.”5
The earliest known correspondence between Beach and Marian MacDowell
dates from 1906, a year after the national press publicly announced Edward
MacDowell’s tragic illness and deteriorating condition.6 Beach had long
admired MacDowell’s music, and now she intentionally included it on her
recitals in support of the ailing composer. In a letter dated November 27,
1906, Beach discusses plans for two upcoming programs. She also offers
encouragement to Mrs. MacDowell in her decision to teach the coming
winter: “There are so many people who would naturally go to you for the
best understanding of your husband’s music, that I feel sure of your success
in a unique field.” In closing, Beach expresses her admiration for Marian’s
“great courage” in the face of difficult circumstances. “It is needless to assure
you again of the deep sympathy which Dr. Beach and I feel for you in this
terrible experience. You are much in our thoughts, as you must be in those
of all people to whom the music of your dear one has meant many, many
hours of happiness.”7
Edward MacDowell died January 23, 1908, leaving Marian MacDowell
a widow at age fifty. Two years later, on June 28, 1910, Henry Beach died.
Amy Beach was forty-two. Neither woman had children. Widowhood
conveyed a freedom to start life anew, unfettered by the prevailing stric-
tures of marriage. Marian MacDowell styled herself the matriarch of what
would become America’s premiere artist colony. Amy Beach pursued life as
an itinerant concert artist and composer, and she became celebrated as the
Dean of American Women Composers.

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 40 Robin Rausch

The paths of Amy Beach and Marian MacDowell did not cross for several
years after their husbands’ deaths. Beach cared for her ailing mother until
she died in February 1911. This double loss of both her husband and mother,
occurring so close in time, proved the catalyst that led Beach to head to
Europe, where she traveled and performed for the next three years. During
this time, Marian MacDowell focused on the growth and development of her
fledgling Colony. From 1910 to 1914, she produced a series of summer
pageants and music festivals to publicize the Colony and draw new talent
and supporters. The first of these productions was the 1910 Peterborough
Pageant, an outdoor drama that used Edward MacDowell’s music in
a retelling of the town’s history. A phenomenal success, it garnered national
press coverage and was the impetus for Mrs. MacDowell’s first lecture–
recital tours.8 World War I eventually brought an end to these summer
Peterborough productions. The growing conflict made it increasingly dan-
gerous for Amy Beach to remain abroad. She returned to the United States in
September 1914.
Beach’s success overseas buoyed her career back home. In 1915, her tour
schedule took her to the West coast, where she heard her Panama Hymn, op.
74, performed at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San
Francisco. Her music was featured at the 1915 biennial meeting of the
National Federation of Music Clubs in Los Angeles, June 24 through
July 3, and included a performance of her piano concerto, with the composer
at the piano. California feted her, and Beach maintained a base there for over
a year. In 1916, she came back East for good and moved to Hillsboro, New
Hampshire, seven miles from her girlhood home of Henniker and roughly
twenty miles due north of Peterborough and the MacDowell Colony.
Beach’s return to New Hampshire coincided with the launch of an
endowment campaign to secure the financial future of the MacDowell
Colony. By now, it was recognized as a critical success. But financial stability
remained elusive. As the Colony approached its tenth anniversary in 1917,
Marian MacDowell was nearing sixty. She did not know how much longer
she could continue her grueling lecture–recital schedule. In the fall of 1916,
appeals for support began to appear in newspapers and popular music
magazines. These often portrayed the MacDowell Colony as a uniquely
American institution, with an important role in fostering a national cultural
identity. Writing in The Musical Courier of September 7, 1916, composer
Carl Venth suggested: “If ever a real national American art is born, and
I believe the time is near, the ideal conditions for a demonstration of genius
loci are offered in Peterboro, which in a very short time should mean as
much to America as Bayreuth means to Germany or Stratford-on-Avon to

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 “A Reality of Glorious Attainment” 41

England.” He considered the MacDowell Colony “a national asset of the

greatest value” and believed it was “the duty of every musical organization
and of every woman’s club to take a share in supporting this splendid
effort.”9
Amy Beach’s name first appears in the annual reports of the MacDowell
Colony in 1917, listed among the contributors to the endowment fund
“raised by Mrs. MacDowell.” This was the first of many donations that she
made annually thereafter. And when Marian MacDowell invited the
National Federation of Music Clubs to hold their 1919 biennial meeting
in Peterborough, Beach performed on the program, playing her Suite
Française in a special recital at the Peterborough Town Hall on July 2.10
Amy Beach came to work at the MacDowell Colony as a resident artist in
1921, at Marian MacDowell’s personal invitation. By then, the Colony had
nineteen studios that accommodated close to fifty artists per season. Most
were chosen by an admissions committee from close to 300 applications.
Beach, however, was always invited by Marian MacDowell. In the early
years Marian chose all the artists. As Colony founder and resident man-
ager, she continued to have great latitude in extending invitations to artists
of her choosing. While Beach benefited from her friendship with Marian
MacDowell, the Colony benefited as well. Beach was an established com-
poser at the height of her career, and her presence lent the still-young
institution a certain prestige.
A typical day at the MacDowell Colony started with a communal breakfast
in Colony Hall, a refurbished barn that served as the social hub of the
Colony. Artists then headed to their assigned studios for a day of uninter-
rupted work. A cardinal rule stated that no artist should disturb another
while at work in their studio unless they had been invited. Lunch baskets
were quietly delivered to studio doors at midday. At the end of the day,
residents relaxed in Colony Hall, where a rousing game of cowboy pool was
routine after the evening meal. Beach worked in the Regina Watson studio
exclusively when she was in residence. The studio was built in memory of the
composer and beloved piano teacher from Chicago, Regina Watson, funded
by her friends and former students.11 Designed in the neoclassical style, it
remains one of the largest studios at the Colony, and at that time served as
both a music studio and a small recital space for informal performances.
A basic tenet of Colony life was Edward MacDowell’s belief in the
correlation between the arts. He thought that artists from different discip-
lines had much to learn from one another, and a Colony residency brought
together a unique group of visual artists, writers, and composers each
season. During the summer of 1921, Beach met poet Edwin Arlington

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 42 Robin Rausch

Robinson (1869–1935), a regular at the Colony who became a friend, and

sculptor Bashka Paeff (1889–1979), who years later sculpted a bust of the
composer. Writer Padraic Colum (1881–1972) was translating old Irish
songs and introduced Beach to the tune she later arranged in her piano
piece “The Fair Hills of Éiré, O,” op. 91. Beach encountered the poet
Katharine Adams and set two of her poems, “The Moonpath” and “I
Shall Be Brave.” Marion Bauer (1882–1955) was also in residence that
summer and composed her “Prelude in D major,” for the left hand alone,
the first of her Six Preludes, op. 15, which she dedicated to Beach.
By Beach’s own account, her first season at the Colony was magical. It was
the summer of the infamous hermit thrush that sang so insistently that Beach
transcribed the bird’s song and wrote two piano pieces based on the melody:
“A Hermit Thrush at Eve” and “A Hermit Thrush at Morn,” op. 92. She
annotated the manuscript of “A Hermit Thrush at Morn” with a statement of
authenticity: “These bird calls are exact notations of hermit thrush songs, in
the original keys, but an octave lower, obtained at MacDowell Colony,
Peterborough, N.H.”12 Beach began performing these pieces that fall and
implored her publisher to expedite publication. “If you can only do two of
the piano pieces early in the year, I should prefer the two Hermit Thrush
pieces, as the interest in them is really remarkable everywhere I play them,
either in public or private. They appeal to the musician and bird-lover alike,
and I am constantly asked when they are to appear in print.”13 The pieces
count among her most popular piano works. In 1998, critic David Wright
singled them out for praise in an article on Beach’s music for the New York
Times: “In this music, Beach does for the Romantic piano piece what Ives did
for the symphony: express human longings for nature and the divine
through a polytonal mix of natural and artful sounds. Such discourse came
readily to these successors of the New England Transcendentalists.”14
Beach told the hermit thrush story often when she spoke about the
MacDowell Colony. It captures perfectly the inspiration that she found in
nature and illustrates the ideal environment that the Colony provided for her
creative work. The studios were strategically situated on the grounds, almost
500 acres, tucked into the woods and far enough apart to ensure that Beach
had what she most needed to compose: “silence in solitude.” Beach elaborated
on this idea in a speech she gave to the Music Teachers National Association
in 1932, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the MacDowell
Colony. “It is not merely the absence of noise or any other distracting
influence. It is the actual communication which we receive from some source
outside ourselves, which can only reach us through ‘the innermost silence.’”15
In her speech, Beach twice mentions The Garden of Vision, a book by

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 “A Reality of Glorious Attainment” 43

L. Adams Beck, published in 1929. Lily Adams Beck was a pseudonym of

Canadian author Elizabeth Louisa Moresby (1862–1931). Moresby traveled
throughout Asia and lived in the East most of her life. She was a devout
Buddhist and published on themes of Eastern culture and philosophy under
the pseudonym L. Adams Beck. Beach quotes from The Garden of Vision: “To
live with lovely things is not a part of the Cosmic Law, but the whole of it
when rightly understood. For art and true spirituality are one.” Later in her
speech, she quotes from it again: “Why do the spiritually minded seek
solitude? Because Divinity sits in solitude, weaving happy spells.” This
comes from a paragraph that begins: “Nature holds the secret, for Nature is
not the veil of the Divine but Divinity itself and being so can interpret man’s
own divinity to him.”16 We do not know how Beach became acquainted with
The Garden of Vision, but the ideas it espoused, equating art and spirituality,
and nature and divinity, clearly spoke to her. Beach had spent a decade’s
worth of summers at the MacDowell Colony when she made this speech, and
it is evident that her Colony experience shaped her personal artistic credo.
At the MacDowell Colony, Beach found that “music poured out of her
that had been all but dammed up.” Beach’s biographer, Adrienne Fried
Block, has documented the increase in Beach’s productivity that dates from
her early residencies. In the five years following her first residency, Beach
wrote nearly fifty works (opp. 83–117), doubling her output from the
previous ten years. Almost all of Beach’s music going forward was written
or sketched at the MacDowell Colony.17 Figure 3.1 shows her in the idyllic
atmosphere that came to mean so much to her.

Figure 3.1 Amy Beach in the New Hampshire woods.

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 44 Robin Rausch

In the summer of 1922, Marian MacDowell and Amy Beach presented

a joint program at the biennial convention of the General Federation of
Women’s Clubs, held in Chautauqua, New York, from June 20 to 30. The
women’s club movement was vitally important to the success of both Amy
Beach and the MacDowell Colony. There were clubs across the country, in
towns big and small, all of them with potential audiences ready to lend their
support to the latest cause. In the years following World War I, one of those
causes was American music. The backlash against German music and musi-
cians that surfaced during World War I, and lasted long after, resulted in
a new appreciation for American composers and their music. American
music was featured at the convention in a series of “Hearing America First”
programs.18 In what was called “one of the outstanding programs,”
Mrs. Edward MacDowell spoke about the MacDowell Colony and appealed
to her listeners for financial aid to make it a permanent institution. She
followed her talk with a performance of eight works by her late husband,
and then introduced Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. Beach spoke about her Colony
experience and played three pieces she had composed there the previous
summer: her two hermit thrush works and “The Fair Hills of Éiré, O,” op. 91.
Around this time Beach became involved in the National League of
American Pen Women and led the formation of the Composers’ Unit within
the organization in 1924. That summer Dorothy DeMuth Watson, the
League’s convention chairwoman, paid a visit to the MacDowell Colony,
where both Beach and Mrs. MacDowell showed her around. Watson spear-
headed what was billed as “the first annual festival by American woman
composers” in 1925, held in conjunction with the League meeting in
Washington, DC. The three-day festival, April 28 to 30, featured several
works by Beach: her songs “A Mirage” and “Stella Viatoris,” op. 100, and
her choral pieces “Peter Pan,” op. 101, and The Sea-Fairies, op. 59. The
composer accompanied all the performances. On the final day of concerts,
Mrs. Edward MacDowell was featured on the program, giving a “Tribute to
the American Woman Composers.”19 There is no doubt that Marian’s speech
was specific to the MacDowell Colony, which was welcoming women artists
in all disciplines from its earliest years. Some of the women composers who
held residencies before Beach include Helen Dyckman, Mabel Daniels (1878–
1971), Margaret Hoberg (1890–1948), Frances Marion Ralston (1875–1952),
Ethel Glenn Hier (1889–1971), and Marion Bauer. During Beach’s tenure at
the Colony, she mentored many of the young women composers in residence,
who called her “Aunt Amy” at Beach’s request. When the Society of American
Women Composers was founded later in 1925, roughly half of the founding
members had spent time at the MacDowell Colony.20

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 “A Reality of Glorious Attainment” 45

Many of these women composers held multiple, consecutive residencies

at the Colony. Summer in Peterborough became an annual routine; it was
a second home where they came to do their creative work without the
distractions or responsibilities of daily life. Musicologist Denise Von Glahn
elaborates on this idea of the Colony as a second home when she writes
about “nature as a summer home.” Von Glahn notes that “unmediated
access to all of nature remained an elusive experience for women in the
early years of the twentieth century.” The MacDowell Colony provided “an
opportunity to engage with nature in ways denied them in their more
urban and busy lives.”21 Too often, escaping the city during the summer
was an option only for those with the financial means to do so. While
Colony artists were asked to pay a nominal daily fee toward room and
board, there were stipends and fellowships available to anyone in need of
assistance. The only requirement for acceptance was talent. The support
that the Colony extended to women composers was unprecedented at this
time.
As soon as Beach was eligible, she joined the Allied Members of the
MacDowell Colony, an alumni group of Colony artists first organized in
1911, to “promote the general welfare of the Colony, preserve its traditions,
and perpetuate the ideals upon which it was founded.”22 With the launch of
the endowment campaign, the Allied Members were increasingly involved
with fundraising. Beach spoke eloquently about the Colony on formal
programs and organized benefit performances, such as the concert that
was held on Saturday, March 7, 1925, in Washington, DC. Billed as “the
first formal recital of her compositions in Washington,” Beach was assisted
by composer and pianist Mary Howe and soprano Gretchen Hood. The
concert featured the Washington, DC, premiere of Beach’s Suite for Two
Pianos Founded upon Old Irish Melodies, op. 104. All musicians donated
their services “to the cause of the famous MacDowell colony.”23
By the 1930s, Marian MacDowell’s failing health prevented her from
touring any longer, and her loyal network of clubwomen was diminishing.
The Colony marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1932, facing the economic
consequences of the Great Depression along with the rest of the world. Beach,
in her aforementioned speech to the Music Teachers National Association
that year, appealed for support with this clarion call: “It rests with us all, who
appreciate the value of that to which we have devoted our lives, to see that this
flag of our country’s art-life never touches the ground!”24 The Colony
survived the Great Depression, only to face devastation when a hurricane
made a rare new England landfall in September 1938. Beach headed for
Peterborough as soon as she could to check on her dear friend and assess

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 46 Robin Rausch

the damage. The buildings held up remarkably well, with only minor repairs
needed. But downed trees were everywhere. The Colony was forced to close
in 1939 for the first time in its history. With clean-up costs estimated at
$40,000, Marian MacDowell wasted no time. She assembled a team of
lumbermen, built a sawmill on the property, and began fundraising. In an
undated letter, likely from January 1940, Beach writes: “Dearest friend, Just
a look at you, and the sound of your voice would coax the bark off a tree!
I cannot be happy a moment In beginning the new year, without sending
something to help even a little in the heroic work you are doing in your own
heroic way.”25
The Colony reopened in the summer of 1940, but without Amy Beach.
She had fallen ill in late March with bronchitis and was diagnosed with
a serious heart condition. On May 14, 1940, Beach wrote to Marian
MacDowell, updating her friend on her medical condition:

the bronchial condition is practically normal, but the heart is weak and therefore
everything must be cut down to its lowest terms at present, so far as exertion is
concerned. Now – of course that rules out the Colony for June!! It hurts to write
this more than you can ever know, but you must know the facts and then be able to
pass on the bliss that would have been mine to someone else.26

A year later she published a letter to the editor of The Musical Courier, an
appeal for MacDowell Colony Aid in the name of her “Hermit Thrush,” to
repair the chimney on the Regina Watson studio.27 Beach returned to the
MacDowell Colony one last time in 1941, but she suffered a bout of extreme
weakness caused by her heart condition and was unable to stay.
In her final years, Beach split her time between New York and Centerville,
Massachusetts. Just weeks before the composer’s death, playwright Esther
Willard Bates reported on her recent visit to Beach at the annual meeting of
the Allied Members of the MacDowell Colony, which occurred each
December in New York City: “She was sitting up in bed with a lovely pink
jacket on and said in a firm voice, ‘Give them all my love, my very dear love,
my very best love; be sure to give them my love.’”28 Seriously ill by this time,
Beach had managed to call Marian MacDowell only a few days earlier,
surprising her friend. Marian paid one last visit before Amy Beach died
on December 27, 1944.
Amy Beach left the rights to her music to the MacDowell Colony, a gift
that earned thousands of dollars each year in royalties and performance
fees for roughly a decade after her death. The money was deposited into
a special Amy Beach Fund. Amounts declined substantially in later years as
Beach’s music lost favor and the fund was subsumed into the Colony’s

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 “A Reality of Glorious Attainment” 47

general operating budget. But Beach biographer Adrienne Fried Block

notes “a startling change” that occurred in the early 1990s. Performance
and recording fees increased greatly; income from Beach’s music tripled
between 1992 and 1995. In the early twenty-first century, Beach’s music
continues to earn income for the MacDowell Colony. In 2022, royalties
averaged $2100 annually over the last five years, a remarkable feat consid-
ering so much of her music is now public domain. No doubt, Amy Beach
would have been elated to learn that almost eighty years after her death, her
music continues to support her beloved MacDowell Colony.29

Notes

1. The title quotation comes from Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, “The Twenty-Fifth

Anniversary of a Vision,” in Proceedings of the Music Teachers’ National
Association, twenty-seventh series (Oberlin, OH: MTNA, 1933), 47. In
July 2020, the MacDowell Colony dropped the word “Colony” from its name
and is known today simply as MacDowell. This chapter retains the earlier usage,
MacDowell Colony, which is how it was known during Amy Beach’s lifetime.
2. Amy Beach to The Arthur P. Schmidt Co., July 9, 1921, box 303, folder 10,
A. P. Schmidt Company Archives, Music Division, Library of Congress.
3. For more information on the history and development of the MacDowell
Colony, see Robin Rausch, “The MacDowells and Their Legacy,” in A Place for
the Arts: The MacDowell Colony 1907–2007, ed. Carter Wiseman (Lebanon, NH:
University Press of New England, 2006), 50–132.
4. Amy Beach to Richard Angell, April 7, 1938, cited in “MacDowell References,”
typescript, box 25, folder 5, Adrienne Fried Block Papers, MC 227, Milne Special
Collections and Archives, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham, NH.
The original is in box 4, the Edward MacDowell Papers, Columbia University.
5. Fanny D. MacDowell to Mrs. Beach, “Monday,” Autograph album, box 1, folder 19,
Amy Cheney Beach (Mrs. H. H. A. Beach) Papers, 1835–1956, MC 51, Milne Special
Collections and Archives, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham, NH. The
letterhead reads “Copley Square Hotel, F. S. Risteen & Co.” The hotel was opened in
the summer of 1891 and sold to another owner after Risteen’s death in 1903.
6. E. Douglas Bomberger, MacDowell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
See especially chapters 18 and 19.
7. Amy Beach to Marian MacDowell, November 27, 1906, box 42, folder 16, Edward
and Marian MacDowell Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.
8. For more on the 1910 Peterborough Pageant, see Robin Rausch, “American
Bayreuth: The 1910 Peterborough Pageant and the Genesis of the MacDowell
Colony” in “Very Good for an American”: Essays on Edward MacDowell, ed.
E. Douglas Bomberger (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2017), 195–212.

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 48 Robin Rausch

9. Carl Venth, “Peterboro,” The Musical Courier 73, no. 10 (Sept. 7, 1916): 21.
10. The full title of this work is Les rêves de Colombine: Suite française, op. 65 (1907).
11. Regina Watson (1845–1913) studied with Franz Liszt and Karl Tausig in
Europe and was a member of ASCAP. The effort to build a studio in her
memory at the MacDowell Colony was spearheaded by Elizabeth Sprague
Coolidge, a former pupil.
12. For an essay on these two works along with edited scores, see
E. Douglas Bomberger, “Amy Marcy Cheney Beach” in Women Composers:
Music Through the Ages, vol. 6, Composers born 1800–1899: Keyboard Music,
ed. Sylvia Glickman and Martha Furman Schleifer (New York: G.K. Hall,
1999), 351–70. The manuscripts are in box 25, folders 27 and 28, A. P. Schmidt
Company Archives, Music Division, Library of Congress.
13. Beach to The Arthur P. Schmidt Co., November 17, 1921, box 8, folder 10,
A. P. Schmidt Company Archives, Music Division, Library of Congress.
14. David Wright. “A Lady, She Wrote Music Nonetheless,” New York Times,
September 6, 1998, p. AR23.
15. Beach, “Twenty-Fifth Anniversary,” 45–48.
16. L. Adams Beck, The Garden of Vision: A Story of Growth (New York:
Cosmopolitan Book Corp., 1929), 225, 232; quoted in Beach, “Twenty-Fifth
Anniversary.”
17. Adrienne Fried Block, Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of
an American Composer, 1867–1944 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), 223–24.
18. G. B., “American Music and Composers Loudly Acclaimed at Chautauqua
Convention of the G. F. of M. [sic] C.,” The Musical Courier 85, no. 1 (July 6,
1922): 24.
19. “Woman Composers’ Festival,” The Sunday Star, Washington, D.C., April 26,
1925, Part 3, 5. The Woman Composers’ Festival Programs are also included.
20. The founding members of the Society of American Women Composers who
had MacDowell Colony connections were Beach, Marion Bauer, Gena
Branscombe (1881–1977), Mabel Daniels, Ethel Glenn Hier, Mary Howe
(1882–1964), Frances Marion Ralston, Helen Sears, and Louise Souther. Gena
Branscombe did not hold a residency until 1945, but she participated in the
1914 summer music festival. Mary Howe was introduced to the Colony by
Amy Beach and first worked there in 1926; she later held a leadership position
in the organization as a board member.
21. Denise Von Glahn, Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose
the Natural World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 15.
22. Minutes of Allied Membership meeting, July 22, 1911, Box I:69, Allied
Membership, minutes of meetings, 1911–1936, MacDowell Colony Records,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
23. “Music in Washington,” The Sunday Star, Washington, D.C., March 1, 1925,
Part 3, 5.

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 “A Reality of Glorious Attainment” 49

24. Beach, “Twenty-Fifth Anniversary,” 48.

25. Amy Beach to Marian MacDowell, [January 1940?], box 42, folder 16, Edward
and Marian MacDowell Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.
26. Amy Beach to Marian MacDowell, May 14, [1940], box 8, Marian MacDowell
Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
27. “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach Asks MacDowell Colony Aid,” The Musical Courier 123,
no. 7 (April 1, 1941): 7.
28. Minutes of Allied Members of the MacDowell Colony meeting, December 16,
1944, box I:69, Allied Membership, minutes of meetings, 1937–1953,
MacDowell Colony Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
29. Block, Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian, 297. Current figures are from
MacDowell Finance Director, Andrew Zimmerman, email to Robin Rausch,
June 3, 2022.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108991124.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press