Johanna Beyer

Johanna Magdalena Beyer (July 11, 1888 – January 9, 1944) was a German-American composer and pianist.

Contents

Biography

Johanna Beyer was born in Leipzig, Germany, but very little is known about her life prior to her move to the United States in 1923. She sang for three years at the Leipziger Singakademie and graduated from the Deutscher Konservatorien and Musikseminare, having studied piano, harmony, theory, counterpoint, singing, and dancing. Colleagues in New York recalled that her pianism and musicianship were excellent and that her musical training seemed traditional and solid.[1] She spent 1911–1914 in America, though nothing is known of her activities during those years. Returning to the U.S. in 1923 (according to the biographical notes she provided in a Composers’ Forum concert program), she studied at the Mannes College of Music, receiving two degrees by 1928. She taught piano to support herself, and may have taught at Greenwich House Music School, but struggled to make ends meet, resorting at times to WPA work and Ladies’ Home Aid. In the late 1920s or early thirties she began studying with Ruth Crawford, Charles Seeger, and Dane Rudhyar and in 1934 took Henry Cowell’s percussion class at the New School for Social Research. Her musical life during these years was intertwined with Seeger, Crawford, Cowell, John Cage, and others in this modernist circle such as Jessie Baetz, a now-forgotten composer and painter who studied with Beyer.[2] Her most intimate friendship was with Cowell; surviving correspondence reveals a tumultuous, and possibly romantic, relationship between the two composers.[3] Beyer acted as Cowell's informal agent and secretary from 1936 to 1941 on a voluntary basis (only receiving partial compensation in 1941).[4]

Though she was largely ignored as a composer,[5] she did have a number of important performances. The first was at the New School for Social Research in 1933, where her Three Songs for Soprano, Piano, and Percussion were performed. A year later, the second movement from her Suite for Clarinet and Bassoon, performed in one of Henry Cowell’s New Music Society of California concerts in San Francisco, was perceived as a “doleful dull duet.”[6] Aaron Copland reviewed a New Music Quarterly Recording of the movement. John Cage performed two movements of her "Three Movements for Percussion" in his northwestern percussion tours during the late 1930s.[7] In 1936 her skills in multiple media came to the fore in her play, The Modern Composer, for which she wrote the lyrics, composed the incidental music, choreographed the modern ballet, designed and created the costumes, slides, and advertisements, directed the production, and performed the piano part. The play was performed under the auspices of the Federal Music Project at the Central Manhattan Music Center, but manuscript sources for it have not yet been found. Her music was performed twice in the New York Composers' Forum, in 1936 and 1937.[8]

Beyer battled with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, during the final years of her life. She died in New York, New York, in 1944.

Musical style

Much of Beyer's music, particularly that written between 1931 and 1939, reflects the aesthetics of the American "ultra-modernists," a circle which included Ruth Crawford Seeger, Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell, Dane Rudhyar and Carl Ruggles. Many of Beyer's works are exemplary of dissonant counterpoint, a theoretical compositional system developed by Charles Seeger and Cowell and most famously articulated in the works of Ruth Crawford Seeger.[9] However, Beyer developed her own distinctive gestures and procedures that distinguished her music from that of her colleagues. Her compositions are characterized by an economic use of resources, balanced and well-constructed forms, "a unique sense of humor and whimsy," and a commitment to experimentation.[10]

Although her music was overlooked during her lifetime and for decades after her death, it was some of the most experimental and prophetic work created during the 1930s. Music of the Spheres (1938) is the first known work scored for electronic instruments by a female composer.[11] The fourth movements of her two clarinet suites (1932) are some of the earliest examples of a pitch-based approach to rhythmic processes, which would not be fully explored again until the late 1940s by composers such as Elliott Carter and Conlon Nancarrow.[12] Several of her works anticipate the minimalist music of the 1960s, most notably the fourth movement of her first String Quartet. She included tone clusters in Clusters, a suite for solo piano, and the duet, Movement for Two Pianos. The large clusters in the these works often require the pianist to play the keys with their forearms.

Perhaps Beyer’s most important and overlooked contribution to the development of new music is her repertoire for percussion ensemble. The Percussion Suite of 1933 is one of the earliest examples in this genre and differs from those of her contemporaries in that it “explores the understated and quiet expressive possibilities of percussion.”[13] Other percussion pieces from the 1930s include IV (1935), the March for Thirty Percussion Instruments (1939), which John Kennedy calls one of the “most gorgeous orchestrations for percussion ensemble ever composed,”[14] and the Three Movements for Percussion (1939). All of her percussion music is distinguished from that of her contemporaries by its sense of humor, and “emphasis on process over more purely rhythmic exploration.”[15]

Works

Percussion

Chamber works

For solo piano:

Songs:

Large Mixed Ensembles

Choir

Orchestra

Selected discography

Notes

  1. ^ John Kennedy and Larry Polansky, “‘Total Eclipse': The Music of Johanna Magdalena Beyer,” Musical Quarterly 80/4 (Winter 1996),720.
  2. ^ Melissa de Graaf, “Intersections of Gender and Modernism in the Music of Johanna Beyer,” Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter 33/2 (Spring 2004): 8–9, 15 <http://depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/isam/>.
  3. ^ de Graaf, "'Never Call Us Lady Composers': Gendered Receptions at the New York Composers' Forum, 1935-1940," "American Music" 26/3 (Fall 2008), 291-292.
  4. ^ Beal, Amy, "'Her Whimsy and Originality Really Amount to Genius': New Biographical Research on Johanna Beyer," "American Music" 38/1 (Fall 2008), 12.
  5. ^ Amirkhanian, Charles. "Women in Electronic Music - 1977". Liner note essay. New World Records.
  6. ^ Quoted in Polansky and Kennedy, “‘Total Eclipse,’” 721.
  7. ^ Kennedy and Polansky, 723.
  8. ^ For a detailed discussion of Beyer's experiences in the Composers' Forum, see de Graaf, “Intersections of Gender and Modernism in the Music of Johanna Beyer."
  9. ^ Reese, 6-7.
  10. ^ Kennedy and Polansky, 725.
  11. ^ Hinkle-Turner, 25-33.
  12. ^ Boland, http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~larry/beyerjpegs/beyer_tempo_melodies_boland_polansky.pdf
  13. ^ Polansky and Kennedy, “‘Total Eclipse,’” 726.
  14. ^ Polansky and Kennedy, “‘Total Eclipse,’” 726.
  15. ^ Polansky and Kennedy, “‘Total Eclipse,’” 726.

Sources