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PROGRAM NOTES
Amy Beach (1867–1944) was a pioneering composer and pianist. She was the first woman to write a symphony performed by a major orchestra and one of the first American composers to achieve success in Europe. A child prodigy, she began reading, improvising, and composing before the age of five, and by the age of sixteen she was publishing her compositions and performing publicly as a pianist. She first performed with the Boston Symphony when she was eighteen, beginning her lifelong collaborative relationship with the orchestra. Beach went on to compose many great works including her Mass in E-flat, the “Gaelic” Symphony, an opera, and a wide array of choral, chamber, and solo piano music. Amy Beach’s Summer Dreams, Op. 47 was first published in 1901 as a suite of six short character pieces for piano, four-hands. Three of the pieces, Robin Redbreast, Twilight, and Katy-dids, have been arranged for concert band by Benjamin Roberts (b. 1999). The following epigraphs were provided by Amy Beach on the first page of each piece in the original piano score.
Robin Redbreast
In country lanes the robins sing
Clear-throated, joyous, swift of wing,
From misty dawn to dewy eve
(Though cares of nesting vex and grieve)
Their little heart-bells ring and ring.
— Lüders
Twilight
The birds have hushed themselves to rest
And night comes fast, to drop her pall
Till morn brings life to all.
— Amy Beach
Katy-dids
The katy-did works her chromatic reed
On the walnut tree over the well.
— Whitman
NOTES TO THE CONDUCTOR
I set out to arrange Selections from Summer Dreams with students in mind. My goal was to present Beach’s music in an manner both accessible to beginners and engaging for more advanced students while maintaining the integrity of her original composition. Thus, the score and parts have been extensively cued and cross-cued, so that almost everything is doubled somewhere in the ensemble. Please feel free to omit any of these doublings to best showcase your musicians. Take liberties! If necessary, the entire piece may be performed without percussion. The three movements, Robin Redbreast, Twilight, and Katy-dids may be performed separately or in any order.
No rehearsal period of Summer Dreams is complete without a lesson about Amy Beach and her music. I encourage conductors to share the program notes with their ensemble and to dig deeper as time permits. For young musicians interested in further study, I recommend Judy “Mrs. Judy Violin” Naillon’s The Very Interesting Life of Amy Beach, and for the older bookworms among us, an excellent biography has been written by Adrienne Fried Block. A great online resource is www.amybeach.org.
Thank you for playing this music. I hope it brings you joy!
— Benjamin Roberts
