New England, 1874. 7-year-old Amy March Cheney is preparing her first public recital. On the program? A Beethoven sonata, Chopin waltzes and several of her own compositions. What seems to us now an incredible display of a young prodigy would have been of little surprise to her community. Amy had been composing for three years already and since the age of 2, singing in harmony with her mother while being rocked in her cradle with a repertoire of 40 melodies. Her parents, concerned about a musical career for a woman in the 19th century, allowed her a small amount of carefully supervised concertizing. As an 18-year-old, Amy would marry one of her guardians (25 years her senior) exchanging the concert stage for the domestic. She persevered, however, armed with her formidable musical an intellectual gifts. She embarked on a long period of self-study: studying and memorizing Bach fugues and creating the first English translations of seminal orchestration texts by Gavaert and Berlioz. By the age of 27, she became the first American woman to write a symphony, premiered by the Boston Symphony just two years later. She would write at the end of her life about her orchestral writing, “It was pioneer work, at least for this country, for a woman to do.” And so it was, pioneer work in a country that was still expanding its borders and developing its musical centers. In the year of her birth, The New England Conservatory was founded (shortly following Oberlin College in 1865 as the first musical conservatory in the American States) and Nebraska was ratified as the 37th state. Her peers, the male members of the Boston Six, would go on to create the music departments fundamental to American music: John Knowles Paine, first Professor of Music at Harvard University’s Horatio Parker became Professor of Music at Yale University, and Edward MacDowell at Columbia University. Amy’s contributions were outside of academia, but equally as fundamental to the nascent 19th-century American history. When her husband died in 1910, the 43-year-old composer and pianist left for Europe where she played to great acclaim. A Hamburg critic wrote "we have before us undeniably a possessor of musical gifts of the highest kind; a musical nature touched with genius." The onset of World War I brought her home where she devoted her non-composing time to supporting music education. At that time, she was at the height of her fame and “Beach Clubs” popped up throughout the US educating young people in music. She also served as leader for many organizations including the Society of American Women Composers. Her long career, her support of young composers, strong humanity, her sharp intellect, her discipline and drive changed the course of American music. Hermit Thrush at Eve Beyond these accolades, there is a humanity and indelible connection to the sensitivities and vagaries of nature that attract me to her work. No other work represents this as deeply as her settings of the songs of the Hermit Thrush during her stay at the then MacDowell Colonies (writing in the score, that she has reproduced their calls faithfully). With every note, her pianist sensibilities shine through. She was not the first to be entranced by its song. Walt Whitman has termed the hermit thrush as the symbol of the American spirit, and others have deemed ti the “finest sound in nature.” Science now confirms this intuition of the human ear. Unlike other birds, the hermit thrush songs follow the same mathematical ratios as western traditional harmony. That means, instead of the micro-tones of the other birds, the hermit thrush tends to sing the whole and half tones that make up our major and minor scales. Amy Beach would later comment on the direction of her career, “‘… my home life kept me in the neighborhood of Boston. My compositions gave me a larger field. From Boston, I could reach out to the world. ̓”