Johanna Beyer: Sticky Melodies (review)

Despite growing interest in recent years in the life and music of Johanna Beyer (1888–1944), culminating in this newest recording, Sticky Melodies, from New World Records by the Astra Chamber Music Society, this ultramodernist composer remains an enigmatic figure in many ways. Little is known about Beyer’s first thirty-five years in her native Germany. She immigrated to the United States in 1923 and spent the rest of her life in and around New York City. Here she earned a diploma in solfège and a teaching certificate from the David Mannes Music School (now Mannes College of Music) and took courses with Henry Cowell at the New School for Social Research. She studied composition with Charles Seeger, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Dane Rudhyar, each of whose influence on her music is at times quite audible. Her closest relationship was with Cowell, on whose behalf she advocated tirelessly during his stint in San Quentin Penitentiary. She earned her living teaching piano—privately, in the public school system, and for the Federal Music Project in the 1930s, frequently struggling to make ends meet. She suffered for years from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), before succumbing to her illness in 1944. The extent and nature of her relationship with Cowell, and the final years of her life, after her correspondence with him ceased, remain obscure.

Until recently, much of the information available to the musical community about her work has come from Larry Polansky and John Kennedy’s groundbreaking 1996 Musical Quarterly article.¹ They praise her music for having a “strong sense of formal coherence,” a “disciplined focus on the development of single ideas and overall shapes,” and a “unique sense of humor and whimsy.” They also mention works that hint at early examples of a minimalist approach.

Correspondence between Beyer and Cowell in the Cowell Collection in the Music Division at the New York Public Library, only recently made available, corrects some misconceptions about Beyer’s life and personality. Long perceived by her peers in the avant-garde musical world as a solitary figure, awkward and painfully shy, she revealed a romantic and whimsical nature to Cowell and other acquaintances. These letters show that she had a large circle of friends and family. Amy Beal has made significant progress toward demystifying some of the unclear or ambiguous references in Beyer’s letters, painstakingly piecing together the composer’s life between 1935 and 1941.²

Contemporaneous printed reviews found Beyer’s music at best, “Experimental in form and modernistic in harmony,” following a 1936 Composers’ Forum concert, and, at worst, “doleful dull,” in reference to her Suite for Clarinet and Bassoon performed at a 1934 New Music Society concert. Her reception at her 1936 Composers’ Forum was hostile: “Miss Beyer, you seem to have gone your male preceptors one better in search of strange and ineffective tonal combinations. Have you consciously adopted Rudyard Kipling’s statement, ‘The female of the species is deadlier than the male’ as a guiding principle in your composition?” Her Composer’s Forum a year later was not much better: “The arm and hand playing on piano is very unusual, but not appreciated here.”³ Yet a number of her colleagues were effusive in their compliments of her talents, as recorded in her 1938 application for a Guggenheim grant for her never-finished opera, Status Quo. Aaron Copland called her “an honest soul with serious musical pretensions.” Wallingford Riegger thought her project “a worthy thing for the Foundation to sponsor.” And Composers’ Forum director Ashley Pettis described her as having “excellent training and background . . . musical innovation and her untrammeled, adventurous spirit.” Most generous was Cowell, who stated that she had “a flare for whimsical and original ideas, and she developed...