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Abstract

Amy Beach (1867-1944) counts among the most influential US-American composers of her time. Her Gaelic Symphony, E-minor, op. 32, composed 1894-1896 is one of the author’s best-known pieces. The four movements own this position mainly to the fact that there exists an impressive point of reference that relates the symphony to the common, Eurocentric symphonic canon of its time: The author's intervention in the debate about a US-American music which was given new impetus by Dvořák's presence at the New York conservatory (1892-1896) was published in the Boston Herald in May 1893. This quite lengthy written statement, that demonstrates Beach’s aspiration to “compose” herself into the national classical canon of US-American music, is up to date one of the most cited sources when referring to the Gaelic Symphony. Thus, the classification of the symphony’s "national" significance became the dominant point of departure of description and evaluation of the symphony in academia. The contemporary reception of the Boston premiere, on the other hand, mainly focused on another point: on the gender of the symphony's author. This paradigm shift in the assessment of the symphony from gender to nation is remarkable and also highlights the tension in which the in many respects markedly different scholarly assessments of the symphony have arisen. 

 

Research questions

In light of this state of research, the questions of whether the Gaelic Symphony is a national or transnational composition and one shaped by the author's gender are placed in a larger context in the present project: In it, new perspectives on the composition are elaborated, which, methodologically different, offer a new contextualization of the piece within contemporary nationalisms as well as transnationalisms and concepts of gender, race and class. 

 

Approach

With this multifaceted view of an iconic composition of US-American music history, including philosophical contextualizations and analyses of visualizations of national topographies in Beach’s music, however, more than just a further, fixed hermeneutic approach is elaborated. Rather, the project work allows us to draw conclusions about a possible contemporary reception horizon of the Gaelic Symphony that goes beyond what is passed down in reception documents

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