Juliet Levy: A Case for the Secular Partsongs of Amy Beach: Comparing Beach and Vaughan Williams’ Settings of “Over Hill, Over Dale”
Abstract: Amy Beach’s op. 39, Three Shakespeare Choruses, for unaccompanied women’s voices, is one of her lesser-known works, and I believe it merits attention. In my paper, I demonstrate the existing fragmented scholarship concerning op. 39, which, along with the circumstances of its composition, likely contributed to the neglect of this work. Throughout the paper, I compare op. 39 to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Three Shakespeare Songs because they share a setting of “Over Hill, Over Dale” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the first section, I assemble as much information as I could find about op. 39 and its performance history, and described the history of Vaughan Williams’ work. Next, I conduct a comparative musical/performance analysis of Beach’s and Vaughan Williams’ settings of “Over Hill, Over Dale,” and discuss the merit of each piece. By demonstrating the value of op. 39’s compositional style, I posit that it is not the quality of the composition that led op. 39 to fall into obscurity, but the circumstances for Beach and the performers of op. 39 of that time. In the final section I discuss this notion and make a case for Amy Beach’s secular choral works.
Bio: Juliet Levy is a first year Master’s Student in Musicology and Graduate TA at the Lamont School of Music. She graduated magna cum laude from Kenyon College in 2018 as a music major and philosophy minor, finishing with distinction in her major. Besides her studies, Juliet is also a soprano vocalist and currently sings with the Colorado Symphony Chorus. Juliet hopes to pursue further musicological studies concerning women composers, opera, and Francis Poulenc during her time at DU and beyond.
