We Hold These Truths
September 17, 2026
It is difficult to do justice to the music and career of Amy Beach. She was by all accounts a spectacular musical prodigy, and she lived her life both in the now-strange strictures of 19th-century gender roles and at the top of the international music world. To follow her biography is to encounter the Boston Symphony, the MacDowell Arts Colony, the ‘Second New England School’ of composers, and in general a who’s-who of the American arts scene. And yet we would not have heard of her much until recently. Nor, for that matter, have we heard much of the ‘Second New England School’ of composers, but history makes its choices.
Her pioneering music and career have brought her music back onstage, though. She was a fully mature composer by the time she wrote the Piano Quintet, Op. 67, which she composed after performing Brahms’ epic piano quintet with the Kneisel Quartet in 1900. Like many composers of this time, she wrote in a style defined by Schumann and Brahms, bringing melodic and coloristic richness to large-scale forms. Her debt to Brahms, moreover, is front-and-center in the quintet, as its main themes are intentionally derived from his work. It is an even and respectful—a collegial—extension of musical material.
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Notes from Kian Ravaei about his new work A Free People:
A Free People was commissioned by the Mimir Chamber Music Festival,Seattle Chamber Music Society, and Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The first and last movements set the Declaration’s opening and closing words. While the second movement deals with its longest, yet least often talked about, section: a list of grievances against a cruel and tyrannical king. Musical references from the Revolutionary era abound, including drum and fife music, bugle calls, the British patriotic song Rule Britannia (which is also the opening theme of Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory), and a paraphrase of The Star-Spangled Banner. The unnarrated third movement, “Of Bondage and Freedom,” reflects the history of the American people up to the present day, asking if we have lived up to the ideals of the Declaration over the last quarter of a millennium.
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Gabriel Fauré is peculiar in his near-complete separation from overarching movements or ideas. He seems to have come to a ‘modern’ style through his ears alone. There were certainly careerist fights around him, as he was head of the Paris Conservatoire, and he was a teacher and mentor to many who would champion new styles and causes. But his course through Parisian musical circles was on the whole workmanlike. Only toward his middle age did he begin to assemble what might be called a real career. All the while he wrote music which we still wish to hear today.
If we were to try to summarize the music of Fauré, we might encounter some difficulty. There is certainly something extraordinary about his ability to link melody and harmony, but that seems only to say that he was writing music. There is much else, though vocabulary fails. Loosely speaking: his harmonies are pungent and adventurous, the melodies sometimes extraordinarily long and arching. No one wrote as he did, and the results have a kind of beauty all their own.
–Tim Summers
Her pioneering music and career have brought her music back onstage, though. She was a fully mature composer by the time she wrote the Piano Quintet, Op. 67, which she composed after performing Brahms’ epic piano quintet with the Kneisel Quartet in 1900. Like many composers of this time, she wrote in a style defined by Schumann and Brahms, bringing melodic and coloristic richness to large-scale forms. Her debt to Brahms, moreover, is front-and-center in the quintet, as its main themes are intentionally derived from his work. It is an even and respectful—a collegial—extension of musical material.
--
Notes from Kian Ravaei about his new work A Free People:
A Free People was commissioned by the Mimir Chamber Music Festival,Seattle Chamber Music Society, and Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The first and last movements set the Declaration’s opening and closing words. While the second movement deals with its longest, yet least often talked about, section: a list of grievances against a cruel and tyrannical king. Musical references from the Revolutionary era abound, including drum and fife music, bugle calls, the British patriotic song Rule Britannia (which is also the opening theme of Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory), and a paraphrase of The Star-Spangled Banner. The unnarrated third movement, “Of Bondage and Freedom,” reflects the history of the American people up to the present day, asking if we have lived up to the ideals of the Declaration over the last quarter of a millennium.
--
Gabriel Fauré is peculiar in his near-complete separation from overarching movements or ideas. He seems to have come to a ‘modern’ style through his ears alone. There were certainly careerist fights around him, as he was head of the Paris Conservatoire, and he was a teacher and mentor to many who would champion new styles and causes. But his course through Parisian musical circles was on the whole workmanlike. Only toward his middle age did he begin to assemble what might be called a real career. All the while he wrote music which we still wish to hear today.
If we were to try to summarize the music of Fauré, we might encounter some difficulty. There is certainly something extraordinary about his ability to link melody and harmony, but that seems only to say that he was writing music. There is much else, though vocabulary fails. Loosely speaking: his harmonies are pungent and adventurous, the melodies sometimes extraordinarily long and arching. No one wrote as he did, and the results have a kind of beauty all their own.
–Tim Summers