Johanna Beyer

A
M
E
R
I
C
A
AMY C. BEAL
N

C
O
M
P
O
S
E
R
S
johanna be yer
american
Composers

A list of books in the series appears

at the end of this book.
Johanna
Beyer

Amy C. Beal

uni v er si t y of il l inois pre ss

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
 Publication of this book is

supported by the Bukofzer

Endowment of the American

Musicological Society, funded in

part by the National Endowment

for the Humanities and the

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

© 2015 by the Board of Trustees

of the University of Illinois

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

States of America Beal, Amy C.
Johanna Beyer / by Amy C. Beal.
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
pages  cm.—(American composers)
∞ This book is printed
Includes bibliographical references and index.
on acid-free paper.
ISBN 978-0-252-03915-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-252-08072-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-252-09713-3 (e-book)
1. Beyer, Johanna Magdalena, 1888–1944.
2. Composers—United States—Biography.
3. Beyer, Johanna Magdalena, 1888–1944 —
Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
ML410.B58562B43  2015
780.92—dc23  2014036351
[B]
for Larry
 contents

ack no w l e dgme n t s  ix

Introduction: From Leipzig to the Bronx  1

1. Sunnyside, 1927–1933  9
2. Compositional Beginnings, 1933–1936  15
3. Having Faith, 1936–1940  23
4.
New York Waltzes: Works for Piano  32
5.
Horizons: Percussion Ensemble Music  40
6.
The People, Yes: Songs and Choral Works  47
7. Sonatas, Suites, and String Quartets: Chamber Music  54
8. Symphonic Striving: Works for Band and Orchestra  63
9.
Status Quo 69
10. Beyer’s Final Years, 1940–1944  79
Conclusion: “May the Future Be Kind to All Composers”  89

a p p e ndi x a bio gr a p hic a l data  95

a p p e ndi x b c hr onol o gic a l l is t of be y e r ’s k no w n w or k s  98
a p p e ndi x c p ubl ic at ions of be y e r ’s music  101
a p p e ndi x d se l ec t e d r ecor dings of be y e r ’s music  103
a p p e ndi x e be y e r ’s p oe t r y  105
not e s  109
source s a nd bibl io gr a p h y  121
inde x  127
 acknowledgments

i am gr ateful to all the people who have shared this research journey
with me and who have helped me in various ways, including Charles Amirkhanian,
Bettina Aptheker, Jay Arms, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, Sally Bick, George Boziwick,
William Brooks, Rich Capen, Mary Jane Cope, Ron Coulter, Rory Cowal, Gary
Galván, Sarah Gerk, Ralph Roger Glöckler, Julie Hanify, Michael Hicks, Ken Hul-
lican, Jennifer DeLapp, Cordula Jaspar, John Kennedy, Maryann LaBella, Rachel
Lumsden, Gayle Sherwood Magee, Katie Clare Mazzeo, Gordon Mumma, Dard
Neuman, Kathleen Nutter, Tanya Pearson, Robin Preiss, Nancy Rao, Herbert
Reynolds, John Shepard, Christopher Shultis, Thomas Smetryns, Ann Snitow,
John Spilker, Paul Tai, Jeffrey Taylor, Kent Underwood, Carole Vance, William
Winant, and all the wonderful performers in the all-Beyer concert at the Uni-
versity of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), held May 1, 2013.
I am indebted to Editor-in-Chief Laurie Matheson at the University of Illinois
Press for her committed advocacy for this—perhaps somewhat unusual—addi-
tion to the American Composers series. I wish also to thank the readers of both
the book proposal and the finished manuscript. In particular, I deeply appreci-
ate an anonymous reader’s and Melissa J. de Graaf’s detailed commentary and
thoughtful suggestions for revisions that have made the final product better than
it would have been otherwise. I am also particularly grateful for the generosity of
time and patience Mark Davidson offered in helping prepare the score examples
and photographic images reproduced here. This research has been supported by
UCSC Arts Research Institute and Committee on Research grants.

My work on Beyer began during fall 2006 as daily trips to Princeton University’s
Firestone Library atrium for the arduous task of hand copying Beyer’s confusing
Cluster Suite, and continued the following spring with weekly trips to the New ix
 Acknowledgments

x York Public Library’s Music Division at Lincoln Center for the transcription of
Beyer’s letters to Henry Cowell. Now, finished at last, this book is dedicated to
Larry Polansky, who has worked altruistically to make this neglected composer’s
work available to the world. His passion and patience have inspired me to per-
severe through many moments of doubt about my ability ever to complete this
project, given all its dead ends and confounding mysteries.
johanna be yer
 Introduction
From Leipzig to the Bronx
I write music because I love to write music.
I have to! It is an inner urge. It is a necessity.
—johanna beyer, Composers’ Forum-Laboratory,
May 19, 1937

Most of her pieces have apparently never been

performed, and she remains a real enigma.
We hope to correct that a bit this year.
—Letter from John Kennedy to Nicolas Slonimsky,
January 24, 1988

in January 2013 , while researching independent American

music publishing in the Peter Garland Papers held by the Harry Ransom Center
at the University of Texas in Austin, I unexpectedly came across several references
to the composer Johanna Beyer:
Who is this lady, Johanna Beyer? I haven’t been able to find anything out about her yet.
I’ve been looking in the more obscure places, but to no avail. (Letter from Michael Byron
to Peter Garland, November 28, 1973)

A brief question, about Joanna [sic] Beyer. Have you found any further biographical infor-
mation about her, other than that she was born in Leipzig in 1888 and died, apparently
in 1944? Charles Amirkhanian hasn’t found much more, nor have I had much luck. (Letter
from Gordon Mumma to Peter Garland, September 8, 1980)

Right now we have this cooperative Beyer edition project going on [ . . . ]. This is fun: about
10 of the scores are out now being copied, and we’ll bring ’em out one at a time until some
miracle happens and we get some money to publish ’em. (Letter from Larry Polansky to
Peter Garland, September 8, 1994) 1
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Introduction

2 I’m enclosing a copy of the new Beyer article in [Musical Quarterly]. . . . We’ve done 10 edi-
tions now and I’m kind of hoping I can stop working on her (I think she’s a hoax anyway).
(Letter from Larry Polansky to Peter Garland, June 25, 1997)

At the time of this writing, some forty years after Michael Byron first posed the
question, we are still asking: “Who is this lady, Johanna Beyer?” Some basic facts of
her life are now known. But Polansky’s tongue-in-cheek remark that he “think[s]
she’s a hoax” points to the enduring mystery of this prolific yet elusive composer.
Johanna Magdalena Beyer was born in Leipzig on July 11, 1888. Very little is
known about her early life. We know a number of addresses in Germany between
1905 and 1915, and that she made at least seven transatlantic passages between
1911 and 1935.1 She first lived in New York from April 1911 until June 1914,
but we know neither what she did there during those years nor what she did in
Germany during World War I. According to a curriculum vitae Beyer seems to
have created around 1937 (hereinafter: 1937 CV), we know that back in Ger-
many, she sang for three years in the Leipziger Singakademie and graduated from
a German music conservatory in September 1923.2 She returned to New York
on November 14, 1923. Her departure from Germany coincided roughly with
the so-called “Beer Hall Putsch”—Adolf Hitler’s failed attempt to overthrow the
German government—in Munich, November 8–9, 1923.
Beyer’s re-arrival in the United States in late 1923 coincided with an exciting
year for music in New York City. In February 1924, young pianist Henry Cowell
gave his Carnegie Hall debut concert; the Paul Whiteman Orchestra premiered
George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue a week later; Aaron Copland returned to
New York after three years in France and began teaching at the New School for
Social Research; and in October, Louis Armstrong joined the Fletcher Hender-
son Orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom. By 1924, Blanche Walton’s apartment at
Central Park West and West 68th Street had become a popular meeting place for
modernist musicians; one year later Cowell and Ruth Crawford met in Chicago.
The year 1924, not to mention the rest of the Roaring Twenties in New York City,
must have been eye-opening for an ambitious music student like Beyer who had
been born during the same decade as Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, and Igor Stravinsky.
In the years following her arrival in New York, Beyer earned two degrees from
the Mannes School of Music, and she took additional classes at Mannes through
1929. For some period around 1925, Beyer worked as a servant and governess
for a family named Guinzburg in Westchester County (New York).
Beyer’s life after 1927 and until her passing in 1944 is the period that can be
reconstructed most clearly. During these years—specifically 1931 to 1943—she
composed all of the music available today: works for piano, percussion ensemble,
chamber groups, choir, band, and orchestra. During those years Beyer lived at
three different New York addresses: 3961 Forty-Third Street (Long Island City,
Queens); 40 Jane Street (Manhattan); and 303 West Eleventh Street (Manhat-
tan). During 1934–35, Beyer had a scholarship for the New School for Social
Research, and she taught piano for some time via the Federal Music Project. She
studied composition briefly with Ruth Crawford, Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell,
and possibly, in some capacity with Dane Rudhyar.3 During Cowell’s years in San
Quentin Federal Penitentiary (1936–40), Beyer was extensively involved in his
business affairs and in his family’s campaign to gain early parole for him. In 1938
Beyer applied, unsuccessfully, for a Guggenheim fellowship; the curriculum vitae
she created the year before remains today the sole source of information about
certain details of her life and work.
Some evidence suggests that Beyer was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in
1941, but according to her death certificate, she had been diagnosed with amyo-
trophic lateral sclerosis in 1938.4 In early July 1943, shortly after writing her last
dated piece, Beyer moved (or was moved) to an assisted-living facility in the Bronx
called the House of the Holy Comforter, a free, Protestant, hospice-like home for
women and child “incurables.” She died there, six months later, on January 9, 1944.
A funeral was held at the House of the Holy Comforter, and Beyer was buried in
Kensico Cemetery, Westchester County, New York. Lou Gehrig is buried in the
same cemetery, as is the Russian pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff and dozens of other
notable figures. On the common gravestone erected for 104 women who died in
the House of the Holy Comforter, the composer’s name is misspelled—Johanna
M. Bauer.
Beyer’s fifty-six known compositions can be divided into several broad cat-
egories: piano music; percussion music; music with text; and mixed instrumental
music. Her earliest known works are a waltz for piano (1931) and two solo clarinet
suites (1932); her last dated works are a percussion ensemble piece called Horizons
(April 1942) and the Sonatina in C for piano (June 1943). (See Appendices B and
D herewith for a list of known compositions and currently available recordings.)
Several undated works may have been completed in the year before her death.
A number of scholars have insightfully analyzed much of Beyer’s work, includ-
ing Marguerite Boland, Ron Coulter, John Kennedy, Larry Polansky, and others.
Conductor John McCaughey concluded, “Beyer’s greatest talent is possibly as a
melodist,” and he made special note of her “dazzling textures, rhythmic overlays,
sound-formations out of noise, and process forms.”5
3
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Introduction

Beyer’s death certificate, filed January 11, 1944, Department of Health, Borough of
the Bronx, New York.

Whatever renown Beyer has as a composer has endured primarily because of

two achievements—one justified, and one misleading. The first—Beyer’s pioneer-
ing contributions to the percussion ensemble repertoire—places her unquestion-
ably among celebrated innovators in the medium—John Cage, Alejandro García
Caturla, Lou Harrison, Amadeo Roldán, William Russell, and Edgard Varèse.
The second reason Beyer’s name is frequently evoked is because of characteriza-
tions of her composition Music of the Spheres (1938), scored “for three electrical
instruments or strings.” Music of the Spheres has repeatedly been discussed as the
House of the Holy Comforter gravestone, Kensico Cemetery, Walhalla, New York;
Beyer’s name (misspelled “Bauer”) is in the third column, ninth from the bottom.
Photograph by the author.

first work of “electronic music” written by a woman.6 We do not know, in fact,

what Beyer meant by “electrical instruments.” She may have wished to have the
work performed using the Theremin, a sliding-tone instrument she had occasion
to observe when its inventor demonstrated its capabilities at the New School in
February 1931, or perhaps an ondes martenot or other available “electrical” instru-
ments of the time. The reputation of Music of the Spheres, no doubt enhanced by
its evocative and celestial title, and the recording made in 1977 by the Electric
Weasel Ensemble, has enchanted scholars and musicians with its mystery and has
led many to make unconfirmed claims about historical firsts.
Though Beyer’s music exemplifies the then-contemporary categories of dis-
sonant counterpoint and ultramodernism, it is also deserving of a closer consider-
ation on its own terms.7 Her work combines the confidence of an original thinker
and the calculations of an analytical mind. A fearless explorer in new methods of
5
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Introduction

6 composition, including tempo melodies, serial techniques, clusters, sliding tones,

and polyrhythm, Beyer designed innovative structures—often highly formalistic
and economical processes—that demonstrate sensitivity to small details as well as
larger designs. Lou Harrison recalled: “She had the typical 1920s and 30s attitude
of geometry in music, or schemes that were carefully carried out and beautifully
executed.”8 At the same time, Beyer’s music is expressive, moving, and whimsi-
cal, and she occasionally used quotation for comic effect. Beyer allowed herself
to move fluidly between abstraction and feeling, ultimately believing “that the
heart and the brain should go hand in hand.”9 Chapters 4 through 8 of this book
provide overviews of each broad category of composition, with particular pieces
highlighted to demonstrate some of Beyer’s greatest strengths as a composer.
Why is Johanna Beyer important? First, a growing number of scholars and
musicians agree that she was an original composer in the school of American ultra-
modernism, whose compositions ought to be performed and analyzed alongside
those of Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford, and Carl Ruggles, and that her work—
some fifty-six known compositions—deserves closer attention. Second, when one
surveys her professional correspondence and the number of people who knew
her as a pianist, composer, copyist, teacher, organizer, and advocate, it is baffling
to realize how thoroughly she disappeared from the historical record. Judith
Tick’s exhaustive biography of Ruth Crawford Seeger (1997) mentions Beyer
only once, though the women apparently knew each other well for a number of
years. Michael Hicks, in his detailed account of Cowell’s prison years (1991) and
in his thorough biography Henry Cowell, Bohemian (2002), makes no reference
to Beyer, though her eleven-year friendship with Cowell constituted one of her
(and, arguably, his) most important relationships.10 Leta Miller’s 2006 article on
the connections between Cowell and John Cage between 1933 and 1941 men-
tions Beyer only in passing, despite her importance as a pioneering composer of
percussion ensemble music during exactly those years. Joel Sachs’s recent biogra-
phy of Cowell (2012) includes several brief mentions of Beyer, but only mentions
once in passing that she was a composer in her own right.
Beyer research has gone through several stages since around 1970. Most
important are Beyer’s manuscripts themselves, almost all of which ended up at
the American Music Center and are now in the Music Division at the New York
Public Library.11 The first efforts to assess her entire known body of work, most
notably by John Kennedy and Larry Polansky in their article and catalog published
in 1996, were based on her then-available manuscripts.12 This collaborative proj-
ect was inspired by Kennedy’s initial work on Beyer with the ensemble Essential
Music. The second substantial source—some 115 letters Beyer wrote to Cowell,
which are housed at the New York Public Library and were first made available
to scholars in June 2000—provides details about Beyer’s professional activities
and her involvement in Cowell’s personal and musical affairs between 1935 and
1941.13 They paint a portrait of an intelligent, passionate, prolific, humorous, and
troubled woman whose reading ranged from Friedrich Hölderlin’s late-eighteenth-
century epistolary novel Hyperion to Aldous Huxley’s “Fashions in Love” (1929);
from Richard B. Gregg’s The Power of Non-Violence (1935) to Clarence Day’s idio-
syncratic view of humanity in This Simian World (1920). Her letters to Cowell mix
dry professional arrangements with intimate, occasionally desperate love letters;
further, they offer sometimes mundane, sometimes profound impressions of a piano
teacher’s exhausting commutes through Queens, Manhattan, Staten Island, and
New Jersey, and allow us to witness her bravely suffering a degenerative illness.
A recently discovered source, surprisingly significant in its documentation
of Beyer’s life for seventeen years, is the diary of the pioneering educator and
social worker Bertha Capen Reynolds (1885–1978).14 Reynolds and Beyer met
in 1927 and remained friends until Beyer’s death. Reynolds’s diary entries men-
tion Beyer more than one hundred times. This diary, at long last, gives Beyer a
rich identity, a context, and a circle of friends beyond Cowell, who has, perhaps
unjustly, loomed too large, and for too long, in considerations of her biography.
Today, musicians who play Beyer’s work are intrigued by her originality; the-
orists who study her methods are impressed by her formal ideas; and historians
who search for new information about her are compelled by the dramatic arc of
her life. In the reception gap that followed her death, she shares company with
many great composers, from Johann Sebastian Bach to Scott Joplin, whose work
also disappeared from a collective cultural consciousness for decades following
their deaths. Leaps of deduction are frequently required of biographers lacking
evidence due to clues missing or lost to history. In a review of a new 629-page book
on Bach by John Eliot Gardiner, New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe writes:
“Absent greater insights into Bach’s life, scholars have tended toward romantic
guesswork. Gardiner writes that the presence of what appear to be raindrops on
a score owned by Bach indicates it ‘may have traveled in his rucksack’ during a
youthful move from Ohrdruf to Lüneburg in 1700, but that’s pure speculation.”15
In the following pages I have done my best to avoid “romantic guesswork” and
“pure speculation,” while trying to paint as vivid a portrait of Beyer as is possible
at this time. The American Composers series is a fitting place for reassessing Beyer’s
life and work—some forty-five years after their rediscovery.
7
 1 Sunnyside, 1927–1933

a side from official paperwork— birth and death certifi-

cates, residency registrations, ship manifests, passport numbers—the earliest cur-
rently knowable fact of Beyer’s biography occurred in 1927, when she was thirty-
eight years old. Therefore, our survey of Beyer’s life begins on October 30, 1927,
when the Smith College social worker Bertha Reynolds first recorded Beyer’s
existence in her diary. Now working at the Institute for Child Guidance and the
Jewish Board of Guardians in New York, Reynolds sought a place to live outside
the metropolis: “I had dreaded New York City as a home, feeling it would offer
only the rock-bound canyons of a metropolis or exhausting commuting at the
end of each day,” Reynolds wrote later in her published memoir.1 On a Saturday
afternoon, she went to a new development in Queens called Sunnyside Gardens,
at the suggestion of a co-worker. This housing project, begun in 1924, was still
being built, and it featured two-story brick houses surrounding neighborhood
green spaces meant for communal use. The housing development management
office sent Reynolds to “a German music teacher, Miss Johanna Beyer,” who had
purchased one of the new homes and wanted to rent one of her rooms. Reynolds
eloquently recorded this day, and the bucolic atmosphere in Beyer’s neighbor-
hood, in an “informal autobiography”:
9
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Sunnyside

10 I liked Miss B., engaged her east bedroom, and so started a friendship of 17 years, which
ended with her death by multiple sclerosis. I shall never forget the satisfaction I felt in liv-
ing close to the warm brown earth, hearing the rain fall on leaves, and seeing it soak into
the ground in the garden under my window. I had been starved for the earth in city blocks
and said that never again would I live that way. In twenty years I lived in Sunnyside I never
lost my love for the green gardens and the whispering trees that grew there.2

In her published memoir, Reynolds wrote further of Sunnyside and Beyer: “I

loved that Sunnyside community for all the twenty years it was my home, and
my friendship with Miss Beyer lasted as long as she lived.”3
Beyer’s new house, in the southwest edge of the development near the cross-
ing with Skillman Avenue, appears to have been registered as a new building with
the New York City Department of Buildings in 1926. It is most likely that she
became the first owner of this two-story structure in the section of Sunnyside
called Madison Court in the summer of 1927; her name first appeared in the
Queens directory in the winter of 1927–28.4 The 1930 census lists the value of
her home as $11,700.5 The area was considered a special district for working-
class housing, a planned seventy-seven-acre, garden-dominated community lined
with sycamore trees, now managed as a National Register Historic District. By
the mid-1920s the rapid transit system allowed residents to travel into the Forty-
Second Street station in Manhattan in a mere fifteen minutes.
Clarence S. Stein, town planner and chief architect of Sunnyside Gardens,
described the community feeling of activism in the housing project:
There was one important difference between the people of Sunnyside and the others. Sun-
nyside was a community of people accustomed to meeting and doing things together—a
real neighborhood community. The others were lone individuals with no organized social
or other relations with the people who lived next door. At Sunnyside a home-owners’ group
was quickly formed; it comprised a majority of the community. The home-owners, as a com-
munity group, were soon ready to ask, and if necessary to fight, for a postponement of or
a decrease in mortgage payments. In the end they went on strike and, as a group, refused
to make payments.6

Sunnyside Gardens was the center of Beyer’s social life.7 Reynolds lived with
Beyer for several years, and they were active with a circle of women friends and a
number of Beyer’s nieces. After a few years Reynolds moved to a different house in
Sunnyside Gardens, a few blocks away from Beyer, at 3947 Forty-Eighth Street.
The two properties were centers of activity for these women, and Beyer con-
tinued to spend time at Reynolds’s house even after she moved to Manhattan in
1936. Friends in Beyer’s community during this time included not just Reynolds
and Beyer’s niece Frida, who lived with Beyer for some period around 1930, but
also the influential piano teacher Abby Whiteside, and Reynolds’s cousin Erdix
Winslow Capen (1909–1995), who was also a frequent visitor to the community.8
After Reynolds moved out, Beyer rented briefly to Willard Espy (1910–1999), a
writer for World Tomorrow who would go on to publish some twenty books, many
of which were about wordplay, a practice in which Beyer apparently delighted. A
later tenant of Beyer’s named Elizabeth Rice was quickly integrated into Beyer’s
and Reynolds’s circle of friends.
Reynolds’s diary records details of Beyer’s activities and dramatic events dur-
ing the late 1920s. Shortly after Reynolds moved in, in November 1927, three of
Beyer’s nieces also occupied the household. A few months later, in March 1928,
one of the nieces had a psychotic breakdown and disappeared; police found her
days later and checked her into Kings Park Psychiatric Center in Brooklyn, where
she died of heart failure within the week. In May 1928, another niece, Gertrude,
visited and then married; a reception was held at Beyer’s house (Gertrude and
her husband would be among the few attendees at Beyer’s memorial service in
1944). That summer, Reynolds paid Beyer twenty dollars to keep her room dur-
ing her holiday travels; in July, Beyer and Frida took a vacation to Washington,
D.C., where they were photographed in front of the Library of Congress.
Beyer’s friendship with Reynolds seems to have brought her into a world of
political activism and engagement with social and racial issues of the late 1920s
and early 1930s. But Beyer had forged important friendships of her own before
meeting Reynolds. In January 1928, Beyer met up with Reynolds at the Interna-
tional House (Morningside Heights), where Beyer introduced Reynolds to her
friend, a young Trinidadian man named Francis Eugene Corbie (1891–1928),
with whom the women then attended an art exhibit. It is presently unknown
how Beyer first met Corbie, who was a well-known activist in public affairs and a
prominent political speaker. City College’s Campus News called him “the foremost
undergraduate Negro student in America.”9 (Corbie also seems to have acted in
a melodramatic comedy called Cape Smoke; or, The Witch Doctor, which ran at the
Martin Beck Theatre in 1925.)10 During the summer of 1928 Corbie became ill
and returned to his family home in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, where he died on
October 3.11 On a Sunday evening in November, Beyer and Reynolds attended
Corbie’s memorial service, held at the Community Church of New York and led
by Rev. John Haynes Holmes, a pacifist known for his antiwar activism, and a co-
founder of both the ACLU and the NAACP. A few years later Beyer would attend
the NAACP annual meeting at St. Mark the Evangelist Church in Harlem.
Beyer’s political engagement during this period embraced both national and
international developments, and she and Reynolds were active in the Town Hall 11
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Sunnyside

12 Club, an important cultural and political center in Manhattan. In November 1928

Beyer and Reynolds attended a meeting about Franklin Roosevelt’s New York
gubernatorial campaign, and on New Year’s Day 1929 Beyer gave a dinner party
for a Mr. Arthur Moore and a woman involved in the Roosevelt campaign. Beyer
also read avidly, keeping up on German politics with the help of the February
1929 issue of Survey Graphic, an issue devoted to “The New Germany 1919–1929,”
and she and Reynolds discussed the advantages of Germany’s multiparty politi-
cal system.12 The women often spent time at a local coffeehouse and frequented
several ethnic (Japanese, Indian) restaurants, no doubt eagerly discussing both
local and global current events.
In January 1930 Beyer was naturalized as an American citizen; in July, with a
new American passport in hand, she traveled to Germany for a two-month visit.
On her 1930 passport application, she requested that her passport be mailed to
an organization called Open Road Inc., which arranged for students and profes-
sional people to travel to Europe for the purposes of studying labor and socialist
practices overseas, including in Soviet Russia. There is no indication that Beyer
participated in one of these tours, but she may well have known the organizers
of Open Road. This connection to a socialist-friendly group during this period
of her life is not surprising, given all the evidence that places Beyer in the middle
of a community of political activists sympathetic not only to socialist ideals and
labor issues but also to racial and civil rights struggles.
On her 1930 passport application, Beyer listed her occupation as “music
teacher.” But Beyer’s work during this period included both private piano teach-
ing and professional accompanying in concerts, as well as work in dance studios.13
For a time Beyer worked as an accompanist at the Denishawn School of Danc-
ing and Related Arts, where Doris Humphrey taught dance until 1928. And as a
conservatory-trained pianist, Beyer had the credentials to draw in paying piano
students. She ran an advertisement for her piano studio in the November 1929
issue of the local Sunnyside News.
Beyer had at least one close competitor, a Sunnyside neighbor one block over
named Helen Gollomb Tuvim (mother to actress Judy Holliday), who placed
a similar ad in the September 1930 issue of Sunnyside News; Tuvim’s “modern,
progressive, psychological method” of piano teaching was going for a “special
offer of $1.00 a lesson.”14 It is safe to assume that Beyer charged something simi-
lar.15 Beyer also gave piano lessons to Reynolds, although it is unclear if money
exchanged hands; together they studied, among other works, Schubert’s “Unfin-
ished” Symphony.
Amid all this social, political, and professional activity, Beyer’s compositional
 Advertisement for Beyer’s private piano studio, published in
Sunnyside News, November 1929; copy located by Herbert
Reynolds in the E. E. Wood Papers, Avery Library Drawings
and Archives, Columbia University.

imagination began to flourish, and it was in February 1931 that she composed
and dated her earliest known work, a waltz for piano (now part of the Cluster
Suite). Beyer’s 1937 curriculum vitae also lists performances of original compo-
sitions from around this time, including a March 1931 performance of works
Beyer composed for a dancer named Mara Mara at “An Exhibition of Persian Art
and its Reaction on the Modern World,” which opened with a special reception
at the Brooklyn Museum. Her 1937 CV also lists among her accomplishments
original music composed for dances at the innovative and experimental Dorsha
Hayes Theater of the Dance. The worlds of socializing, politics, and culture were
closely intermingled in the interwar years: on Memorial Day 1932, after hosting
a birthday party for one of her friends, Beyer and her guests attended a Social-
ist Party meeting at P.S. 125 during which Dorsha and Paul Hayes entertained.
The spring of 1931 featured a number of musical events that may have helped
lead Beyer down the path of ultramodernism and, eventually, to Henry Cowell:
in February, Léon Theremin demonstrated his eponymous new instrument at the
New School (Cowell would present his Rhythmicon there nearly a year later); that
same month conductor Nicolas Slonimsky gave a Pan-American Association of
Composers concert that included music by Cowell, Ives, Ruggles, Henry Brant,
and Alejandro García Caturla; on March 31, Cowell gave a piano recital at the
New School. In May 1931, the Greenwich Village Music Festival offered a pro-
gram of compositions by Marion Bauer and other New York-based composers;
Charles Seeger of the New School for Social Research spoke on Paul Hindemith’s
utilitarian concept of Gebrauchsmusik at the Greenwich House Music School. 13
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Sunnyside

14 As mentioned above, our earliest direct knowledge of Beyer’s compositional

work occurred in 1931; by January 1932 she was sharing her new work with her
Sunnyside friends. Between February and May of that year, Reynolds documented
three important facts—particularly significant for reviving Beyer’s biography
because her connection to the Seegers has long been discussed as a fact without
any concrete evidence:
10 February: Johanna had interview w. Charles and Ruth Seeger—teachers of modern
composition. They will give her lessons.
10 March: Johanna giving German lessons to Seegers to pay for comp. lesson every
week.
12 May: Johanna composing.

That summer, Beyer submitted a piece to the arts competition at the Sum-
mer Olympics in Los Angeles.16 In July and August she penned two poems—
“Universal-Local” and “Total Eclipse”—which she would set to her own music
two years later.
By the end of 1932 Beyer was having significant financial difficulties, and she
hired workmen to refurbish her basement so she could live there while renting out
the rest of her house; she had lost another tenant and was worried about her debts.
Perhaps to distract her from such worries, Reynolds took her to a housewarm-
ing event for a socialist organization called Pioneer Youth of America; in January
1933 the friends attended a socialist meeting in Sunnyside “on Technocracy.”
Beyer’s friendships with Eugene Corbie, Bertha Reynolds, Dorsha Hayes,
Abby Whiteside, Erdix Capen; her activities as an engaged aunt to many visiting
nieces; her association with pacifists, socialists, left-wing sympathizers, and black
activists during the Harlem Renaissance and the Depression; and her involve-
ment in the Sunnyside Gardens community as a pioneering homeowner, land-
lady, music teacher, and hostess offer a much different view of her personality
and social life than we have previously received, the latter a misleading history in
which professional acquaintances described her as “strange and difficult to know,”
“angular, awkward, and self-conscious,” “problematic,” “extremely quiet,” and,
most condescendingly, “always there to lick stamps.”17 In fact, she led a rich life
filled with accomplished people, intellectual pursuits, and compositional ambi-
tion. But our perspective on Beyer shifts dramatically around 1933. In this year of
massive changes—Prohibition ended, Roosevelt took office, banks closed, Adolf
Hitler was elected, and on and on—Beyer’s musical and emotional world began
to be dominated by her relationship with Henry Cowell and would remain so for
much of the final eleven years of her life.
 2 Compositional Beginnings,
1933–1936

be yer’s compositional beginnings soon brought her into

the orbit of the New School for Social Research. For the 1933–34 school year,
the New School listed among its instructors Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, Hanya
Holm, Doris Humphrey, Harry A. Overstreet, Paul Rosenfeld, Charles Seeger,
and Roger Sessions, among others. As the first fascism-fleeing wave of Euro-
pean immigrants started to descend upon New York, the New School became an
important intellectual and cultural center. Sally Bick writes:
Beginning in 1933, the School initiated advanced workshops in modern music that were
addressed to a select group of students. These courses were directed toward students with
professional aspirations in composition or were geared toward the adult student with higher
intellectual goals. In both cases, the integrity of the materials would embrace the realm of
pure learning. . . . The extraordinary musical activities initiated by Cowell and the community
he fashioned launched the institution as an alternative platform in contemporary culture.1

Starting on September 27, 1933, Cowell taught a ninety-minute, ten-week

Wednesday evening course called “Contemporary American Music,” which
included participation by a number of contemporary composers. Though Beyer
does not appear on lists of registered students during the 1933–34 year, evidence
suggests she visited this course, as well as Cowell’s second course that fall, “Work
15
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Compositional Beginnings

16 Course in Music: New Possibilities of Piano Playing.”2 Beyer’s name first appears
as a student in Cowell’s fall 1934 class, “Creative Music Today,” which included
eleven students—all women except for Wallingford Riegger. Many years later Lou
Harrison commented on Beyer’s status as a student of Cowell’s and, therefore,
as part of an elite group of composers: “[She is] one of the siblings, therefore, of
the hundreds of us who studied with Henry.”3
We can only speculate about the specific occasion on which Beyer and Cow-
ell first met. In early 1933, Reynolds’s journal provides key information about
Beyer’s developing connections during this time:
9 March 1933: Johanna copying music for composer-teacher.
14 March 1933: Sunday night Johanna took us to a modern concert at the McDowell Club.
Saw the Seegers and Ruth played song she wrote on poem re Sacco and Vanzetti by a
Chinese Mr. Hysang [sic]. Henry Cowell played on piano strings like a harp.4
23 March 1933: Dinner with Johanna at Coffee House and then she played her comp.s.
J. has chance to show her music to Henry Cowell for publication.

In addition to this evidence, Cowell’s 1933 pocket calendar contains Beyer’s name
in several places. The first instance is on October 6, 1933, two days after the term’s
second class meeting of Cowell’s course “Contemporary American Music”: “12:30
Beyer,” the entry reads. An article published in the New York Times on October 22
announced that “J. M. Beyer and Wallingford Riegger will discuss the relation of
German to American music” on “Wednesday evening” (October 25) at the New
School. On October 24, Cowell wrote: “4:00 rehearse Beyer.” And on the day of
the event in question, October 25, he wrote:
Vanessa 5:00
Class 5:30
come early Beyer rehearse
after Samaroff NS

According to her 1937 CV, Beyer’s Three Songs for Soprano, Piano, and Percus-
sion were performed at the New School on October 25, 1933. Aside from several
solo pieces composed in 1931 and 1932—a piano waltz and two solo clarinet suites,
respectively—Beyer composed several chamber pieces during 1933: a Percus-
sion Suite in Three Movements; a Suite for Clarinet and Bassoon; a Quintet for
Woodwinds; Sky-Pieces (a song setting of a poem by Carl Sandburg); and a set of
three songs for soprano, piano, and percussion (“Timber Moon”; “Stars, Songs,
Faces”; “Summer Grass”—also Sandburg). The last entry mentioning Beyer in
Cowell’s 1933 calendar is simply her Sunnyside address and phone number, at
the back of the pocket notebook. Her contact information appeared on the same
page as entries for Marion Bauer, Henry Brant, Aaron Copland, Wallingford
Riegger, and Joseph Schillinger.
Beyer continued making strides in her compositional work and developed
new working methods. In early 1934, exhausted from copying music by hand, she
started using what Reynolds referred to as a “photo process for compositions”—
most likely the ozalid printing process, first trademarked in the United States
in 1929. Beyer also lost a job she had at this time playing for a dance instructor
(probably at the Denishawn School mentioned in chapter 1). She also enjoyed a
few performances of her own music: most notably, on February 15 the Lentamente
movement from her Suite for Clarinet and Bassoon was performed at Cowell’s
New Music Society concert in San Francisco. (On February 20, 1934, Reynolds
noted this in her diary: “One of Johanna’s pieces played in the U. of Cal. New
Music Soc.”) A month later Reynolds wrote of “Johanna’s concert in Boston,”
though it is unclear what this concert included, or where it took place. In late
1934 Beyer wrote a third poem, “To Be,” which she set to music along with her
1932 poems “Universal-Local” and “Total Eclipse” in a collection titled Three
Songs for Soprano and Clarinet. By December 1934, Reynolds noted that Beyer
was gaining recognition for her music, but no money; she had also lost another
Sunnyside tenant, leaving her without her small rental income.
Like most musicians during the Depression, Beyer struggled financially.
Despite foreclosures and other threats, the year 1935 brought some relief through
the Works Progress Administration and its associated initiatives, and it is probably
during this time that she taught piano under the auspices of the Federal Music
Project. Historian Richard Crawford writes of the significance of these programs:
Between 1929 and 1934, about 70 percent of all musicians in the United States were unem-
ployed, a trend the American Federation of Musicians, the national musicians’ union, was
powerless to buck. In 1935, as part of a massive relief effort labeled Federal Project Number
One, under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the national government took action,
establishing the Federal Music Project as a way of supporting unemployed musicians. At
its peak, the program employed 16,000 musicians, who gave 5,000 performances draw-
ing an estimated monthly attendance of 3 million. . . . In addition, government funds were
used to sponsor musicological research and to promote new music through the Composers’
Forum-Laboratory. For the first time in the history of the United States, music was receiving
systematic, comprehensive support.5

On the brink of the Federal Music Project era, we encounter the earliest
currently available dated letter from Beyer to Cowell, written on February 12,
1935.6 Writing from Sunnyside, she addressed him as Mr. Cowell and signed her
name as it would appear on nearly all of her manuscripts: J. M. Beyer. The letter 17
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Compositional Beginnings

18

Photograph included with Beyer’s 1935

U.S. passport application. Photographer
unknown; copy provided by United
States Department of State, Passport
Services, Department of Legal Affairs.

mostly describes a pedagogical method book she was composing at the time, a
collection of short teaching pieces she called the “Piano-Book: Classic—Roman-
tic—Modern” (to be discussed in chapter 4). The close of the letter adopted a
flirtatious tone: “Do you want to join me for breakfast? Better hurry over before
it gets cold.”
For only the second (and last) time since her move to New York in 1923,
Beyer traveled back to Europe from June until September 1935. Her passport
application now listed her occupation as “music teacher and composer,” as opposed
to merely “music teacher” she had listed in 1930. In comparison with her 1930
passport photograph (reproduced on the cover of this book), the 1935 image
reveals a visibly aged Beyer.
The immediate reasons for Beyer’s trip were the occasion of her mother’s
eighty-fifth birthday and a performance by Beyer of “excerpts from different piano
suites” at the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Society of Women Musicians in
London on July13.7 On or around that date, Beyer wrote a letter to Ruth Craw-
ford and Charles Seeger on the back of a program she wanted Crawford to see.8
This important letter not only verifies that Beyer did indeed travel to London in
1935 for a performance of her music but also reveals that she saw Adolf Hitler in
person that summer—at the Leipzig Bach Festival:
Dear Ruth, Charles, Michael, . . . and ?
Have been thinking of you now and then and wonder whether you have grown in dimen-
sions of family members, or whether it is still to be?
I am stalking around in London since a week and have played at the 24th Anniversary of
the Society for Women Musicians. Shall leave again for Germany the end of this week.
 The Bach-Fest at Leipzig was great, quite interesting audience, one hears all kinds of
languages, and saw also Hitler, crown prince, and princess—
Have to do a lot of traveling and visiting yet before I start back, which will be on Sept.
19th, the “Berlin.”
I discovered your name on this program and thought you might be interested to see it.
I had forgotten all about my birthday, till 2 days afterwards, but it was on July 11th, when
I had tea with Miss K. Eggar, the Director of the Society. I told her then that to hear good
American Music they ought to play your things before anybody else’s, but she thought your
percussion awfully peculiar! I must tell you more about it when I come to see you. I am on
the latest program on English Members as just two American Guests. Hope so much all is
well with you and here is my love
Hanna9

Shortly after Beyer’s return to the United States, her Sunnyside house fore-
closed. That fall, she composed a choral work called The Robin in the Rain, which
she submitted to a Federal Music Project choral contest. At the same time, Beyer
pursued her relationship with Cowell. Her second known letter to him, written on
October 29, 1935, mentions neither details regarding her recent troubles (she was
now living in her own basement, with nearly no heat) nor the fact that she was, at
the moment, composing a five-movement percussion suite for nine instruments.
(The fourth movement of this suite, IV, would be the only piece to be published
during her lifetime, in Cowell’s New Music Editions, 1936). Addressed “dear
Henry,” the letter included a romantic poem by Thomas Chalmers Robertson,
which concluded with these lines:
For there each heart that beats is yours or mine,
and no voice can speak but it is ours,
till having each alone we shall not pine
for loss of the world, its prizes and powers.
Love, let me take our days into my arms,
and keep them close, to fend them from all harms.

“Do you like it?” she asked, before signing the letter, mysteriously, “Persephone.”10
In early December, Reynolds once again chronicled Beyer’s trials:
Johanna lives in basement and gets relief $1.00 a week for food. . . . May not get WPA job
since she is “working.” Homeowner’s demonstration at Court House re foreclosures. The
Seegers head up WPA in Washington and tell her no job for her.

Beyer’s next letter to Cowell, written December 17, 1935, focused on her first
impressions of his music:
I must start with the experience I had with your music from the very beginning. There was
a time, when I went every week to the 58th [Street] music library to get modern music. It 19
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Compositional Beginnings

20 was there that I came upon one of your piano pieces. I had never seen written down any-
thing of this kind and found it rather difficult to get [illegible], but by the end of the week I
could manage a little and found out that there was someone who had the courage of writ-
ing down something similar to what I had come [?] sometimes, when improvising, or just
wasting time on the piano. I just liked to listen to the sounds it made.
When I heard you play the first time at the New School, I watched too much the mechani-
cal part and I heard only 2 or 3 pieces. It was last year at the Irish Festival, when you played
in the dim light, that it touched me for the first time, shortly afterwards you played again
on the end of your course. I was just about to fall in the old habit of watching, when you
said, it should not be watched. I obediently closed my eyes and felt for the first time to be
able to shut out all prejudised [sic] conceptions of all times before, I felt that here was a
music, which must be listened to differently and old terms could not be applied.

She further reflected on her reactions to a Town Hall concert in which Cow-
ell played. She admitted that she was wondering what type of music she herself
would write next, now that she had come so strongly under Cowell’s influence:
“You certainly have opened a wide field for me, you have taken the blindfold off
my eyes and said: ‘see, hear!’ I am a lucky creature and certainly shall be grateful
to you forever and ever. . . .” She closed her letter with the proclamation: “I dare
to be your proud friend.”
The year 1936 was a particularly fertile time for Beyer’s growing body of
work. On January 2, 1936, Reynolds noted that some of Beyer’s works were to
be played in Prague and Boston, and that she had sent music to a festival in Bar-
celona (no evidence has been located with regard to the Prague or Barcelona
events). On January 22, Marion Bauer became the first woman to have a Com-
posers’ Forum-Laboratory concert; a few days earlier, Beyer had had an audition
for a Composers’ Forum concert of her own. During a brutally cold winter storm,
Beyer traveled to Boston to hear clarinetist Rosario Mazzeo perform her Three
Songs for Soprano and Clarinet on January 29.
The 1930s were a golden era for modern American music, and concert life,
festivals, and competitions flourished. For example, in April 1936, Musical America
announced: “Two prizes for orchestral compositions by native-born American
composers will be awarded next season by the New York Philharmonic-­Symphony
Society and will be given performances by the orchestra.”11 The following month,
Musical America announced a program of contemporary American music at the
Music School Settlement, including work by Bauer, Beach, Copland, Cowell,
Ives, and others. As an American citizen, but not a native-born one, and in the
midst of rising immigration alongside Depression-era nationalism, Beyer’s sta-
tus may have hindered her success in taking advantage of certain performance
opportunities for American composers, though she had been honored as one of
“just two American Guests” at the London concert in July 1935. In a letter writ-
ten several years later, Beyer expressed anger at Cowell for insisting she was not
“100% American” and thus not eligible for certain festivals and competitions.12
Beyer had the first of her two Composers’ Forum-Laboratory concerts on
May 20, 1936, during which a number of her pieces were performed: Movement
for Two Pianos (performed by Beyer and Jessie Baetz, also a student of Cow-
ell’s), “Excerpts from Piano Suites” (performed by Beyer); Suite for Soprano and
Clarinet (performed by Rosario Mazzeo and Amelia Tartaronis); and her first
string quartet (performed by the Modern Art Quartet). During the conversa-
tional “forum” with the audience after the performances, Beyer was asked about
her favorite composer. She replied: “I don’t think there is any favorite modern
composer. I like Bach. I am influenced by Bach. Bach is my morning prayer and
Bach is my evening prayer.” When asked if she was influenced by Cowell or vice
versa, she replied: “Well, I really don’t know and probably Mr. Cowell doesn’t
know.” Later she remarked: “I am not influenced by or imitating Henry Cowell
at all.” The transcription of the event records that when asked a pointed question
about gender, Beyer “bowed graciously and the audience laughed.”13 Reynolds,
who attended the event, was disappointed for her friend: “Johanna had her con-
cert. They put her off till now, lost score, singers wouldn’t sing and orch. wouldn’t
play till last minute. Played without heart. Questions insulting. But a few from
good musicians, enthusiastic.”
On May 21, one day after Beyer’s Composers’ Forum-Laboratory appear-
ance and the same day the New York Times ran a short report about her concert,
Cowell was arrested in Menlo Park, California, though Beyer would not learn of
the event until he wrote to her a week later. 14 Due to alleged illegal sexual activity
with underage boys, Cowell faced a “morals” charge. On July 8, 1936, after sev-
eral weeks at the Redwood City Sheriff’s office, he entered San Quentin Federal
Penitentiary. While Cowell was in prison, from 1936 until 1940, Beyer served as
the tireless caretaker of many of his professional affairs, and she corresponded
extensively with many people, including his family, on his behalf. Though she
looked after Cowell’s business constantly during these years, she also composed
close to thirty compositions in that same time, including Have Faith!—a short but
powerful song for soprano and flute, begun several months after Cowell’s arrest.
The text, not coincidentally, expressed optimism about the future and revealed
deep affection, if not love, as told in these lines:
21
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Compositional Beginnings

22 But essential is, that you and I

and all the other things have faith
have faith in things to come
in things that passed, and are
and we must try to understand
and love and help each other.
 3 Having Faith, 1936–1940

be yer’s life went through many changes in 1936, not the

least of which was her move in September from her Sunnyside house and com-
munity—her home since 1927—to a small apartment at 40 Jane Street in the West
Village.1 Earlier that summer she started a new job teaching music in Harlem;
perhaps this new steady income was the reason she could write to Olive Cowell
(Cowell’s stepmother) that she had “some money to spare.”2 Optimistically expect-
ing Cowell to be released from his imprisonment soon, Beyer met frequently with
the architect Alvin Johnson, director of the New School for Social Research at
the time, and tried strategically to negotiate classes for Cowell to teach upon his
return to freedom.3 Much of Beyer’s conversations with both Olive and Johnson
focused on psychiatric appeals in Cowell’s case, and on general views of homo-
sexuality of the time.4
Beyer’s health might have started to falter soon after Cowell’s imprisonment;
on one occasion she mentioned to Cowell that she had—or had had—cancer.5
It is therefore all the more baffling that on August 31, 1936, she also wrote to
Olive: “Fortunately I am healthy and can stand a lot of work.” Beyer’s second
string quartet was completed the following month.6 According to Beyer’s death
certificate, her ALS had its first onset a few years later, in 1938. In spite of her
own personal battles during these years, between the summer of 1936, when 23
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Having Faith

24 Cowell was jailed, and the summer of 1940, when he was released from prison,
Beyer handled the majority of his business affairs, lobbied for his early parole,
wrote dozens of letters, arranged performances, recordings, and radio airings of
his work, and composed dozens of new works of her own.
Despite her move to Manhattan and her ongoing concern for Cowell’s situ-
ation, she remained active in her Sunnyside circle of friends. On November 17,
1936, Reynolds’s diary noted that Beyer attended a “theatre party,” where Beyer,
Reynolds, and Reynolds’s cousin Erdix went to a benefit preview performance
of Kurt Weill’s Johnny Johnson, a satire on war that officially opened two nights
later in a production directed by Lee Strasberg. After the show the friends had
supper at an Indian restaurant in midtown called the Bengal Tiger, where the
proprietor and his wife were musicians and dancers, and had friends in com-
mon with Beyer; Erdix bought recordings of Indian music from them.7 A few
days later, on November 20, 1936, Beyer claims (in the 1937 CV) to have had,
at a place called the Central Manhattan Music Center, a Federal Music Project
performance of a play she wrote called “The Modern Composer,” for which she
composed “incidental music, choreographed the modern ballet, designed and
made the costumes, slides, illustrated advertisements, directed the whole play,
[and] took the piano part.” Given the specificity of these details, it is difficult to
doubt the veracity of her claim; yet neither evidence of the performance nor her
writings or music for this piece have surfaced.8 Around this time Beyer and Reyn-
olds also attended a Theatre Union play called Marching Song, written by John
Howard Lawson, who had once served as the leader of the Hollywood branch
of the Communist Party USA.
During this period Beyer’s life seemed to balance precariously between a
private struggle with poverty and being on the brink of public recognition. Beyer
received some support from WPA projects around this time, but Reynolds noted
that she “keeps warm with gas radiator lugged from room to room.” In April
1937, Beyer attended a Sunday afternoon reception for Paul Hindemith at the
Greenwich House Music School. A group photograph of the participants at the
event—nearly fifty people, only a handful of whom are identified—appeared on
page 33 of the May 10, 1937, issue of Musical America.9 At the event Beyer met
Irma Goebel Labastille and Marion Bauer, with whom she discussed Cowell’s case
and the need for sending letters to the prison board.10 During this time Beyer also
tried to find a publisher for Cowell’s book manuscript “The Nature of Melody,”
contacting publishers Knopf, Fischer, and Schirmer, and enlisting the help of
Aaron Copland, Otto Luening, Nicolas Slonimsky, and others.11
Composers’ Forum-Laboratory program for Beyer’s second concert, May 19,
1937; copy located by Melissa J. de Graaf in the National Archives and Records
Administration, College Park, Maryland.
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Having Faith

26 On May 19, 1937, Beyer had her second Composers’ Forum-Laboratory

event, shared with composer Walter Helfer.12 The printed program for this con-
cert included what has been thought, until just recently, to be the only photo-
graph of Beyer in existence (the passport photos included on the cover of this
book and in chapter 1 are the only other known photographs of Beyer).13 Beyer
again performed “Excerpts from Piano Suites (1930–1936)”; the Suite for Vio-
lin and Piano (performed by Carmela Ippolito, violin, and Beyer); Sonata for
Clarinet and Piano (1936; dedicated to Rosario Mazzeo and Nicolas Slonimsky;
performed by William Bortman, clarinet, and Beyer); Suite for Clarinet and Bas-
soon (1933; Bortman, clarinet, and Herbert Coleman, bassoon). Her Quintet for
Woodwinds appeared on the program but was not performed for lack of time.
During the conversation with the audience after the concert, in response to a
question about scales versus clusters, Beyer remarked: “I think that this modern
life is so noisy, so intricate, and so complicated that one just can’t explain it any
more with one simple tone and melody. One must simply go on and bang like
the rest of the world.” Another audience member asked: “Was Miss Beyer ever
in love?” She responded cryptically: “I have never been out of it.” Beyer was also
questioned about the difference between composing from one’s head as opposed
to one’s heart. Here she might have been reminded of what Charles Seeger wrote
about Ruth Crawford in American Composers on American Music (1933) with regard
to the difference between “reason” and “aesthetic effect”: “Serious music must
be capable of submission to both tests. It is a co-operation of head and heart, of
feeling and thinking. The trouble with so much modern music is that there is a
fight on between the two—the head is afraid to think and the heart cannot feel,
or vice versa. Composers, take notice!”14
In August 1937, Cowell was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, with parole
denied and “no further parole consideration until one-half of the sentence is
served.”15 Olive informed Beyer of Cowell’s sentence that same month, while Beyer
was spending the summer at Reynolds’s house in Sunnyside.16 Olive enlisted Beyer
in a cause that, in fact, already occupied her and would for the next three years:
“With much appreciation for all your efforts and as soon as plans are matured, I
shall let you know what you can do in New York.”17 When Beyer received Olive’s
letter, she already knew of the sentencing. Ten days prior, Cowell himself had
written, reassuring Beyer that he was trying to maintain a positive attitude and
to continue working. At the time, Beyer was writing her first orchestral composi-
tion—on August 5, 1937, Reynolds noted, “Johanna writing a symphony”—and
on August 8 Beyer herself wrote to Koussevitzky: “I have just finished my First
Symphony.” Cowell encouraged her to continue copying parts (Koussevitzky had,
at least, agreed to look at the work) and expressed his enthusiasm over the pos-
sibility that the conductor might eventually perform the piece. Regarding their
personal relationship, he wrote, “You have been wonderful in writing so often,
and I enjoy every letter from you greatly. If you wish to continue writing them, I
shall be delighted. But if you find, that it is upsetting to you, to continue, I shall
understand this perfectly. Sometimes I feel, that part of you is being imprisoned,
because of the closeness of the contact in letters, and perhaps you would be set-
ting yourself free by breaking off the contact.”18
To the contrary, Beyer’s devotion seems to have deepened as she took on
more and more administrative responsibilities for Cowell. Her feelings for him
were also revealed in a number of suggestive letters to Olive. On August 30, 1937,
Beyer wrote Olive a particularly emotional—and unconfirmed—account of a
seduction, refusal, and possible engagement with Cowell. That fall, Beyer also
composed an orchestral work titled CYRNAB—an unusual but revealing confla-
tion of henRYCowell and johanNABeyer.19
In some ways Beyer seems like two different women during this period. She
was emotionally overwrought about Cowell’s situation and overwhelmed by her
increasingly romantic feelings for him. At the same time, she composed pro-
lifically—in 1937 alone she wrote eight works, including two chamber pieces,
three pieces for choir, and three works for orchestra—while copying her own
and Cowell’s music, conducting a variety of business tasks for him, and continu-
ing her teaching obligations.20 She participated in a meeting for the founding of
the American Composers Alliance (ACA) in December 1937, alongside Marion
Bauer, Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, Otto Luening, Wallingford Riegger, Virgil
Thomson, and Edgard Varèse.21 Beyer corresponded frequently with Olive about
various financial issues pertaining to her promotion of Cowell’s music—getting
scores copied and bound, paying his ACA dues, and so on. Toward these ends,
Olive kept money in an account of Cowell’s that Beyer could access. In Septem-
ber 1939, Beyer told Olive, “This is one of the most busiest months.” She added:
I am writing to all the conductors I can think of, send scores and get parts ready and so on.
Had a fine letter from Stokowsky [sic], he wants Henry’s scores in Philadelphia in October
and Nicolas Slonimsky just called up, he spoke of the possibility of having Henry recorded
with the Columbia Phonograph Co. I have to get in touch with them Monday and see what
I can do to help it along. And so on . . . 22

In addition to the activities recorded in Beyer’s letters to Cowell and to Olive

(and others), Cowell’s own San Quentin–era letters to Olive reveal to what degree
Beyer had taken charge: he reported to Olive that Beyer wrote to him frequently
27
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Having Faith

28 about radio broadcasts of his work, that she communicated with Blanche Walton
regarding the copying of scores and parts for orchestral engagements, negotiated
fees for performances and recordings, and undertook meetings and communica-
tions on his behalf (and sometimes her own) with Leopold Stokowski, Nicolas
Slonimsky, Percy Grainger, Walter Fischer, Harrison Kerr, Gerald Strang, Mar-
tha Graham, Fabien Sevitzky, Hans Kindler, Joseph Schillinger, Ashley Pettis,
Lazare Saminsky, Dorothy Lawton, Alvin Johnson, Edwin A. Fleisher, Arthur
Cohn, Joseph Szigeti, Harry Allen Overstreet, the Leunings, the Seegers, Aaron
Copland, Alfred Wallenstein, Howard Barlow, the Columbia Phonograph Com-
pany, the Columbia Broadcasting System, and many others.23 She was fearless in
her reaching out for help for Cowell’s work.
Around 1938 Beyer was included in a small group that would comprise a
“Promotion Committee” for the New Music Quarterly Recordings (NMQR),
and she communicated regularly about the New Music recordings project with
Harrison Kerr, Otto Luening, and Gerald Strang, who had taken over the direc-
tion of New Music Society events. At this time Beyer also provided to Luening
(who, from his office at Bennington College, served as a chairman to the executive
committee overseeing NMQR while Cowell was in prison) a particularly per-
sonal mailing list for possible future member subscribers to the NMQR project,
a list that included Rosario Mazzeo, Erdix Winslow Capen, the Overstreets, Sun-
nyside resident Professor Otto Koischwitz, Martha Graham company member
Nina Fonaroff, the Guinzburgs (Beyer’s employers in 1925, now living on Park
Avenue), and Beyer’s fifteen-year-old piano student in Harrington Park, New
Jersey, named “Rudi” (Rudolph Radama von Abele, who would go on to earn a
doctorate in American history at Columbia University).24 Beyer also connected
Luening to Percy Grainger, who agreed to have his name listed as a “Patron” for
NMQR. Though Cowell took pains to avoid further emotional commitment with
Beyer, he clearly recognized her devotion to promoting his work.25 In February
1938, he responded to Walton’s evidently negative opinion of Beyer, significantly
referring to her as a “friend” rather than as a former student or “secretary”:
I am sorry that [Beyer] did not make a favorable impression on you. She has done such a lot
for me—has gone to endless pains, taken endless time, made so many calls on my behalf,
that I am greatly endebted [sic] to her. She was not one of my best acquaintances; yet she
is the only one in NY who remains there steadily who seemed to be willing and offered to
do all these things. . . . It would seem that among my friends she is the only one who was
in a position to do it, and also wished to. And I am very grateful indeed to her. Her faithful-
ness and tirelessness have been a matter of wonder to me. I do wish that she was just the
right person in your estimation!26
Perhaps as a way of publicly thanking Beyer, in 1938 Cowell composed a three-
movement solo piano piece called Rhythmicana, which he dedicated to her.
When Cowell thought Beyer was coming west on tour with “a Chinese
dancer” named C. Chew in 1939, he wrote to his father: “I hope you can show
her a bit of hospitality while she is here. . . . She has done more errands for me,
and ungrateful tasks such as copying orchestra parts, than anyone else, almost
at least in the east.”27 In 1940, Cowell again acknowledged his gratitude, writing
to his friend John Becker: “I have had a flurry of performances lately—Johanna
Beyer’s efforts for my music have borne fruit.”28 At the same time, Beyer worked
to make practical arrangements for Cowell’s parents, who planned to visit New
York City in mid-March. For the occasion of their visit, she arranged a concert
at the Downtown Music School and created advertising for the event herself.29
Beyer was also indefatigable as a pianist in promoting Cowell’s newest work.
She recorded his Tocanta for Hanya Holm, who wanted to use the work in a dance.
Beyer sent Olive the bill with the announcement, “I have to meet Fabien Sevitzky
tomorrow on account of the March 28th performance over the radio.”30 On Feb-
ruary 11, 1940, several months before his release, Beyer performed Rhythmicana
and Tocanta at an all-Cowell Composers’ Forum-Laboratory concert. Later that
month, Beyer listened to a radio performance of Cowell’s Old American Country
Set by Sevitzky and the Indianapolis Symphony—a performance for which she
was personally responsible. She wrote to the conductor—Koussevitzky’s nephew
and one-time principle bassist for Stokowski, who became the conductor of the
Indianapolis orchestra in 1937—in a manner symptomatic of her fervent reaction
to music:
I had hoped to be able to stay here and listen in quietly to be closer to composer-music-
conductor, but it so happened that I had to share it with friends in a different place. Three
of us were sitting on a sofa, the Old American Set score on my lap. I am used to be alone,
other people disturb me in listening as I like to, yet, the moment the music started, I felt
your great personality. I seemed to see and feel every one of your moves. You conduct with
heart and soul and I hardly think anyone could ever go to sleep while you conduct, there
is always that striking vitality, stirring. And I felt Henry and was deeply touched by his
delightful, sweet, lovely dance-music—my heart ached that it had to be over so quickly, I
could have listened on and on. It is wonderful to know you!31

Sevitzky responded kindly on March 9, 1940. In what appears to be the last

recorded attempt of Beyer to promote her own work, she wrote to Sevitzky a few
months later, asking if he would look at some of her compositions, namely, what
she called Symphonic Movement I (1939) and Symphonic Opus 5 (1940). She
informed him, “The Symphonic Movement was selected by Dr. Hans Kindler, 29
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Having Faith

30 Washington, among the best incoming works, so was one of Henry Cowell’s,
however we both did not get played there after all!”32 Though Sevitzky and Beyer
met and talked at length when he was in New York City in late spring 1940, the
conductor never programmed any of her orchestral compositions.
On April 9, 1940, a federal census taker recorded the residential details of
Beyer’s apartment building at 40 Jane Street. Rather than “Johanna Beyer,” an
“Elsie Beyer” is listed as a resident of the building. The census-documented age
of this woman was thirty-nine years old (Johanna Beyer would have been fifty-
one at the time), and the report says she was born in New York. “Elsie,” the sole
resident of the apartment, gave her occupation as music teacher. The census says
she has no education beyond high school. Her salary is listed as $1,000 for fifty
hours’ work in 1939. I have found no other reference to an “Elsie” in any Beyer-
related documents. It is unclear whether Beyer deliberately lied to the census taker
about her name, age, place of birth, and level of education, or if something else
occurred to obscure the facts. Existing evidence, in particular the large volume
of correspondence Beyer wrote during the spring of 1940, strongly suggest she
was living at 40 Jane Street at the time. Why these inaccuracies were recorded in
the 1940 census presently remains a mystery.
Before Cowell’s sentencing was reconsidered in April 1940, Beyer again solic-
ited letters of support from the contemporary music world at large. She asked
them to write letters on official letterhead paper to the Board of Prison Terms and
Paroles, San Quentin, and requested that the letters be sent directly to her so she
could deliver them collectively to the prison, “so that they may be at hand at the
psychological moment.”33 On March 24 she wrote, exasperatedly, to Grainger:
“The case is postponed to the first week in May and I am supposed to send off
all the letters directly to the Board on April 25th. If I had the time and strength I
would copy these many letters, for they all came open, except the one from Ives;
alas, I might as well give up.”34 A few weeks later, in a hastily hand-scribbled note,
she told Sevitzky, “Henry Cowell is coming back in a short time!—we have been
successful at last!”35
As Cowell began to prepare for his life after his June 1940 release from prison
and his move to Grainger’s house in White Plains, New York (where, as a condi-
tion of his parole, he would work as Grainger’s “secretary”), Beyer was among a
very small group of people besides Grainger and Cowell’s parents—“a few very
trusted friends”—who were kept informed of his whereabouts.36 Cowell explained
further to Grainger: “I have also asked Hanna to aid in preventing you from being
pestered in any way, and in protecting against any publicity. Unfortunately she is
not very strong now, but she is quite willing to act as a buffer in receiving letters
and calls, etc., instead of their going to White Plains.”37 This letter contains one
of Cowell’s few known acknowledgements of Beyer’s declining health, a factor he
seems to have ignored after he began to disengage from her friendship and her
professional support.

31
 4 New York Waltzes
Works for Piano

be yer wa s a skilled pianist, so it is not surprising that she

wrote a number of solo piano pieces. The titles for her three major piano suites
(Gebrauchs-Musik; Dissonant Counterpoint; and Clusters) derive from techniques in
the air during the mid-1930s. Beyer’s use of the term Gebrauchsmusik (or, as she
wrote it, “Gebrauchs-Musik”) must have been ironic, given the atonal and abstract
nature of her pieces under that title. Beyer may have become aware of the prin-
ciples of Gebrauchsmusik—a German term for “utilitarian music,” or music that
served some specific social or situational function—through a lecture given by
Charles Seeger on Paul Hindemith’s use of the concept, in May 1931 at a New
School–sponsored festival held at the Greenwich House Music School.1 In her
1933 book on modern music, composer Marion Bauer summarized Gebrauchs-
musik: “It deals with the ‘sociological function of music,’ and has as a basic idea
that music—good or bad—is futile if it cannot attract an audience.”2
Beyer’s Gebrauchs-Musik consists of five short, mostly two-voice pieces. The
undated Dissonant Counterpoint likewise explores repeating and evolving rhyth-
mic patterns, as well as additive rhythm ideas, expanding the length of individual
measures within an ametrical setting—not unlike Olivier Messiaen’s technique
of additive rhythms—and creating discretely separate phrase structures similar
to techniques used in her clarinet suites. Like much of Beyer’s music, these pieces
frequently include difficult polyrhythms (three against four; four against five;
five against six). The fourth movement of Dissonant Counterpoint features a serial
treatment of intervals in each of the two voices. This all-interval set of outwardly
expanding mirror construction is analogous to similar precompositional designs
used by Béla Bartók (Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste, 1936) and Anton
von Webern (Piano Variations, op. 27, also 1936). Beyer frequently used octave
displacement to obscure intervallic unity (Gebrauchs-Musik IV).
Several pieces suggest Beyer was thinking in terms of twelve-tone construc-
tions. In Dissonant Counterpoint IV and VIII, Beyer’s use of a slow, quiet, sparse
texture, with frequent interruptions by silence, foreshadow what would later come
to be known colloquially as “Feldmanesque.” Further restrictions of material often
include choice of pitch and limitations of range. The pieces in these suites tend
to alternate between a quick, rhythmic style and a slow, static one. Like most of
Beyer’s other piano works, these suites were intended for the composer to perform
herself. The manuscript source for Dissonant Counterpoint includes penciled-in
phrases in Beyer’s hand with mood indications like “Problems” (III), “Happy-go-
lucky” (V), and “Religion” (VI).
Because of the many gaps in Beyer’s biography, we are left without a clear
impression of how she might have “stumbled into herself” as a composer, to bor-
row a description of Ruth Crawford’s compositional self-awakening—although
Beyer’s mentioning to Cowell of “improvising, just wasting time at the piano”
suggests how her stumbling might have begun.3 Her earliest known work, the
waltz dated 1931, is a seventy-two-bar solo piano piece, the first in a set of four
short pieces she would eventually call The Cluster Suite. (Bertha Reynolds first
mentions Beyer’s own works in a diary entry on January 8, 1932, a little over a
month before she had her initial “interview” with the Seegers.) Beyer performed
this piece (or sections of it) on May 20, 1936, as part of “excerpts from piano suites,
1930–35” in her Composers’ Forum-Laboratory event. In her program notes for
the concert, Beyer described another piece in a gendered manner: “Two-part dis-
sonant counterpoint; the first voice feminine, arabesque-like; the second voice
strong, masculine.” She might have been referring to the first piece of Dissonant
Counterpoint, with its smoothly legato, slowly moving left hand, and its bouncy,
rhythmically nervous right hand.
Beyer’s “excerpts from piano suites” seem to have been a combination of
Dissonant Counterpoint and a set of four pieces she grouped as The Cluster Suite.
Beyer’s program notes for the event refer directly to her earliest piece, written
in 1931, which she “satirically” called a “waltz”: “Doris Humphrey called it once
‘architectural.’ After an introduction of nine measures the theme enters and stays 33
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | New York Waltzes: Works for Piano

34

Dissonant Counterpoint IV, piano; manuscript held in the Music Division, New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts.

on the scene almost unchanged, only its environment changes. It was danced by
Dorsha [Hayes] in 1930–31.” On May 19, 1937, Beyer again played “excerpts from
piano suites” in her second Composers’ Forum-Laboratory concert. Her program
notes for that performance also referred to the “Original New York Waltz,” which
eventually became the third piece in The Cluster Suite:
 A group of chords is gradually interpolated, finally running off in dissonant contrapuntal
passages only to be summoned again. Organized rests, rests within the measure, whole
measure rests, 1, 2, 3 measure rests, tonally and rhythmically undergo all kinds of crab
forms. Throughout, the tone “F” is reiterated. Around it, tones are grouped singly, becom-
ing more substantial; chord clusters part again, to stay on singly but one or two groups of
tone clusters get acquainted with a single melody. A struggle for dominance between group
and individual seems to overpower the latter; yet there is an amiable ending.

During the question-and-answer period after the concert, an audience

member asked: “Please identify the numbers from the Piano Suite which you
played. The third movement was strange and remarkably moving.” Beyer sim-
ply responded: “I have no names to my music. I have just numbers.” Despite
this refusal to admit to programmatic intentions, Beyer was clearly thinking in
dichotomous terms at least some of the time—masculine/feminine; group/indi-
vidual, and so on.
The Cluster Suite exhibits traits typical of dissonant counterpoint. These pieces
also reveal Beyer’s ability to write strong melodies, rhythmically driving motives,
and nonthematic material that exploits the power and range of her instrument.
Two of the pieces in the suite are set in triple meter (the above-mentioned 1931
waltz and “the original New York waltz”), and these two are also most suggestive
of tonality. The “original New York waltz” is almost entirely monophonic and
pianissimo; the piece that precedes it features five- and six-octave clusters played
fortissimo. The four short pieces are connected by a five-bar “starting motive,”
which was meant to be played at the beginning, then between each piece, and at the
end, giving the suite a sense of formal coherence. This “starting motive” consists
entirely of two-octave-wide forearm clusters. Throughout the four pieces, Beyer
makes extensive use of fist, wrist, and forearm clusters. Though the manuscript
of The Cluster Suite bears no named dedicatee, it strongly suggests an homage to
one of the main promoters of the cluster technique, the same man who “opened
a wide field” for Beyer’s music: Henry Cowell.4

“Cluster” motive, from The Cluster Suite, piano; edited by the author with Dennis
Bathory-Kitsz and Larry Polansky. Used by permission of Frog Peak Music. 35
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | New York Waltzes: Works for Piano

36 Several of Beyer’s later piano pieces return to a more tonal idiom, though
these shorter works seem to have been written more for private consumption or
for teaching purposes than for the concert hall. These include the three-move-
ment Suite for Piano (1939), dedicated to Henry Cowell; an undated, thematically
simple Prelude and Fugue in C Major; and a Sonatina in C—dated “Greenwich
Village, N.Y., June 1943” and dedicated to Beyer’s piano student Roland Leitner.
Her formal choices—suite, sonatina, prelude, and fugue—might also reflect the
cultural move toward neoclassicism at the expense of modernist experimenta-
tion during the Depression years. In an undated letter to Cowell written around
1940, Beyer talked of her piano students’ involvement with the Suite for Piano,
which several of them were playing: “Rudi had asked me to give him a copy of
my latest piano suite, he heard Roland play it and likes it very much. Now he
hums the themes!”
Beyer’s last known piece, the Sonatina in C, is in four short movements
(Allegro brioso; Scherzo-Trio; Andante; and Sciolto). The pieces contain exclu-
sively Italian markings, including some rather uncommon terms, such as “scor-
rendo,” “tardando,” “tenero,” “tempo frettoloso,” “misterioso ma con rigore,”
“cantalerle,” and “ridotto,” among others. The pieces are charming and beauti-
ful, and they contain many of Beyer’s favorite ingredients (dance-like melodies,
clusters, extreme registers, polyrhythm, 5/4 meter, rondo-like developments of
main themes). The Sonatina raises several troubling questions, however, given
that it is dated June 1943, just six months before her death. (Beyer moved to the
House of the Holy Comforter on [or around] July 4, 1943, according to Bertha
Reynolds’s diary.) It is hard to imagine Beyer writing this piece so clearly, given
that within six months she would be dead from an illness that normally deprives
its victims the use of their hands at some point. Indeed, the title, name, and date
on the first page appear to be printed in someone else’s hand. The dedication to
Beyer’s beloved piano student Roland Leitner also raises questions. Was he still
taking piano lessons from her at this late date? Did he visit her in her West Elev-
enth Street apartment in Greenwich Village and help her with her daily needs,
including titling and dating a work perhaps written years earlier?
The undated short composition called Bees demonstrates the composer’s
poetic nature and her delight in programmatic references. With the tempo marking
“As fast as possible (The bees are busy),” the piece zips along in a series of chro-
matic trills and scales, imitating the buzz of a moving bee. (The piece is similar in
many ways to Béla Bartók’s “Buzzing,” which appears as #63 in Book II of Mikro-
kosmos, composed between 1926 and 1939.) Beyer’s Bees exists in several versions,
one of which contains lyrics about happy bees gathering honey from flowers and
Sonatina in C (1943), excerpt, piano; manuscript held in the Music Division, New
York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | New York Waltzes: Works for Piano

38 trees. The words were “probably intended pedagogically,” for singing or recita-
tion, with the sounds “sr—” and “br—” accompanying the tremolos and trills.5
The larger collection in which one version of Bees appears, called by Beyer
Piano-Book with the subtitle “classic—romantic—modern,” contains a number of
original pedagogical pieces as well as arrangements of several folksongs (like the
German tune “Winter Ade,” the Christmas carol “Stille Nacht” [“Silent Night”], a
French folk song, and others).6 The book also includes doodle-like line drawings
of plants, people on a see-saw (one of the pieces is called See Saw), stick figures
standing on hills, and something that looks like a sea otter. Beyer wrote lyrical
poetry for nearly every piece in the Piano-Book. Much like Bartók’s Mikrokosmos,
Beyer’s Piano-Book trusts the beginning piano student to quickly grasp concepts
like cross rhythms, improvisation, echo games, contrary/mirror motion, transposi-
tion, “difficult” keys, rolled chords, chromatic scales, hand crossings, syncopation,
and other techniques infrequently found in traditional method books for young
pianists.
In a 1935 letter to Cowell, Beyer described the Piano-Book in this way:
The outward form is grouped in Four Seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall. I started with
winter, yes. Each little piece has a rhyme and a picture. . . . All the years of teaching and
never finding the right books and looking over the dozens of books at Schirmers (I must
confess I only looked at them for a few minutes) with their few good things here and there,
but never together, have helped. I have used all idioms I know exist and are possible: clas-
sicism, romanticism, modernism. There are also suggestions and appliance for transposi-
tion. In echo games I have urged creating musical answers, leading towards composition.

One version of “Winter Ade” (“Goodbye Winter”) was stamped by the Ameri-
can Music Center on August 5, 1936, and is labeled “German Folksong with vari-
ous versions.” The set as it is currently archived includes pieces labeled “Italian
Folksong,” “Russian Folksong,” “Ireland,” “England—old popular song 1672,” and
“Switzerland—1839.” It is unclear for what these pieces were intended; Kennedy
and Polansky note that several of these works were not variations on “Winter
Ade” but rather nation-specific tunes like “Volga Boatman” and “Santa Lucia.”7
In addition to her solo and pedagogical pieces for piano, Beyer composed
one piece she called simply Movement for Two Pianos, also aptly dedicated to
Cowell. The piece focuses on polyrhythm (the main theme is seven against three),
rolled clusters, clusters played as increasingly loud tremolos, multi-octave clusters
played fortissimo, and other sonic shock effects. Beyer provided the following
notes for her performance of this piece with Jessie Baetz at the 1936 Composers’
Forum-Laboratory concert:
 Written in 1936 for the composer-pianist-painter Mrs. Jessie Baetz and dedicated to Henry
Cowell, because it brings in its development tone-clusters, which he originated, as you all
know. Each piano part has its own independent, individual theme, even themes, yet together
they strive to make a whole and succeed, just because of their individual independence.
One stresses more the tonal element, the other the rhythmic.

Like much of Beyer’s music, the Movement for Two Pianos is dramatic, effective,
and thematically unified.
In a rare, candid moment of graciousness, Henry Cowell once wrote: “I
remember Beyer’s playing as having the composer’s intelligence behind it.”8 As
a pianist, teacher, and composer, Beyer made the piano central to all her musical
experiences. Her compositions for piano constitute a substantial and innovative
body of work for this instrument.

39
 5 Horizons
Percussion Ensemble Music

be t ween 1933 a nd 1942, Johanna Beyer composed eight

works for percussion ensemble—a total of nineteen movements and about sev-
enty-five minutes’ worth of music. Copies of five of these pieces were archived
in the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music in the Free Library of
Philadelphia. Frank J. Oteri has called Beyer “after William Russell, . . . the single
most prolific composer of percussion music in the 1930s.”1 Beyer’s four suites and
four short standalone pieces cover the full range of her formal and expressive
capabilities. Two of these pieces—“Endless,” from Three Movements for Per-
cussion (1939), and “Liberty,” the first movement of Horizons (1942)—represent
some of the most astonishing music composed in the twentieth century. Kennedy
and Polansky assessed this body of work as occupying “an important and almost
completely overlooked place in the history of American music.”2 With their fre-
quent focus on process rather than rhythmic complexity, Beyer’s percussion works
forged new territory in the genre.
Beyer composed her first work for percussion ensemble, the three-movement,
thirteen-minute-long Percussion Suite, in 1933, the same year as her Quintet for
Woodwinds; the Suite for Clarinet and Bassoon; Three Songs for Soprano, Percus-
sion, and Piano; and Sky-Pieces. Beyer met the Seegers in 1932 and began composi-
tion lessons early that year, and the flurry of new work reflected their influence on
her expansion of technique and development of new ideas. The Percussion Suite
is scored for Chinese blocks, triangle, tambourine, cymbal, bass drum, xylophone,
rattle, castanets, and tam-tam. The first movement is characterized by the austere,
quiet plodding of the bass drum—John Kennedy writes: “It may be the first time a
composer has marked percussion sotto voce”—which begins and ends the piece, and
is constant throughout.3 The second movement of the suite features an oft-repeated
solo xylophone melody, with ever expanding intervals and frequent rhythmic varia-
tion, as well as regular use of both slow and fast glissandi, revealing Beyer’s grow-
ing interest in sliding tones.4 John Kennedy writes of Percussion Suite: “Beyer’s
accomplishment in the Suite is that in her first work in the genre, she immediately
explored the less obvious musical parameters possible with percussion—favoring
subtlety over thunder, and broadness of space and time over dense rhythm.”5
Beyer’s next percussion ensemble piece, a five-movement, approximately
twelve-minute nonet titled Percussion (dated October–December 1935), has an
unusual history. From the early 1940s until 2010, the entirety of this piece was
unknown. The fourth movement, known as IV, was assumed to be a standalone
piece, odd in its cryptic title, but fascinating from a performance point of view,
since it was considered to be the first percussion work to leave the instrumenta-
tion and orchestration completely open—perhaps a practical decision on Beyer’s
part, though her previous percussion suite had been scored for specific instru-
ments. IV was published in Cowell’s New Music Orchestra Series No. 18 in 1936
(along with works by Doris Humphrey, Ray Green, Harold Davidson, and Gerald
Strang) and remained the only work of Beyer’s ever to be rendered into edited
form until the publication of the piano miniature Bees by the Frog Peak/Johanna
Beyer Project in 1996. In October 2011, in the John Cage Notations collection at
Northwestern University, Ron Coulter found four movements by Beyer (I, II, III,
and V) that clearly were the other movements to a suite—the long lost siblings
of IV.6 Coulter, who has studied, performed, and recorded the work, has written:
Percussion is an elegant set of rhythmic studies that explore textural density. This process is
enhanced by tempo variations that give the aural impression of increasing density via accel-
eration and decreasing density via deceleration. All five movements utilize tempo variation
with indications of accelerando, ritenuto, a tempo, and allargando, with various gradations
of poco, poco piu, and molto. Suspension of musical time is utilized throughout movements
one, two, three, and five with fermatas occurring on measure lines. . . . What Beyer referred
to as “8 times 8 measures,” predates Cage’s development of micro-macrocosmic rhythmic
structure, albeit in a very rudimentary form. . . . Beyer’s copious use of tempo variation is
remarkable given the historic function of percussion instruments in pan-European art music
as establishing or reinforcing the rhythmic reference point (i.e. pulse) of a composition.7
41
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Horizons: Percussion Ensemble Music

42 Considered by many to be both daring and enigmatic, IV still is striking in its

conception—the piece is like tidal movement, constantly in motion, increasing and
decreasing in both speed and volume throughout. The layering of the parts also
creates an unusual visual symmetry, perhaps the reason Cowell chose it instead
of the other movements for publication in his series.
All composed in 1939, Beyer’s Waltz, March for 30 Instruments, and Percus-
sion Opus 14, like the Three Movements for Percussion, were inspired by John
Cage’s establishment of a percussion ensemble at the Cornish School one year
prior. Yet there is no evidence that the three shorter pieces were ever performed.
Beyer’s Three Movements for Percussion—the three movements titled “Restless,”
“Endless,” and “Tactless”—is in some ways Beyer’s most radical work. Dedicated
to Cage and intended for performance by the John Cage Percussion Players in
Seattle, Cage’s group performed the work on at least six occasions between 1939
and 1942 in Seattle, Monterey, Moscow (Idaho), Walla Walla, Mills College in
Oakland, and San Francisco.8
“Restless” is an almost perfect palindrome (in terms of the overall material,
but at the measure level everything is always played “frontwards”), opening with
an aggressively loud gong stroke played three times, with the material doubling
back on itself at M. 58 and then speeding to its close with a steady accelerando.
Similar arch forms occur in many of Beyer’s pieces. Notated in 3/4, the middle
part of the piece pits four against three to complicate the otherwise waltz-like feel.
“Endless” is radical in both its form and its sound world. An insistently repeated,
static woodblock pulse, swelling with small hairpin crescendi and decrescendi
every two measures, is occasionally punctuated by a cymbal, repeated accents, or
other increasingly ornamented embellishments at the end of each phrase cycle.
A seventy-bar section is then repeated in its entirety, closed by a short coda. The
relentless (“endless”) tapping of the woodblock, like the ominous ticking of a
clock in the middle of the night, coupled with frequent fermatas and silences,
the muffled bass drum, bright cymbal, and ominous lion’s roar create a kind of
sonic fever dream. The courageously radical nature of the sparse texture, the
minimal material, the intense focus on repetitions and small detail (the slightly
changed embellishments that punctuate the phrases) foreshadow both Cage’s
interest in silence as a musical parameter and the minimalist idea of music as a
gradual process. The third movement establishes a kind of groove characterized
by each instrument focusing on one repeated motive. Gradual tempo and ampli-
tude changes give shape to the overall form of the piece.
The other short percussion pieces Beyer composed in 1939 all included
specified instrumentation and tend to be scored for approximately seven players.
March for 30 Percussion Instruments seems to have an ironic title: the meter is
4.5/4 (counted as 9/8), which would only allow for a “march” with a limp. What
John Kennedy calls a “hiccupped theme” is “gradually filled in both rhythmically
and by a groaning lion’s roar, with bursts of forte contrasting with the baseline soft
volume.”9 Percussion Opus 14 is one of only three extant pieces of Beyer’s that
carry opus numbers, and it is unclear why, let alone why the number is fourteen
(the other two, Symphonic Opus 3 and Symphonic Opus 5, were composed around
the same time, in 1939 and 1940, respectively). The piece is in 3/4 throughout
and uses the acceleration-deceleration/crescendo-decrescendo pattern typical of
many of her other pieces. Beyer completed another percussion work at the end
of 1939, which had turned out to be a very prolific year for her. Waltz, though
scored in 3/4 as would be expected, emphasizes three-against-four cross rhythms.
Kennedy writes: “The work features ‘rolled’ downbeats through the ensemble in
several instruments from low to high, creating a lovely arrhythmic wash of color
underneath the interplay.”10
Beyer composed two more percussion works before her health deteriorated.
The score of Strive, a five-minute work for fifteen instruments played by approxi-
mately eight players, bears the date of July 1941—just one month after the last
dated correspondence from Beyer to Cowell. Beyer’s Strive appears to have been
“composed on a whim” for John Cage, who had been soliciting new percussion
works for a concert he wanted to hold at Mills College on July 26 of that year.11
The piece’s many tempo changes are consistent with Beyer’s earlier percussion
work. The use of stretched and suspended time contrasts with other percussion
music of the time, as does the reduced material, and the gradual changes in texture
and dynamics. Coulter points out that “texture is an integral compositional ele-
ment in Strive, consisting of a spectrum from individual sounds framed in silence
to the blurring of individual sounds by dense aggregates of sound.”12
Beyer’s last piece for percussion ensemble, composed in 1942, is also her lon-
gest and most ambitious. The sixteen-minute, four-movement Horizons is scored
for fourteen instruments written on independent lines. No specific instrumenta-
tion is given, except for some general register distinctions. The last movement
calls for “wind, water, and bird,” presumably instructing the musicians to somehow
reproduce those sounds in performance. The four titled movements—“Liberty,”
“Utopia,” “Destruction,” and “Reality”—are reminiscent of some of the monu-
mental, dramatic life-themes suggested by Beyer’s opera proposal Status Quo.
Each movement has brief performance instructions as well as a short bit of poetry.
This programmatic association is unique in Beyer’s percussion work, though she
makes extensive use of her own texts in her songs and choral pieces. The through- 43
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Horizons: Percussion Ensemble Music

44

Horizons, for percussion ensemble, manuscript title page; held in the John
Cage Notations Collection, Northwestern University.

composed first movement “Liberty,” in particular, matched the steady intensity

of Beyer’s earlier experiment in calm elongation of musical time in “Endless.”
The performance instructions and poetic texts for Horizons are as follows:
I. Liberty (a planless “free for all”) “Sleepers, toiling with a minute, with a grain of soil,
poor forgotten creatures . . .”
use low pitched instruments
to give a mystic, rather subconscious impression
do the whole thing behind a curtain, if possible
 II. Utopia (“. . . Behold the hypocrite, the pleasure loving, his heavenly abode . . .”
use high pitched instruments
“rootless unreality”

III. Destruction “. . . Alas, fate strides in, mowing, plowing, . . . purifying . . .”
use all instruments
double up parts to vary the pitch
don’t keep within rhythm literally
use all possible sounds and blitz tricks
vary it with each performance instinctively

IV. Reality (“. . . Stars, moon, suns, boundless beauty . . .”)

Sunrise
nothing is to be taken literally
with increasing intensity following a day’s activities
slowly back to its starting point
Sunset

It is noteworthy that the poetic texts accompanying “Liberty” and “Reality” were
taken from the texts for Beyer’s own Three Songs for Soprano and Clarinet writ-
ten in 1934, specifically from the song called “Universal-Local.”13 I am unaware
of any other instances of Beyer “borrowing” her own material in this manner.
On July 11, 1942, Beyer wrote to Lou Harrison about Horizons; she was hop-
ing he would arrange a performance in California:
I was very happy to get your letter and enclosures about the concert. Arthur Cohn from the
Philadelphia Library would like to have a copy of the program or rather a program for his
files. John Cage used to send me a few and I sent it on to Cohn. He also wants the score for
copying purpose. However, I would rather leave it with you now, since you have the inten-
tion to perform Horizons this fall, unless you make a copy of it yourself this summer. The
original could be sent on. In a way it would be good to send it on to Cohn as soon as pos-
sible as all these WPA projects are very uncertain now. But again it may be best to wait till
you have a chance to try it out and plan it for definite instruments. Also, coming back to
performance, I begin to like the idea that a voice should utter the words belonging to each
movement first before the movement itself is played. I have in mind to write a symphonic
work using the same idea.14

Two days later, due to her increasing immobility and difficulty climbing stairs,
Beyer moved from her residence of approximately six years at 40 Jane Street
in Greenwich Village to the place that would be her last Manhattan address, a
ground-floor apartment on Eleventh Street. Though she wrote no further per-
cussion pieces, it is astonishing that Beyer was optimistically planning a new work
for orchestra at the time.
45
Horizons, for percussion ensemble, movement IV, “Reality,” excerpt; held in the John Cage Notations Collection,
Northwestern University.
 6 The People, Yes
Songs and Choral Works

b e y e r ’s e n t i r e o u t p u t f o r v o i c e — songs and choral

works—was composed between 1933 and 1937. Her three single songs and two
three-song sets make use of her own poetry and that of two other writers (see
Appendix E for Beyer’s original poetry.) Beyer’s earliest songs reveal the influence
of Ruth Crawford, whom Beyer met in early February 1932. Beyer’s composi-
tion lessons with the Seegers might have continued until they moved to Wash-
ington, D.C., in late 1935. Crawford’s settings of Sandburg’s work, in particular
her Three Songs to Poems by Carl Sandburg (for contralto, oboe, piano, and per-
cussion with optional orchestral ostinati; 1930–1932) clearly influenced Beyer’s
choice of Sandburg’s poems “Sky-Pieces,” “Timber Moon, “Stars, Songs, Faces,”
and “Summer Grass,” as well as the unusual instrumentation for her own Three
Songs—soprano, piano, and percussion.1 But as an immensely popular poet at
the time, and one connected to the socialist and populist ideology embraced
by Beyer’s friend Bertha Reynolds and other activists in Sunnyside in the early
1930s, Sandburg might have appealed to the budding composer anyway. Beyer’s
manuscripts of Sky-Pieces are accompanied by four different cover pages, three of
which reproduce, in Beyer’s hand, Sandburg’s quirky poem about fedoras, slouch
and panama hats, derbies, and sombreros. It ends with the lines: “Hats are sky-
pieces; hats have a destiny/wish your hat slowly; your hat is you.”2 47
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | The People, Yes: Songs and Choral Works

48 According to Beyer’s 1937 CV, her three Sandburg songs were performed at
the New School on October 25, 1933, in Cowell’s class on contemporary Ameri-
can music (see chapter 2). We might speculate that Beyer was at the piano and
Cowell played the percussion parts. All three pieces call for Chinese blocks, tri-
angle, cymbal, and bass drum. The vocal parts might have been sung by Radiana
Pazmor, who had performed some of Crawford’s Sandburg songs at the New
School around this time.3 The second song, “Summer Grass,” gives three different
tempi at the start: 8th=176; 8th=160; 8th=144. It is unclear what this is supposed
to mean; they might be tempo ratios (11:10:9) related to Cowell’s Rhythmicana
idea. This unusual song also includes Sprechstimme (notes “to be spoken” rather
than sung, marked with x), and at the end Beyer instructs the singer: “going very
gradually into a hum with closed lips going gradually from hum into ending.”
Beyer’s next song, Ballad of the Star-Eater (1934), was based on a poem by
(Alice) Bonaro Wilkinson Overstreet, wife of Harry Allen Overstreet, then chair
of the Philosophy Department at the City College of New York (during the
1920s and 1930s Overstreet also taught in the continuing education program
at the New School for Social Research, where Beyer may have first met him). It
is unclear whether or not Wilkinson Overstreet wrote the poem especially for
Beyer. Beyer set the poem for soprano and clarinet, perhaps intending the high
registers to represent the poem’s emphasis on height and the act of climbing to
the stars. This longer song setting is Beyer’s only narrative work. Wilkinson Over-
street had recently published a book called The Poetic Way of Release (1931), which
argued for the psychological power of verse, including communal poetry reading
and speaking choirs.4 The Overstreets’ advocacy movement in adult education
and mental health, which linked literary art and psychological theory, might have
been a strong influence on Beyer, who had written a number of poems since 1932,
several of which would soon be used in her other songs and choral works. The
Overstreets were also friends of Bertha Reynolds, who noted their marriage in
her diary on September 22, 1932.
Even today, the combination of soprano and clarinet is rare. Perhaps due to
her acquaintance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra principle clarinetist Rosa-
rio Mazzeo, Beyer wrote two solo clarinet suites (1932) and a total of four songs
for soprano and clarinet (1934), as well as a suite for clarinet and bassoon (1933),
a sonata for clarinet and piano (1936; dedicated to Mazzeo and Nicolas Slonim-
sky), and a suite for bass clarinet and piano (1936?). In addition, she wrote three
chamber works for woodwinds that included clarinet. For The Ballad of the Star-
Eater Beyer might have chosen this combination because of the similar ranges of
the clarinet and the average soprano. Beyer certainly would have been attracted
to the clarinet’s natural ability to produce sliding tones (notated by Beyer as wavy
lines or arrows) and trills, as well as its relative ease in articulating disjunct melodic
lines. The clarinet part starts out in a relatively low range but moves higher as
the narrative turns to the collecting of stars. At a section marked agitato molto,
the Sprechstimme technique is indicated by Xs. The soprano’s highest note is a
high G# on the word “crown.” The writing is in the dissonant counterpoint style
and also reflects the heterophonic interweaving of independent voices favored by
Ruth Crawford. The clarinet introduction represents a structural plan Marguerite
Boland calls chromatic completion or accumulation.5 The piece is unified, with
melodic material and motives returning and developing throughout. The song
is about hunger, creativity, and strength, opening with the lines “Hunger assailed
me with sharp, cold pain/I had searched for food, and searched in vain.” After the
protagonist has scaled “the wall of the sky,” the song ends with this affirmation:
“Now I walk the earth without care, though roots elude me and boughs are bare/
For stars still prickle my fingertips, and the taste of stars is warm on my lips/I fear
no hunger with sharp, cold pain/if it dare assail me, I shall climb again.”
Also composed in 1934, Beyer’s Three Songs for Soprano and Clarinet are
settings of Beyer’s own poetry. Two of the poems (“Total Eclipse” [August] and
“Universal-Local” [July]) had been written in 1932, and the third (“To Be”) was
dated December 1934. The pieces were performed by Mazzeo in Boston on Janu-
ary 29, 1936, and on a Composers’ Forum-Laboratory concert on May 20, 1936.
The musical material of “Total Eclipse,” with its long, dramatic text, is unified
by the repeated-note (“short-long”) clarinet motive that opens the piece. This
is picked up by the soprano when she enters with the declaration of “moving of
masses.” For the 1936 Composers’ Forum-Laboratory program, Beyer wrote the
following: “‘Total Eclipse’, here I use the same tonal material for both voice and
instrument, yet different rhythmical patterns. There is often imitation by the
voice or vice versa, but in the development the themes vary so, that they become
truly dissonant counterpoint.” The beginning and ending of the song emphasize
a more static, speech-like melodic pattern, while the middle of the piece rises in
excitement, leading from the initial stirring of “astro-phenomena” to the goal
of “phenomenous climax!” “To Be” is shorter and scored in an antiphonal (call
and response) texture, with the clarinet playing increasingly elaborate flourishes
between each phrase of text. (At the most virtuosic moment, the clarinetist has to
play eighteen sixteenth notes within a 6/8 bar with the eighth note equaling 152.)
About “To Be,” Beyer wrote: “Here I also start using the same tonal material for
both voice and instrument, but in entirely different rhythms and developments.”
“Universal-Local” is similarly brief and is tightly focused on an economical use of 49
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | The People, Yes: Songs and Choral Works

50 ideas. Here the clarinet is set very high and plays only five pitches throughout, in
a consistent order and pattern, perhaps representing the repetitious regularity of
the “universal.” Beyer wrote: “ [In] Universal-Local, the clarinet part keeps repeat-
ing a simple austere motive, just changing into a faster rhythmical pattern in part
2. I tried to get the never changing, sublime, universal atmosphere.” Sprechstimme
enhances the doom of “poor, forgotten creatures.” This song is radical in its static
sparseness and thematic conviction, “as spine-tingling as it is restrained.”6
Beyer’s last solo song, the remarkable Have Faith! (1936; rev. 1937), is also her
most personal. Composed just a few months after Cowell’s arrest, her text might
refer to her feelings for him and to her effort to stay positive about the future.
The song was written for flute and soprano, and dedicated to Ethel Luening, a
singer married to the composer Otto Luening, who also was a flutist. The piece is
short, very high, and dramatic in its declamations. The manuscript exists in three
versions: one in 3/4, one in 2/4, and one in 5/8. Two of the versions require the
singer to vocalize without words for some of the time—one version, composed
around January 1937, included a forty-measure solo vocalization without text. In
all three versions, Sprechstimme is used on the first iteration of the words “it does
not matter.”
Between 1935 and 1937 Beyer wrote five choral works: The Robin in the Rain,
The Federal Music Project, The Composers Forum-Laboratory, The People, Yes, and The
Main-Deep. The Federal Music Project and The Composers Forum-Laboratory used
original texts by Beyer; both of these works were dedicated to Ashley Pettis, the
director of the Composers’ Forum-Laboratory. The Robin in the Rain set a poem
by Charles Coke Woods; The People, Yes used a Carl Sandburg poem; and The
Main-Deep was based on a poem by James Stephens.7 Three of the five pieces
were labeled “to the Choral Contest Committee, Federal Music Project, 254 W.
54th Str. NY.”8 Most of Beyer’s choral works are for four-part, a cappella chorus;
there is no evidence that any of them were performed during her lifetime.
During fall 1935, when Beyer composed her first choral work, The Robin in
the Rain (October 1935), the Composers’ Forum-Laboratory was established as
part of the Music Education Division of the WPA Federal Music Project. Beyer
clearly hoped to use the new opportunities to have works performed. As far as I
am aware, at the time of this writing, the piece has yet to receive a premiere. The
Robin in the Rain exists in two manuscript versions: the first, for soprano and alto
chorus and a solo soprano, plus a simple, purely chordal piano part; the second
version (the one dedicated to the Choral Contest Committee) is for full chorus
with the same soprano solo as in the first version; the tenors and basses here take
on the role of the piano drone. The piece is in three strophic verses, with the same
music for each verse. In both versions the altos sing the repeated word “drop” in
an onomatopoetic hocket pattern with the soprano melody, which is scalar. The
solo soprano sings “the robin, the robin” on a motive that emphasizes the tritone.
Beyer’s next choral piece, The Federal Music Project, is dated July 1936, the
same month she composed her String Quartet No. 2, and the month Cowell
entered San Quentin. The work is scored for four-part chorus, but the basses
sing mostly a tremolo on a low F/G-flat minor second. (Based on the evidence
of this piece and The Robin in the Rain, and given that all her solo songs were for
soprano, one might speculate that Beyer was reluctant to write for male voices.)
Perhaps intended as a form of populist Gebrauchsmusik, or music that served a
certain purpose within society (as opposed to art music, that served no practi-
cal purpose), The Federal Music Project celebrates its titular honoree with Beyer’s
optimistic five-verse, strophic poem (see Appendix E).
Beyer’s slow, quiet, pulsing music for The Federal Music Project is in some
ways incongruous with this exuberant text; as the basses establish their secundal
drone, the upper voices repeat the words “I know” in cascading imitation. When
the basses take over the text, Beyer requests “clear diction, almost speech” as the
other parts take over the drone role. After a short, imitative passage that moves up
from the basses through the tenors, altos, and sopranos, Beyer creates an intrigu-
ing sonic effect in which the full chorus arrives together on an open fifth on A
(coinciding with the last word of each verse): the sopranos hold the high A as the
altos and tenors drop out abruptly, while the basses slide over an octave down to
the low F that is the root of their drone. Each verse ends (and begins) with the
plaintive repetition of “I know. . . .” Beyer’s setting of The Federal Music Project is
radical in its austerity and minimal use of thematic material.
In January 1937 Beyer set another of her own texts in a new choral work
as active, humorous, and extroverted as The Federal Music Project had been static,
contemplative, and introverted. The new piece, titled The Composers Forum-Lab-
oratory, self-consciously pointed to the venue that would provide almost the only
two occasions for her to hear her own work performed during her lifetime. Like
its predecessor, The Composers Forum-Laboratory was dedicated to Pettis; it was
scored for full chorus and a piano playing a bouncy, oscillating octave pattern
throughout. The choral parts are mostly in imitative polyphony, and again, to her
syllabic writing she adds “with clear diction,” though the polyphonic layering is
sometimes so dense that it obscures the words. Beyer’s text is a tongue-in-cheek
comment on the public-critique nature of the audience discussions following each
Forum-Laboratory concert. Perhaps this poking fun at the pretentious serious-
ness of the Forums was not appreciated by the Choral Contest Committee. 51
The Main-Deep, chorus, excerpt; manuscript held in the Music Division, New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts.
 In September and October 1937, Beyer composed two more choral pieces.
The first, The People, Yes, was based on Carl Sandburg’s poem of the same name,
which was verse 106 in a three-hundred-page book-length poem called The People
Speak (1936). Beyer wrote out verse 106 on the cover of her manuscript. Scored
for SATB a cappella chorus, the slow-moving pace of the long-held, tied and/
or repeated whole notes sets the mood for the text, which begins with the line:
“Sleep is a suspension midway and a conundrum of shadow lost in meadows of
the moon.” The staggered entries create an almost canonic pattern that results
in a cluster-like sound mass. A refrain on the vocables “ai! ai!” are notated with
Xs, which Beyer again explains as meaning “spoken, yet within pitch.”
The Main-Deep, Beyer’s last known work for chorus (a cappella SATB), was
also intended for the Choral Contest Committee. Beyer hand-copied James Ste-
phens’s three-verse poem The Main Deep onto the cover page of her manuscript.9
The poem is non-narrative and focuses on free-association-type word pairings
that must have appealed to Beyer’s elliptical and poetic sensibility (“long-rolling,
steady-pouring, deep-trenched, green billow”; or later: “cold-flushing, -on-on-
on-, chill-rushing, hush-hushing, hush-hushing . . .”). Beyer makes good use of
words suggestive of particular treatments, especially the glissando-evocative words
“pouring,” “rolling,” and “sliding,” which are subjected to ascending or descend-
ing vocal slides usually about the distance of a major sixth (she writes in the score:
“all intervals should be reached by sliding as subtle as possible!”). Beyer uses the
word “hushing” (and “flushing”) throughout as percussive contrast to the sliding
tones and long-held notes (she notes: “the consonants ‘sh’ should be held and
sounded”). This is Beyer’s densest work in terms of chromatic layering. As a result,
it is also one of her most radical in terms of sound: all the parts sing throughout,
creating fullness of sound, in contrast to the thinner textures, layered imitation,
and frequent structural breaks of her other choral pieces.

53
 7 Sonatas, Suites,
and String Quartets
Chamber Music

be yer composed at le a st eighteen instrumental chamber

works and eleven pieces for symphony orchestra or large ensemble. The clarinet
was a main focus for Beyer, perhaps because of her acquaintance with Rosario
Mazzeo (E-flat and bass clarinetist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra from
1933 to 1966), for whom she wrote several pieces. Though it is unclear how Beyer
came to know Mazzeo, he obviously appreciated her work. He performed her
Three Songs for Soprano and Clarinet in Boston and New York in 1936, recorded
two movements of the Suite for Clarinet and Bassoon for New Music Quarterly
Editions in 1938, and continued playing the latter work with his Crown Chamber
Players in California between 1966 and 1976.1
Beyer’s two suites for solo clarinet, composed in 1932, are landmark works
of dissonant counterpoint and modernist formalism. Both are in four movements
(Suite for Clarinet I: Presto, Largo, Moderato, and Rallentando; Suite for Clari-
net IB: Giocoso, Lamentation, Contrast [Sonnet form], and Accelerando). The
pieces are unusual in their appearance: individual lines of music ending where
the phrases end (using a phrase structure technique adopted from Seeger), thus
creating irregular, sometimes symmetrical lengths of systems. Beyer’s “cumu-
lation-reduction” idea (in the words of Marguerite Boland) allows her to make
use of palindromes, as in the first movement of the first suite.2 In other pieces
the cumulation-reduction process manifests itself through a gradual increase or
decrease in the density of orchestral textures, gradual tempo changes, dynamic
swells, and repetition/alteration of material. These early clarinet pieces also reveal
Beyer’s engagement with dissonant counterpoint.3 About the first suite, Boland
writes, “Beyer uses an approach common to many composers working systemati-
cally with chromatic saturation or aggregate completion: the last pitch that com-
pletes the chromatic collection also signals the end of a section or movement.”4
In other words, Beyer lets pitch dictate form, carrying out systems to their logical
conclusions.
The third movement of the second suite is titled “Contrast” with a subtitle
in parentheses: “Sonnet form eighth=96.” It is unclear what she meant by sonnet
form, though the measure lengths of the twelve phrases might be thought of as
a kind of metaphorical rhyme scheme: 5+7, 5+7, 5+7, 5+7, 8, 10, 9, 11. The last
movements of each clarinet suite—both marked accelerando—are particularly
interesting both historically and theoretically. They use another formal design
written about by Cowell, namely that of “tempo melody,” or a proportional rate
of tempo change based on the relationship between the end of one line and the
beginning of the next, a technique later called “metric modulation.”5 (Beyer writes
in the score “m=m” as an abbreviation for measure=measure.) The clarinet suites
are compositionally intricate and virtuosic in their demands. These are important
in their theoretical implications, and they started Beyer down a path of writing a
number of pieces for woodwinds.6
Beyer’s Quintet for Woodwinds had been scheduled for performance on
the May 19, 1937, Composers’ Forum-Laboratory concert but was cut from the
program due to time constraints. Beyer had written the following notes for the
performance, and they appeared in the program:
Quintet for Woodwinds is written in dissonant counterpoint. A dissonant chord is the signal
for the discussion, the individual utterances of all participating instruments. Although only
one or two instruments are heard in the beginning, they soon all talk at the same time. In
the middle section one instrument after another is heard above the others in a short state-
ment, while the rest subdue their voices. Soon they are all off again. The bassoon starts
and ends the composition.

Another of Beyer’s earliest known compositions, the Suite for Clarinet and Bas-
soon (1933; also called Suite III for Clarinet and Bassoon) holds a special place
in her catalog. It was one of the first of her pieces to be performed in public and
the only piece to be recorded (albeit only partially) during her lifetime. In an
undated letter to Harrison Kerr, Beyer provided the following liner notes for
the recording: 55
Suite for Clarinet I, fourth movement; manuscript held in the Music Division, New
York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
 II Lentamente and IV Allegretto ponderoso are parts of a Suite for Clarinet and Bassoon
by Johanna Magdalena Beyer, in which an attempt is made to exhaust all possibilities in
melody-writing.
II The Clarinet sings in slow motion while the bassoon runs along merrily in countermel-
ody, counter rhythm. The passing consonances and dissonances are of secondary impor-
tance.
IV The Clarinet presents two themes in Rondo-form: The first spreads itself over space
ponderously in wide skips, intervals, the second runs adjustingly up and down the gamut
in close steps. All the while the Bassoon gasps humorous comments—spiced with biting
wit—at such extreme emotions of it’s [sic] partner!
But please, before you start listening to the two movements, forget all about these
remarks here: Let the music speak to you directly.

The San Francisco Examiner allegedly reviewed the 1934 California concert as
a “doleful dull duet”; but Lou Harrison later recalled the recording as “hypnotiz-
ing, a very strange and a wonderful piece.”7 Aaron Copland reviewed the record-
ing ambivalently in Modern Music, an important new music journal of the time:
[New Music Quarterly Recordings] has also put on a single disc two movements [Lenta-
mente; Allegro Ponderoso] from a Suite for clarinet and bassoon by Johanna Beyer, and Two
Chorales and Ostinato for oboe and piano by Henry Cowell. Miss Beyer’s pieces produce
an improvisatory impression which tends to leave one suspended in mid-air. This is less
true, however, of the second of the two movements.8

Bertha Reynolds mentioned the piece twice in her diary. On November

30, 1937, she wrote, “[J] has to pay $100 to have recordings made of her comp.
by Bst. Symph. Players.” More than a year later (December 8, 1938), while on a
business trip to St. Louis, Reynolds reported: “Johanna’s recording came. Sounds
horrid.” It is unclear whether she found the piece or the performance “horrid,”
and/or whether Beyer shared her opinion about the final product. For the 1937
Composers’ Forum concert, Beyer offered these notes:
The first movement is written around the motive [dotted 8th-16th]. It occurs again and again,
reversed, extended, doubled, repeated in succession, until finally the movement becomes
intoxicated with the dotted rhythm which goes faster and faster in dotted sixteenths. In the
second movement the bassoon takes the faster part, while the clarinet moves on slowly. The
third movement contains a systematic occurrence of rests in the clarinet part. The fourth
movement has two themes for the clarinet. While the main theme skips in wide tonal inter-
vals, the second runs off in small close steps. Both are repeated and developed in rondo
form. Against this is an organized rest period for the bassoon.

Beyer’s Suite for Oboe and Bassoon, dated June 1939, exists in several ver-
sions with different titles, and, perhaps out of exasperation at not being able to get
57
 j o h a n n a b e y e r   |  Sonatas, Suites, and String Quartets

58 her pieces performed, she allowed for substitutions, writing on the score: “ . . . or
any other suitable instrumentation.” The four-movement suite plays with modal
and tonal harmonies, two-voice polyphony, chromaticism, and tunefulness. The
Six Pieces for Oboe and Piano, also dated June 1939, opens with a tonal melody
that sounds like quoted material. The piano part has a few clusters but mostly the
piece sounds more conventional than much of her music; repeated notes, square
rhythms, and a more periodic sense of phrasing make this piece unusual in her
output. The second movement is static, sparse, and dark, and the two instruments
never play together.
Beyer composed only two duos for strings and piano: Movement for Double
Bass and Piano (1936) and Suite for Violin and Piano (January 1937). There is no
evidence that the bass piece was performed during Beyer’s lifetime; the Suite for
Violin and Piano was performed by Beyer and violinist Carmela Ippolito at the
Composers’ Forum-Laboratory concert in May 1937.
The Movement for Double Bass and Piano is a good example of Beyer’s inter-
est in thematic unity and her manipulation of a reduced amount of musical mate-
rial.9 The piece starts with a nine-measure bass solo, which focuses on a repeated
motive—a descending minor third, first plucked, then bowed—followed by a short
chromatic melody that introduces a second, more rhythmically oriented motive
(dotted-eighth, sixteenth note, quarter note; or “long-short-long”). The piano
repeats this material, embellishing the original motive with clustery minor seconds
in the right hand and octaves in the left. At measure 50 the bass has a cadenza-like
solo that begins with a trill and then emphasizes minor seconds. The solo ends
dramatically, with several one-and-a-half-octave descending glissandi. The piece
ends as ominously as it began, with the austere pizzicato minor third. Why Beyer
chose to write for this unusual instrumentation is unknown; perhaps she was famil-
iar with Serge Koussevitzky’s Chanson triste (1906), also for double bass and piano
(Koussevitzky himself was an accomplished bass player). Robert Carl, in his liner
notes for bassist Robert Black’s recording of the piece, writes that “[the piece] is
relentlessly probing and intense in the spirit of the American Ultramodernists.”10
Beyer’s equally “probing and intense” Suite for Violin and Piano, though
comprising three short movements, is likewise grounded by thematic unity, tight
organization, the haunting use of repeated notes, and motives brought back as if
out of memory. Optimistically dedicated to Hungarian-American violinist Joseph
Szigeti and the Russian-Swiss pianist Nikita Magaloff (neither of whom ever
played it), the piece was premiered at the May 20, 1937, Composers’ Forum-
Laboratory concert, with Beyer at the piano. She offered these notes:
 The violin states the theme out of which the whole material for the Suite derives, tonally
and rhythmically. The second measure of the 4/4 rhythm theme has only three quarter
notes instead of four. These three notes become very significant. In the first movement
they appear insistently in the piano part against the 4/4 beat of the violin, while in the
second movement the three beats of the violin throb against the four of the piano. In the
first [sic: third] movement these three beats occur again in the piano part. Violin and piano
take alternatively one motive of the theme and comment on it, resulting in abstraction.

Beyer favored this polyrhythmic play of four-against-three for creating tension

between instruments. The short cadenza that opens the third movement reiter-
ates melodic ideas found in the solo opening of the first movement. The piece,
like the Movement for Double Bass and Piano, reveal a dark, brooding quality in
Beyer’s writing. Following the 1937 premiere of the piece, for which there was
apparently a “good-sized audience,” the New York Herald-Tribune described this
piece as “experimental in form and modernistic in harmony.”11
Beyer’s four works for string quartet make a sizable contribution to the twenti-
eth-century repertoire for that ensemble: String Quartet (1933–34); String Quar-
tet No. 2 (July 1936); Movement for String Quartet (also called Dance for Strings;
1938); and String Quartet IV (undated). A “String Quartet No. 3” has not been
found; Beyer possibly counted the Movement for String Quartet as the third in
this series of four works for quartet.
The first quartet, like the second and fourth, is set in a classical four-move-
ment form: Allegro; Lento; Moderato; and Presto. Written in the year following
Beyer’s initial composition lessons with the Seegers, it would be difficult to deny
the influence of Ruth Crawford’s String Quartet (1931), which included not only
virtuosic displays of dissonant counterpoint but also featured one of the most radi-
cal (and earliest) uses of a completely static sound-mass texture. Beyer clearly had
studied Crawford’s work; its form, compositional techniques, and sound world
are reflected especially in Beyer’s first two quartets.
The first quartet’s Presto movement, in particular, seems modeled on the
groundbreaking third movement of Crawford’s quartet. Playing with mutes, and
asked to play the softest pianissimo possible (con sordini ppp sempre ppp), the strings
whisper through a landscape of glissandi, sliding tones, slight swells in dynamics.
Polansky describes this movement:
The fourth movement is nothing short of astonishing. In its minimalist use of material, and
focus on timbre and gesture, it might have been written fifty years later (listen for the second
violin repeating a high E-flat half-note pulse for one hundred and twenty-nine measures).
It is a unified, fantastic sound world, almost completely composed of glissandi, crescendi/

59
 j o h a n n a b e y e r   |  Sonatas, Suites, and String Quartets

60 decrescendi clusters, and few somewhat surprising “melodies” near the end. Its closest
aesthetic relative may be another Beyer piece, The Federal Music Project.12

Near the end of the movement, all the parts slide down to an F-E double-stop
on the second violin: the E eventually drops out, and the piece ends with a long
decrescendo on the lone F. Beyer’s way of notating some of the slides and fades
foreshadow the radical graphic notation of the 1960s in the music of composers
like Krzysztof Penderecki and George Crumb.
The four movements of Beyer’s String Quartet No. 2—Allegretto, Largo,
Moderato, and Allegro quasi Presto—reveal again the influence of Crawford, espe-
cially in Beyer’s Largo, which likewise recalls the third movement of Crawford’s
String Quartet. But the piece also reflects similarities to Ives’s playful settings
of tonal quotations in atonal contexts. Beyer’s first and last movements both use
the melody from a well-known aria in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute):
Papageno’s “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen. . . .” The aria, the first to be heard in
the opera, establishes the lead character of Papageno as hungry for a “girl or a
wife.”13 The upbeat, tonal tune is played by the cello in both instances; in the first
movement other parts play fragments of it as well. It is framed by sliding tones,
drawing attention to the contrast between a lyrical melody and the abstract tex-
tures of modernism.14
The Movement for String Quartet (or, Dance for Strings) is somewhat unusual
in its instrumentation: violin, viola, cello, and double bass. Written two years after
her Movement for Double Bass and Piano, Beyer might have been interested in
writing solo material again for bass. This 221-measure movement has probably
never been performed. An opening section focuses on a static texture on D with a
pulse in the viola; the instruments enter forte and then fade to piano. This dramatic,
fading gesture is then repeated. After a meter and tempo change, a dance-like mel-
ody appears in the viola with the cello and bass accompanying lightly, the violin
plays a countermelody. The piece seems less radical than much of Beyer’s music,
with a steady pulse, thin texture, and transparent, repetitive themes throughout.
The static fade on D returns to close the piece in a rounded way.
Beyer’s undated String Quartet IV might have been her last piece. It is writ-
ten in clear handwriting that looks like perhaps someone else copied it. The first
movement Moderato has no tempo marking, is set in 4/4, and is in C major. The
first violin plays a repeated melody that sounds like a quotation of the third phrase
in “Freres Jacques”—the part in English that sings: “Morning bells are ringing!
Morning bells are ringing!” The cello plays an oscillating line that resembles
the beginning of the requiem mass chant “Dies Irae,” or “Day of Wrath.” At
String Quartet No. 2, fourth movement, excerpt; manuscript held in the Music
Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
 j o h a n n a b e y e r   |  Sonatas, Suites, and String Quartets

62 measure 62 the cello is stranded on triplet low Es for the rest of the movement.
The Larghetto bears the mark of dissonant counterpoint in that it seems to be a
study in contrast. The third movement Andante is thin-textured and austere, and
makes interesting use of chromaticism, recalling Shostokovich’s dark contrast of
major and minor and his use of relentlessly repeated notes that move suddenly to
something unexpected. Beyer’s Presto finale also exploits both a sparse sound (the
cello playing open fifths) and the compound meter’s ability to emphasize duple
or triple patterns at the same time. Beyer changes the key signature frequently in
this piece and brings back material in reorchestrated forms. Like the Movement
for String Quartet, Beyer’s String Quartet IV has never been performed.
 8 Symphonic Striving
Works for Band
and Orchestra

be t ween 1935 and 1941, Beyer wrote eleven works for large
ensembles, from her nine-instrument March of 1935 to her full-orchestra Sym-
phonic Movement II of 1941, which she dedicated, optimistically, to Leopold
Stokowski. Seven of these works were for the forces of the Romantic orchestra,
with enhanced percussion sections; five were copied and archived at the Edwin
A. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music in the Free Library of Philadelphia.1
According to musicologist Judith Tick, the notion of a “woman composer” of
orchestral music was not established until just a few decades before Beyer began
composing:
In 1893 the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Kikisch performed the Over-
ture Wichitis by Margaret Lang—the first time any orchestra in the United States had per-
formed a piece composed by an American woman. Three years later the same orchestra
performed the Gaelic Symphony of Mrs. H. H. A. Beach—the first symphony composed by
an American woman. Lang and Beach therefore established the precedent that women
could indeed compose orchestral music.2

Following an era during which most women in music were singers, pianists, harp-
ists, patronesses, or friends to celebrated men in the field, it is not surprising that
many who remembered Beyer at all remembered her as “Cowell’s secretary” rather
63
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Symphonic Striving

64 than as a fellow composer who toiled over her orchestral scores just as they did.
But she was not alone in her desire to write for larger forms, and there were a few
precedents, though she may not have known them. The November 25, 1933, issue
of Musical America featured an article titled “Works by Two Women Composers
Played by Philadelphia Orchestra.” Frances McCollin’s Adagio for String Orchestra
and Ione Pickhardt’s Mountains were conducted by Stokowski, who claimed to be
“continuing his search for novelties.”
Beyer’s March of April 1935 was completed just before her departure for
Germany in May of that year, a trip that would be her last to the country of her
birth. She wrote March on manuscript paper issued by the Irving Berlin Standard
Music Corporation, which featured pre-printed instrumental staves, including lines
for saxophones and banjo. Beyer turned the paper upside-down and ignored the
predetermined instrumentation, which was probably intended for band or musical
theater. The manuscript is crowded and displays what appear to be Beyer’s own
corrections. Beyer copied out all the parts, which included two clarinets, two cor-
nets, cymbal and drum, two violins, and cello. It is unclear why she wrote for this
particular combination. The piece is odd, given Beyer’s exploration of dissonant
counterpoint at the time: except for two brief passages in the cello part and one
passage in the clarinet part, the entire piece consists of parallel fourths. The rhythm
is regular and even, and the drum and cymbal play triplet patterns throughout.
Until recently, Beyer’s Fragment for Chamber Orchestra, dated January 1937,
was her only orchestral piece that had ever been performed. It was premiered by
the Ensemble Resonanz and recorded live by Westdeutscher Rundfunk during a
festival in Cologne, Germany, in 1999. This approximately six-minute piece was
dedicated to Hans Lange, the violinist and, at the time of the dedication, associ-
ate conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The piece was copied by the
Fleisher Collection, but Beyer made parts herself for the chamber group consist-
ing of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn in F, two violins, viola, cello, double bass,
piano, and percussion (Chinese blocks, cymbal, and bass drum). Fragment’s slow and
quiet opening passages are dominated by an evocative series of solo oboe phrases,
accompanied by atmospheric long tones in the muted strings and slow cluster
chords in the piano. Chinese blocks play on the oboe’s rests, causing a hocket-like
conversation between the two dissimilar instruments. This unifying hocket theme
recurs throughout. The sparse texture of the opening is joined by countermelodies
in the flute and clarinet; the bassoon plays a pattern of three against the general
setting of four, one of Beyer’s favorite techniques for creating a feeling of tension.
In the middle of the piece, the piano has an eight-bar solo passage. The last sec-
tion switches to 3/4, but maintains much of the thematic material of the opening.
The cellos are given two-octave glissandi. A sudden flourish in the piano and the
opening’s oboe and Chinese block motive close the piece, as a last held chord in
the piano slowly fades away with the oboe’s final held high D. The piece, far from
a mere “fragment,” is beautiful and effective, and it demonstrates Beyer’s sensitiv-
ity to instrumental combinations, thematic material, and formal drama.
Soon after Fragment for Chamber Orchestra, Beyer composed her first work for
full orchestra, the four-movement Symphonic Suite (dated January–July 1937),
which the composer estimated to be about twenty-four minutes long.3 The move-
ments include an opening Grave, an Allegretto scherzando, a Lentamente, and
a Presto finale, marked “as fast as possible.” The first movement opens similarly
to Fragment for Chamber Orchestra, with a clarinet solo marked espressivo, accom-
panied by sparse pizzicato strings. The full orchestra that follows the introduc-
tion is mostly homorhythmic (all the parts moving together). The end of the
Grave features English horn, oboe, and bassoon solos; the Allegretto scherzando
begins attacca. This movement, too, foregrounds paired soloists: at the opening,
piccolo and bassoon; at the end, piccolo and percussion. An antiphonal passage
follows the opening, which sets the string section against the brass instruments
in an imitative call-and-response passage. The Lentamente movement likewise
emphasizes solo wind melodies while the piano plays a jarring but slow-moving
series of augmented octaves (or minor ninths). Throughout, the triangle (and
sometimes glockenspiel) plays a three pattern against the overall time of four.
The Presto features a fast-moving 9/8 unison melody in the winds.
In February 1938, Beyer composed a piece called Reverence for wind ensemble
(piccolo, flute, English horn, clarinet, bassoon, soprano saxophone, tenor saxo-
phone, alto horn, “brass,” euphonium, timpani, and bass drum) and dedicated it
to the Australian pianist, bandleader, and composer Percy Grainger. Beyer’s cor-
respondence with Grainger seems to have begun in November 1937, after Cowell
connected them. As she introduced herself to Grainger, she remarked that she
had heard him conduct a piece of Cowell’s (Reel) on the radio, broadcast from the
Interlochen International Music Camp in Michigan, in August 1937. She added:
“And being also a composer, I know your works of course.” She enlisted him in
her efforts to promote Cowell’s book manuscript “The Nature of Melody,” writ-
ten during his early months in prison, for which Beyer sought support through
publishing companies and funding agencies like Fischer, Knopf, and the Gug-
genheim Foundation, and for which she had “been checking up examples and the
like.”4 But their correspondence was only partly about Cowell. Soon Grainger
became an important channel through which Beyer could talk about her own
music; clearly she craved contact with other composers and hungered for feed- 65
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Symphonic Striving

66 back and mentoring. She enjoyed discussing with Grainger the tedium of copy-
ing parts, obtaining and comparing various types of manuscript paper, and other
mundane composers’ trade details.5
Grainger also encouraged Beyer’s interest in exploring new compositional
idioms, supported her efforts to write for concert band and wind ensemble, and,
on at least one occasion, brought these works to life.6 In 1939 Cowell conveyed to
Grainger Beyer’s reaction to seeing Grainger conduct a rehearsal of her concert
band and wind ensemble pieces Reverence and Elation: “She was speechless with
pleasure over having had the opportunity to hear her own work rehearsed—her
own statement is that she was deeply thrilled, but tried not to show it!”7 Beyer
also shared her enthusiasm with Grainger: “I really felt very grateful to you for
taking all this trouble, it was really a thrill despite! . . . It was a fine experience
for me, and the best lesson I could possibly have.”8 This would turn out to be the
only time Beyer had the opportunity to hear any of her large ensemble pieces
performed live.
Beyer’s remaining orchestral works include the Symphonic Movement I, Sym-
phonic Suites 1 and 2, the four-movement Symphonic Op. 3, the three-movement
Symphonic Op. 5, and CYRNAB. While her Symphonic Op. 3 might be the most
ambitious of these pieces, CYRNAB is perhaps the most interesting. As Kennedy
and Polansky first pointed out, CYRNAB appears to be an anagram-like construc-
tion taken from the middle of the names “henRYCowell” and “johanNABeyer,”
implying, perhaps, something “about Beyer’s perception of her relationship to
Cowell.”9 Beyer composed this approximately twelve-minute piece in fall 1937,
after Cowell had been sentenced and after she had begun corresponding with
Grainger. It is written for a large orchestra: piccolo, flute, oboe, English horn,
B-flat clarinet, bassoon, contra-bassoon, trumpet in F, horn in F, trombone in
B-flat, trombone in F, tuba in F, timpani, Chinese blocks, cymbal, gong, bass drum,
piano, violin 1, violin 2, viola, cello, and double bass. The piece is in two sections,
120 and 197 measures long, respectively. A sforzando gong stroke opens the piece,
followed by a quiet, slow horn call playing repeated open fifths. When the per-
cussion, piano, and strings enter, the texture remains thin and static. The winds
likewise enter with slowly oscillating seconds, while the brass gradually add some
movement. A high single pitch held in the horn provides a seamless transition
to the second section. This is set in 6/8 and features the violins playing pizzicato
eighth notes and the winds playing a dance-like melody that contrasts with the
static calm of the opening. The piano plays chromatically moving octaves on the
strong beats of one and four. Several solo phrases interrupt this pattern. The finale
features much of the opening material as well as some faster flourishes and many
Symphonic Movement II, first movement, excerpt; manuscript held in the Music
Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

dynamic swells. The end is a very quiet fade of the horn repeating the open fifth
heard at the beginning of the piece, with the strings playing muted C-sharps.
Beyer’s orchestral works raise many questions about her ambition and her
expectations. She communicated with many famous conductors—including Car-
los Chávez, Eugene Goossens, Howard Hanson, Hans Kindler, Otto Klemperer,
Serge Koussevitzky, Karl Krueger, Hans Lange, Fritz Mahler, Pierre Monteux,
Artur Rodzinski, Lazare Saminsky, Fabien Sevitzky, Nicolas Slonimsky, Leopold
Stokowski, Joseph Szigeti, and Alfred Wallenstein—yet she was unable to inter-
est any in her larger works. Koussevitzky, for one, looked at her Symphonic Suite
of 1937 and deemed it “not convincing,” with no further explanation.10 Despite
this lack of support, Beyer not only composed a number of substantial symphonic
pieces, but she also copied individual instrumental parts for most of them. This
tedious yet hopeful process must have occupied a great deal of her time. In a rare
acknowledgement of her diligence, Cowell wrote Beyer some encouraging words 67
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Symphonic Striving

68 from San Quentin on August 15, 1937: “It would be splendid, if Koussevitzky in
Boston would take an interest in your new orchestral piece. It would be worth the
work. I fully appreciate your hopeless feeling when engaged in copying parts!”
According to a letter Beyer wrote to Lou Harrison in 1942, she “had it in mind”
to write a new symphonic work, one that would include narration of some sort,
similar to what she intended for her large percussion suite Horizons.11 Symphonic
Movement II (1941) would remain her last orchestral piece.
In the last years of her life Beyer became increasingly frustrated over her
inability to generate interest in her orchestral work, and on June 4, 1941, she
exasperatedly wrote to Cowell, “I ought to hear at least one work once.” Sadly,
she never did. On March 1, 2014, during the final stages of writing this book, I
drove forty-five minutes from my home in Santa Cruz, California, with a small
group of musician friends, to hear conductor John Kennedy give the world pre-
miere of Beyer’s Symphonic Movement I (1939) with the Santa Clara University
Orchestra. As I listened to this piece that had been silent for seventy-five years,
with the manuscript in hand, I wondered what Beyer might have learned about
writing for orchestra, had she had the opportunity to hear some of these works
performed during her lifetime.
 9 Status Quo

one of be yer’s most ambitious projec ts was a plan for

an opera called Status Quo, for which she decided to apply for a Guggenheim
Foundation Fellowship in the summer of 1937.1 Composers who won Guggen-
heim awards between the fellowship’s establishment in 1925 and the year Bey-
er’s proposal was submitted in 1938 included Aaron Copland (1925), Leopold
Damrosch Mannes (1926), Roger Sessions (1926 and 1927), Roy Harris (1927
and 1928), Quincy Porter and Randall Thompson (both 1929 and 1930), Ruth
Crawford (1930), Otto Luening (1930 and 1931), Henry Cowell (1931), George
Antheil (1932 and 1933), Adolph Weiss (1932), William Grant Still (1934, 1935,
and 1938), Dante Fiorillo (1935, 1936, 1937, and 1938), Walter Piston (1935),
Ross Lee Finney (1937), Paul Creston (1938 and 1939), David Diamond (1938),
and Carlos Chávez (1938).2 The most frequently supported person in this group
is hardly a household name today: Dante Fiorillo, a self-taught composer and
undistinguished cellist, had established ties to both the Yaddo artist retreat and
Black Mountain College. Ruth Crawford was the only woman composer awarded
a grant during this early period (though it is also not known how many women
besides Beyer applied). During the first thirty years of the fellowship’s existence,
it was awarded to only two other women composers: Louise Talma (1946) and
Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1955). Age as well as gender may have been a factor in 69
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Status Quo

70 Beyer’s rejection: a file card documenting her proposal concluded unceremoni-

ously: “At age 50 she doesn’t appear to be a good risk as a composer.” Indeed, of
the twenty-seven composers awarded Guggenheim Fellowship grants between
1925 and 1938, only a handful were over forty: Adolph Weiss (41), Walter Piston
(41), and William Grant Still (43 during his third Guggenheim year); the oldest
fellow in the early group was Theodore J. Stearns, at age 46.
In October 1937 Beyer asked Koussevitzky and several composers to act as a
reference for her proposal.3 She sent Koussevitzky an annotated resume, which,
remarkably, has remained the sole source for certain details about her life. The
“work plan” she provided Koussevitzky, basically a draft of the Guggenheim proj-
ect proposal itself, outlined a four-act, twelve-scene opera “that will be modern
both in theme and musical form,” she explained.4 She wished to spend a year on the
composition, “which, in combination with various forms of pantomimes, dances, as
well as speech, exclamations, songs, would seem to express our modern life.” She
explained her aims: “The traditional themes of the opera are outworn and of little
significance for our time. Likewise the musical form of the opera, which related
itself to these older themes, is quite inadequate for the musical consciousness of
our present world.” (Indeed, just a few years earlier, on February 20, 1934, Virgil
Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s experimental Four Saints in Three Acts opened on
Broadway, challenging the “outworn” forms of both opera and musical theater.)
In an undated letter (probably 1938) Beyer wrote to Harrison Kerr excitedly of
her work on the opera: “I am living a fast life here, I tell you, working like hell; the
music for my Status Quo comes out well, I am almost crazy from all the melodies
swirling around in my head, sticky ones too, people will be surprised what I can
do!” In August 1938 Beyer announced to Grainger: “I have finished my Status
Quo, a pageant to music . . ., but I have only finished a short-hand score. The real
copying work has to start in now.”5 Beyer submitted her Guggenheim application
in late 1938; her proposal was rejected in early 1939.6 At present, a completed,
even “short-hand score” of Status Quo has not been found.
Instead, we have only Beyer’s detailed description of the opera and two sec-
tions of music that were intended to be part of it. Both pieces were apparently
completed in or around 1938: Music of the Spheres, a “movement for three electri-
cal instruments”; and Dance, for full orchestra, the title page of which was labeled
Status Quo, Part of Act IV: Geneva. Though Status Quo was never fully realized, and
none of it was ever performed—except for Music of Spheres, discussed separately
below—it is worth considering in some detail, given that Beyer provides us with
considerable information about her aesthetic intentions and also because Beyer’s
Guggenheim evaluations, written by prominent people who were asked to assess
her proposal, contain candid and widely varying responses regarding her talent
and her personality. Finally, given that Beyer intended the work to culminate in
“the essence of music, derived from all existing systems,” it might have consti-
tuted, had it been supported, a Gesamtkunstwerk extravaganza in a class with other
pioneering works of musical theater written during the mid-twentieth century.
An eyewitness confirms that the ideas in Status Quo were of significant impor-
tance to Beyer, perhaps expressing many of the socialist and populist ideas prolif-
erating in Sunnyside during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Composer Ray Green,
who visited Beyer in her Jane Street apartment at the time she was planning the
opera, later recalled:
From her description of the piece it was political in motivation and she was quite vehement
by what she thought of as the political injustice of the period in which she was living. She
was very indignant about the ‘status quo’ as she talked to me. My impression of her was
that she was a person passionately devoted to her convictions.7

In her Guggenheim proposal Beyer explained that she wished for the opera to
be significant to the “modern age” and to the “ideas and interests that are vital in
our present world.” Not only the ideas but the music would be relevant to Bey-
er’s time: “I shall also be able to recall various historical music systems and give
them their significant placing in the evolution of our social life.” The four acts,
taking place in “the present,” would have the following settings: Act I: U.S.A.;
Act II: The Kremlin; Act III: Rome-Berlin; Act IV: Geneva. In her synopsis of
the opera, Beyer described background screen projections (“picturing star sys-
tems, our globe, different continents . . .”), music (“all existing musical systems
according to stage and screen”), and the broad events of the individual scenes.
It is clear from the following summary that Beyer had not planned the later acts
in much detail at the time of her Guggenheim application. The practical depic-
tion of rapidly juxtaposed places—jumping from Schenectady, New York, to the
North Pole, for example—is hard to imagine in performance. Beyer’s inclusion
of the fascist rallies in Nuremberg in Act III is notable, as is her apparent utopian
belief in the neutrality of Switzerland in Act IV.
ACT I: U.S.A.
Scene 1: America: New York. Pair, eastern type, in subway discussion world affairs, their
point of view.
Screen: Stars, globe, America, U.S.A., airoplanes [sic], steamers, skyscrapers, Broadway,
Harlem, Chinatown, Ghetto . . .
Music: energetic, pulsating, syncopated, cross rhythms, dissonant counterpoint,
polyphonic.
Scene 2: Pair, western intellectuals, going across country in plane: Schenectedy [sic], 71
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Status Quo

72 Washington D.C., New Deal, Mt. Wilson Observatory, San Francisco, Bay Bridge,
shipping, strike, across Northpole
Screen: Schenectedy [sic], Washington, Lobby, Lobbyists, Northpole: icebergs, icefields,
snow wastes . . .
Music: flowing, throbbing, of exultation, exuberance, American folktunes, according to
screen, across Northpole just primitive percussion beats.
Scene 3: England: Abdication of Edward VIII, coronation pageant
Screen: accordingly
Music: Neoclassical, conventional
Scene 4: France:
Screen: accordingly
Music: French, Debussy, 6-tone scales

ACT II: The Kremlin

Scene 1: Russia: Moscow, all their new achievements; Syberia [sic]
Screen: Youth, factories, nurseries, schools, artprojects, collective farms
Music: Marches, marching songs. . . .
Scene 2: China being aggressed
Screen: accordingly
Music: oriental, using original records possibly
Scene 3: India-Africa being ruled
Screen: accordingly
Music: Hindu-African
Scene 4: Ireland
Screen: the isle, scenery . . .
Music: Gaelic, bagpipes, jigs, reels

ACT III: Rome–Berlin

Scene 1: Europe continental, Germany
Screen: Nürnberg Festival
Music: Folktunes, marches, conventional, modern
Scene 2: Italy
Screen: Rome fascist rally
Music: marches . . .
Scene 3: Spain
Screen: accordingly
Music: Spanish

ACT IV: Geneva

Scene 1: Geneva
Screen: Switzerland, peaks of eternal snow, Wilhelm Tell [?] flags and representatives of
all countries
Music: essence of music, derived from all existing systems.
Music of the Spheres, title page; manuscript held in the Music Division, New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts.

The two existing pieces of music from the opera include Dance for full orches-
tra and Music of the Spheres. Music of the Spheres, the “movement for three electrical
instruments,” appears to be a kind of prelude to the opening scene of Status Quo.
The manuscript is dated July 1938, and Beyer estimates the piece to last about five
minutes. The “three electrical instruments” are accompanied by a triangle that
occasionally plays a short-long part throughout. What Beyer meant by “electri-
cal” in 1938 is unclear. In the Dance section of Act IV, she writes for what appears
to be electric cello (“El. Cello”).
A short section of music written on the second page of Music of the Spheres
seems to have been intended as an introduction to that piece. What appears to be
an eleven-bar timpani pulse joined by a lion’s roar is labeled “Beginning of Status
Quo, Screen: Star systems.” Immediately following is a trill played by an “electrical
instrument,” with the note “leading into Music of the Spheres.” The triangle takes
over the trilled minor second, and then the three sliding instruments enter one 73
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Status Quo

74 by one. The lowest voice oscillates between F and E in bass clef, the middle part
plays long-held notes, and the top part is very high whole notes. A note in the
score instructs “all intervals are to be taken glissando as subtle as possible.” The
piece starts very slowly (quarter note equals 52) and very quietly (ppp), but, as in
much of Beyer’s music, a gradual arch form occurs over time. The opening dynamic
and tempo are a “starting point, gradually increasing speed and dynamics”; about
halfway through the piece the tempo has reached a whole note equaling 52 (four
times as fast as the opening), and she indicates “gradually decreasing speed and
dynamics back to the staring point” (the whole piece is marked “Lento-Moderato-
Lento”). The piece dramatically dies away with a marking of “morendo.”
Beyer included in her Guggenheim application a typescript of an ambitiously
cosmic introductory statement meant to be read by “Voice (Announcer)”:
Presently we will hear Music of the Spheres, see star systems happenings of the Universe,
to remind us of eternal truth, beauty, infinity. We will see our earth, floods, vegetation,
ancient animals, and some of our ancestors.
On the stage two primitive creatures roam around in darkness. We hear a cry, a wail
stops in response: sound and rhythm are herewith given. And in this introduction we will
witness the development of these two elements into music from the very primitive to the
complicated of our day.
When arrived at the use of most complex rhythm, melody, harmony, we find ourselves
in America, the U.S.A. And we better be prepared, for here we will experience cause and
effect of complex music: life at a Sturm and Drang period: stress, uncertainty, the restless-
ness of 1938/1939. After this we will travel to other islands, continents, other climates,
surroundings, circumstances and be anxious to find out, what other influences may do to
music, into what our two elements, sound and rhythm have developed there.
We will find, that everywhere, music is closely related to life and that there are developed
in music various systems—some thousands of years old. And although this or that system
of music from other countries is unfamiliar to us, we must be tolerant and interested, as we
are in the lives of these different peoples, and then we will experience, that these strange
sounds have a certain beauty. The understanding and joy of it will increase to the degree
of our interest in it.
In the last set, just before having another glimpse of eternity, people from all these
countries will unite in a dance. Tolerance and cooperation will be the motives. The music to
this dance is an attempt to unite features of different music systems to a rather substantial
harmonious whole.
And with this accomplished we will join the spheres once more.8

To some degree, ideas in this introduction, and in Status Quo in general, echo
cosmic and poetic ideas Beyer explored in many of her song texts (see Appendix
E), ideas she also expressed in a letter to Alvin Johnson on August 30, 1936: “Our
music could not possibly be subjective. The vast stretches of our land, many-fold
races, vast cities, the rhythm, pulse of our life must ultimately bring an objective,
synthetic style about, to be authentic American music.” In her ambitious introduc-
tion to Status Quo, Beyer meshed ideas from astronomy, evolution, geopolitics, and
utopianism, and thereby allowed her imagination to cast a wide net for themes to
stream through her opera. Her reference to the “stress, uncertainty, the restless-
ness” of the time allude to growing anxiety about the coming war in Europe.
Beyer’s Dance for full orchestra, labeled Part of Act IV: Geneva, might have
been intended as the final section of the opera, as the final section of Dance leads
back to Music of the Spheres, which, as is indicated by the narration above, would
appear to close the work in Beyer’s preferred arch form. Dance is preceded by one
page of music in several short sections that are unclear in their numbering and
their geographical meaning, but clear in the way she intended instrumentation
to depict cultural references:
10. Pair: France [a 7-bar section for musette and piano]
11. Pair: England [a 7-bar section for bagpipe and piano]
12. Pair: America [a 7-bar section for “El. cello” and piano and/or trombones]

This is followed by a short section marked “Dance—Adjustment,” which continues

with “El. cello,” piano and trombone, and then moves to violin and viola, piano,
and trombone. Similar to the “pairs” section, these short passages feature simple
melodies. Then the Dance movement begins, for full orchestra, including piccolo,
saxophone, tuba in F, contrabassoon, piano, percussion (tambourine, cymbal, snare
drum, bass drum, and timpani in D), and a muted solo trumpet. After a 210-mea-
sure exploration of this rich range of orchestral color, the reprise of Music of the
Spheres is introduced by the pulsing piano, which continues with the triangle as
an ominous accompaniment to the three sliding “electric instruments.” Music
of the Spheres was composed one year before John Cage’s historically celebrated
Imaginary Landscapes #1 (1939), which similarly exploited the possibilities of elec-
tric glissandi, coupled with sparse percussion and muted piano accompaniment.
Beyer’s Guggenheim application file included a number of written evalua-
tions of her proposal by experts in the field.9 They are contradictory in that some
praise her talent while others refuse to endorse her operatic ambitions. (Kous-
sevitzky’s rejection of her Symphonic Suite in connection with her Guggenheim
application has been mentioned elsewhere.) Perhaps most significant is the rec-
ommendation written by (an incarcerated) Henry Cowell, given the depth and
complexity of their relationship. He called her a “great natural talent . . . with
a flare for whimsical and original ideas.” He spoke of her “fine technique” and
75
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Status Quo

76 “good workmanship.” Still, his report recommended Gerald Strang for a Gug-
genheim instead of Beyer. Strang, in turn, wrote an assessment of Beyer, first
praising and then damning his competitor for the award: “While her music shows
a good deal of originality I find it diffuse and intellectual. I am not convinced
that it has much musical meaning. Hence I very much doubt her ability to carry
out this project in such a way as to produce a significant contribution to musical
literature.” Other assessments were varyingly positive, negative, thoughtful, and
dismissive. Wallingford Riegger found the proposal for Status Quo suggestive of
National Geographic magazine, but in the end he determined “it would be a wor-
thy thing for the Foundation to sponsor.” Marion Bauer admitted she did not
know much of Beyer’s work but said that what she had seen of it, she had found
“interesting.” Bauer mentioned that her friend Ruth Crawford “always spoke of
her as having unusual talent.” Harry Overstreet “unhesitatingly” recommended
Beyer—“unquestionably a first-rater.” Ashley Pettis, too, felt Beyer was “a musi-
cian of excellent training and background” and added: “Her outstanding charac-
teristics are her interest in musical innovation and her untrammeled, adventurous
spirit.” He wholeheartedly endorsed her proposal.
Alvin Johnson, on the other hand, with whom Beyer had much contact on
Cowell’s behalf during this time, wrote: “I do not think she has either the intel-
lectual power or the command of her art to do anything with the theme she pro-
poses.” Roy Harris pompously asserted: “To create new operatic idioms is a life
work requiring great talent, resourcefulness and experience with the orchestra,
the voice (as solo and chorus) and experience with music in relation to the the-
atre.” He concluded: “Such equipment I cannot honestly say that I believe Miss
Beyer to be possessed of.” (Apparently Beyer had her own doubts about Harris’s
“equipment”; on January 19, 1941, she wrote to Cowell: “Just listened to Roy
Harris 3. Symphony, but am not convinced. What is he aiming at? The effects
of Finlandia?”) On the other hand, Ruth Hannas, a professor of composition at
the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, wrote of Beyer’s “creative gift,”
which she considered “authentic in its medium of expression.”10
Most surprising in this collection is a letter from Erdix Winslow Capen,
Bertha Reynolds’s first cousin, who had known Beyer and her music since at
least 1932, when he visited Sunnyside and Beyer played her music for him. They
remained friends. Capen worked as an art instructor and a theater designer, and
he wrote a passionate endorsement for Beyer’s proposal, quoted in full below:
I have known the candidate Miss Beyer for a number of years. Probably for about seven.
Through visits to New York and through mutual acquaintances I have kept in touch with her
and her work. We have corresponded for several years at irregular intervals. I have been
 interested in her work as something rare and unique, since she first explained her beliefs
and demonstrated her compositions to me. I think that she has unusual ability and a very
rare and interesting way of looking at things which is apparent in her work. She seems to
be way ahead of most of her contemporaries in her thoughts of music and its place in the
world. She has a highly individual method of composition and thinking which make her
work valuable to music and especially towards opera in which direction her thought seems
at present to be turning. I am not a musician myself but am a theatre artist and technician
and from such a viewpoint her music seems to have a more alive quality for the theatre
than any that I have known. An opera by her should be a departure for the good, from any
existing forms, judging from her past work, still without being created only in the spirit of
being different. The peculiarities of her work don’t spring from any desire to be different
but from a truly different feeling and approach. I feel certain that given the wherewithal
and the chance to work it out she will rise to heights that she has thus far been unable to
reach because of lack of funds to tend to her needs while she worked. I have read the plan
she has submitted. My reaction to it from her description and knowing her, is that it is a
very fine idea and very good theatre and so few things labeled opera seem to have that.
It has the stamp of the living on it rather than the outmoded form of a past century which
is so seldom completely satisfactory at present. She seems to have hit on a vital plan for
opera which is worth trying for its possibilities of future development as well as possibly
releasing a new talent and giving added creative chance to a woman who has been held
under too long for her own good. She has a gift for unceasing labour. She has more capac-
ity for hard work than anyone else who has crossed my path so far. In spite of that she is
not an ‘ivory tower’ sort of person and her work is very much in the present in thought and
expression. I am thoroughly convinced from what I have heard of her work that she is as
near a genius as I am ever likely to meet up with. In case you feel that I have been blow-
ing her horn too consistently I want to say that everything I have said I firmly believe to be
true. I have complete faith in her abilities as a composer and in the far reaching influence
of her work. I wouldn’t care to have her know that I think as highly of her work as I do but
she knows that I have plenty of faith in her abilities.

This generous assessment of Beyer’s creative potential from someone outside

the modernist musical establishment is astounding in its detail and dedication,
and perhaps is a testimony to how devoted Beyer’s Sunnyside friends remained
to her throughout her life. Capen’s compliments contrast starkly with the deri-
sion of a privileged composer like Roy Harris, who claimed that Beyer had no
experience with the orchestra, voice, or theater, even though he would not have
had any authority to make such an assumption.
It is worth pointing out that two of the three women who wrote letters for
Beyer gave her the benefit of the doubt (Ruth Hannas: “I am not positive she
understands the orchestra; perhaps the orchestra does not understand her”) and
acknowledged how difficult it was for women to succeed in the field of compo- 77
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Status Quo

78 sition (Marion Bauer: “I know that she has had a terrific struggle and very little
opportunity to work out the ideas she has, which demand freedom from worry
and plenty of time”). It is also conspicuous that several suggested that she was
psychologically unsound in some way (Alvin Johnson: “Both Miss Beyer and her
project are a little mad”), or to be avoided at all costs (Mrs. David Mannes: “We
wish to emphatically state that we would not think of endorsing the operatic plans
Miss Beyer has submitted”). It is unclear why Johnson and Mrs. Mannes were so
vehemently negative, given that some prominent people offered more moderate
or even overtly supportive views of Beyer’s promise as a composer. Though critical
of her ability, Copland generously—though perhaps also unhelpfully—pointed
out that she was an “honest soul with serious musical pretensions.” Cowell himself
provided the most profound conclusion of them all—“her whimsy and original-
ity really amount to genius”—even though, in the end, he recommended a male
contemporary over Beyer.
Status Quo is lost to us and apparently became lost to Beyer after her Gug-
genheim proposal was rejected.11 We can only imagine, based on a few fragments
of her global, meta-musical vision, what this work might have become, had it been
supported.
 10 Beyer’s Final Years,
1940–44

the summer of 1940, which coincided with Cowell’s release

from prison, was busy for Beyer. She continued working on Cowell’s behalf and
also visited him in White Plains after he had settled at the Graingers’ house.1 She
taught piano at a number of schools and private homes around the greater New
York area, and the families for whom she taught were central to her social life.
She spent much of July in Grant City, Staten Island, house-sitting for the family
of her gifted ten-year-old piano student Roland Leitner, with whom she was par-
ticularly close and to whom she dedicated one of her last works, the Sonatina in
C, in 1943. While his family was away she watered their plants, raked leaves, and
took care of Roland’s pets.2 That July, for her birthday, Roland gave Beyer $10
and a poem he had written himself; he was particularly eager for her to join the
family on their vacation to the Catskills. She would sometimes spend the night
at their house after Roland and his brother’s piano lessons. (Around this time
she also was close to a family for whom she taught piano lessons in Harrington
Park, New Jersey, where she also occasionally spent the night after lessons.) After
house-sitting for the Leitners, she spent much of August with friends, who seem
to have been parents of a young piano student of Beyer’s named Herbert, in the
seaside town of West Belmar, New Jersey. Beyer, who frequently wrote in her let-
ters about how much she loved to swim, reported to Cowell that “the ocean baths 79
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Beyer’s Final Years

80 have strengthened me and made me hungry . . . I eat about 10 times as much as I
used to!”3 During the months while Beyer was away, Cowell occasionally visited
New York on business and stayed at her apartment, which they apparently con-
sidered a shared office space.
After returning from her holiday at the seaside, Beyer’s thoughts returned
to Cowell and their relationship. From a Hudson River pier near her Jane Street
apartment, on August 24, 1940, Beyer wrote Cowell an emotional and revealing
letter that freely mixed personal issues with compositional ones:
Perhaps it will be better to be absolutely frank with you in the case of my friends and rela-
tives . . . Now they have all expected that you will marry me as soon as you are able. Having
said that you are not the marrying kind, they concluded that you are a homo-sexual. . . . One
day [Beyer’s friend; name unclear] surprised me by stating: “Henry and his friends want to
get rid of you, mark my word, and when they are ready for it, they will offer you something
for the work you have done.” I said: “Ausgeschlossen” [out of the question], and if they
would, I would certainly not accept it, not a penny! . . . After telling you all this, you might
not care to meet any of the bunch, I couldn’t blame you. [Beyer’s friends: Rie and Herbert
Chandière?] said one day, before you were free, about marriage. I answered: Who wants to
marry an old sick woman? They said, you are neither old nor sick, in decent circumstances
you will soon be alright again, such devotion of yours counts. . . .
It is still strangely exciting to meet you and to find over and over again how much we
have in common! I am not entirely free yet and myself at these meetings, I don’t know what
I may be allowed to do and what not! May friends touch each other?

Though only partially excerpted here, this particular letter, while typical in its
tone, is remarkable in several respects. Beyer had admitted her feelings for Cowell
quite openly years before, yet her uncertainty about his affection lingered. This
letter suggests how charmed she still was by Cowell, to what degree she might
have been under pressure from family and friends to marry the man to whom
she had been so devoted. It also suggests that her friends saw her more clearly
than Cowell did. Yet it is uncertain how much of her belief in their relationship
was based on a shared reality. It is equally unclear whether Cowell had at one
time truthfully encouraged Beyer to believe in a mutual romantic attachment, or
whether he was exploiting her devotion, using her for his own professional sur-
vival during his prison years. It is clear, however, that he did not feel obligated to
help promote her music, neither in her last years, nor after her death.
From the moment he was released in the summer of 1940 Cowell began
distancing himself from Beyer. These efforts might have been intensified due
to pressure from his stepmother, Olive, who had never felt that Beyer could be
considered a suitable match for Cowell. His attempts to sever his connections to
Beyer might also have increased because he began to envision a partnership with
Sidney Robertson, ethnographer and supervisor of the California Folk Music
Project, with whom he had developed a deeper friendship during his prison years.
Later, Robertson indirectly degraded the work Beyer did for Cowell by describing
him (and Robertson’s own working relationship with him) in this way: “People
say, ‘[Sidney,] you have always done so much for Henry, [but] I have never really
believed this, because I never felt that Henry was a person for whom one could
do very much.” Perhaps with Beyer in mind, Robertson added: “Practical work,
yes, typing letters, yes, running around doing errands yes, but he had a kind of
force in himself.”4
By fall 1940, Cowell actively sought out eligible women for possible mar-
riage.5 Around this time he included Beyer in a list of composers in a Modern
Music article titled “Drums Along the Pacific,” but he cryptically referred to her
as “J. M. Beyer, formerly of New York,” to which she responded bewilderedly,
“Does it mean now of Staten Island, Harrington Park, and Brooklyn?”6 Despite
his growing indifference, she continued to write about work she was doing for
him—negotiating performances with a long list of prominent conductors, record-
ings, and lecture opportunities. Between summer and fall 1940, Cowell seems to
have dismissed any intention of helping Beyer make her work known; instead,
he passed on performance and recording opportunities to John Cage, Lou Har-
rison, and William Russell. At the end of the year he complained to his parents
and expressed anguish about his attempts to sever the ties:
I have been having trouble in my relationship with Hanna Beyer. I had to tell her bluntly
that I would never be in love with her. . . . It is very hard to withdraw from her smoothly and
slowly, which I have been trying to do, as I sense that there is no future to this relationship
(she cannot be a friend) and so it may have to come to an open and definite break. I don’t
wish this, and am still trying to avoid it.7

The Beyer-Cowell correspondence reveals a vast gulf between how each of

them viewed the nature of their relationship. Beyer continued to inform Cowell
about day-to-day occurrences, disregarding his desire to “withdraw smoothly
and slowly.” Perhaps his attempt was too slow for her to really take notice. On
September 28, 1940, Beyer announced to Cowell that she had received a sum-
mons from the director of music at the Board of Education: “Kindly report to the
Principal of P.S. 156, Brooklyn, Mr. Israel Goldfarb, Sutter Ave. and Crafton Str.,
regarding the establishment of an after-school piano class.” (A day later, Reynolds
noted: “Johanna took course and is eligible for piano teaching in public schools.”)
On October 15 Beyer wrote to Cowell: “I’ve just landed the loveliest job!” In
81
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Beyer’s Final Years

82 December, she invited him for Christmas goose at her niece’s house, apparently
still in denial about his intention to end the friendship.
In early January 1941 Cowell visited Beyer at her home and proposed an
arrangement in which he would pay her for work she had done for him in the
past, so as to eliminate a situation in which he owed her something. Beyer was
opposed to the idea, and after his visit she wrote a contradictory letter that mixed
deep feelings with level-headedness, personal and compositional details, and a
touching kind of optimism regarding the future of both her music and their rela-
tionship: “I wanted to close up a certain chapter, but before daring so, I wanted
to make sure, that nothing was left undone, and that even the smallest item was
clear between us.” She added:
I wrote a movement for winds this afternoon before you came and I was naturally very happy
about the [Hans] Kindler letter for both of us. And it seems to me, for me the worst is over:
the thought that nobody will ever play my works. I wanted to show you my four movements
for strings today, and I have been planning all sorts of works in my mind which I intent [sic]
to work on this summer.8

In early 1941 conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra Hans Kindler had
indicated that he was interested in performing Beyer’s Symphonic Movement I
(1939) and a work of Cowell’s, but the performances never took place.9 A few
days later, she wrote to Cowell:
I shall give you a few facts today. The dissonant note on which you closed our last experi-
ence calls forth these facts: I am sick in bed, bleeding. My condition is worse than we both
have been wanting to believe. I have been trying frantically to keep out of the hospital. The
city would not help me, because they accuse me of having worked for you while I should
have stayed in bed and taken care of my health.10

Beyer’s illness, which became acute in 1941, is difficult to address from such
a historical distance. According to Bertha Reynolds, Beyer received a diagnosis of
multiple sclerosis in June of that year, and Reynolds later believed that to be the
cause of her death.11 But according to Beyer’s death certificate, she had received
a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis as early as 1938. In 1936 Beyer men-
tioned to Cowell that she had had cancer; two years earlier, Reynolds noted in her
diary that Beyer was being treated for varicose veins. Lacking medical records,
we can only speculate about whether these different diagnoses were accurate, let
alone related, and about what caused her to suffer so much physical pain and dete-
rioration during her final three years. Her letters, and Reynolds’s diary, however,
clearly document a severe affliction that eventually prevented her from taking
care of herself.
 In the letter excerpted above, though, Beyer moved beyond her physical
condition and went on to describe the circumstances of several job offers, one
of which required her to play the piano extensively, which she was incapable of
doing, since she had been copying parts for Cowell for months instead of prac-
ticing. (It is likely that her difficulty in playing the piano at this time also was
related to the onset of more serious symptoms stemming from her disease.) She
then turned again to her feelings for him, claiming that her “love is not the pos-
sessive kind.” Taking on an increasingly bitter tone, she added: “It is so fortunate
that just at this lowest point things begin to happen with my works. It seems to
be God’s help, he might believe in my work as composer, as human being, as do
the friends who know me. I should think that you would be happy too to think
that somebody worthwhile had come into your life.”12 (Around this time, Beyer
also bizarrely told Cowell that, as a child, she had foreseen in a dream the details
of the two world wars.) During the following weeks she continued to implore
him to escort her to various events (a screening of the Disney film Fantasia; a
Martha Graham performance; various recitals).13 She learned that her recording
of Cowell’s Tocanta was being abandoned.
A few weeks later, Cowell wrote Beyer a letter that emphatically reempha-
sized his proposed business arrangement, one in which his prior method of “tak-
ing care of the office overhead [was] to discontinue”—including her Jane Street
telephone.14 He suggested two ways of streamlining their professional contact.
First, he would pay her union rates for the copying she had done of his compo-
sitions (Tocanta, Anthropos, others) and thereby would carry no further financial
obligation to her. Second, he suggested that they split all fees for any lectures,
performances, or recordings that resulted directly from her activity. In a detached
yet reasonable manner, he expressed concern about her financial situation. Upon
his insistence, on February 9, Beyer reluctantly sent Cowell a “bill” listing the
scores she had copied for him: 145 pages at the union rate of forty cents a page.
Cowell’s financial records show that he sent her a check for $12.50 in January
1941—half the fee for a lecture she arranged for him at Columbia University—
and another check for $58 in February, for music copying.15
In the same letter, he addressed the lingering emotional situation between
them: “I am not in love with you, and cannot feel that a marriage between us
would prove a happy one.” He explained that he wanted to limit his social contact
with Beyer, since he wished to meet eligible women at parties and concerts, and
felt that Beyer would jeopardize his reputation if he were to be seen with her in
public. He announced that he would no longer come to her apartment, “since I
can no longer consider it as my place of business as well as yours.” He insisted, “I 83
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Beyer’s Final Years

84 would do anything I could to avoid hurting you, but there is no use avoiding the
truth, and I am deeply sorry that the truth is painful.” On January 15, the same day
Beyer received this letter, her increasingly existential desperation hit a new low:
May I beg you today, to reconsider our friendship. To forget, what has happened so far, and
begin anew, entirely anew. There is a fierce fight within me and it threatens to wreck my
body and mind completely. I am too weak to be able to check it. Bertha is worried about
me, she asked me, would I go to a hospital if she finds one for me, that was last weekend.
Since then, things have grown worse again. I told Bertha that I would fight desperately
to be able to hold through till summer when pupils stop anyway, that, if I stop now, I will
loose [sic] my chance to ever make a living again. Henry, please don’t be hard now, when
I am so weakened.16

A few weeks later Cowell wrote to Robertson about his fifty-percent arrange-
ment with Beyer. He downplayed—or failed to notice—Beyer’s emotional appeals:
“Hanna has been writing me, but the tone of the letters is a great deal more sen-
sible, and I think it may come thru with no entire unfriendly break.” But he added:
“I am fully prepared to break entirely if this half and half won’t work.”17
Despite Cowell’s threats to abandon their friendship completely, Beyer con-
tinued to demonstrate compassion toward him: “Sorry you have to work so hard,”
she wrote, “[I] wish we had a society where a man with your qualities were provided
for so he could serve his art, and so with continuity” (at the same time she admit-
ted “I seem to be sinking lower each week, am in bad shape . . . but I managed to
finish the score for Stokowski”).18 Just a few days before Cowell had announced
to Roberston his willingness to “break entirely,” on January 21, 1941, Beyer said
that she was going to stay with her current doctor until “about June” and then
would submit herself to a thorough examination and “perhaps to hospital.” In
the same letter, Beyer described her “boundless” happiness at seeing a Martha
Graham performance of the recent works El Penitente and Letter to the World, a
performance at which she would have seen the young Merce Cunningham dance
(it is unclear if Cowell attended the recital with her, or just provided tickets).19 A
day later, Bertha Reynolds intervened on Beyer’s behalf, with a letter to Cowell:
The fact that it is my profession to listen to people in trouble and to keep confidences has
resulted in my knowing more about [Johanna’s] affairs than anyone else probably. . . . I
have been worried about her health and yet she is undoubtedly right that to stop now for
hospital care would probably destroy the slender chance she has of building up a living in
teaching. Undoubtedly she has less than she needs in food and warmth and rest from heavy
physical work. At one time I was able to help her but am now able to earn only enough to
meet my own obligations. I am afraid it would be difficult for her to get back on Home Relief
because of her resistance to answering some of their questions about the work she was
 doing for you at the time she dropped out. She has, therefore, no security as far as I can
see, except the chance she may have of earning. I hope that you will do all you can to put
opportunities in her way, and we must all desire earnestly that she may recover her health.20

In March, Beyer seemed resigned to her situation, telling Cowell “there is

not much hope for me, unless I give in, and rest completely and then it will be a
slow recovery, having waited so long to do something about it: I must undergo
an examination.” She realized she could no longer play a role in Cowell’s life:
“Therefore we have to face the facts and I must give up work for you.”21 A week
earlier, she told Cowell that a piece of hers had been rejected by a WPA concert
review board.22
At this time Beyer’s work still included both private students and group after-
school piano lessons, as she tried to continue working until the summer despite
her illness. On April 3, 1941, she outlined her weekly schedule for Cowell:
Tuesday: Harrington Park 1–9 (I may go sometimes earlier in spring)
Wednesday: Brooklyn 2–6 (I also leave earlier on sunny days and sit over there on the
shore road in the sun)
Thursday home (sitting in the sun on Ablingdon Square around noon)
Friday: Staten Island leaving at eleven in the morning.
Mondays I am also definitely home till 6.

As her illness rapidly progressed, she described the details to Cowell, who
no doubt would rather not have heard them: her increasing inability to leave
her apartment except for her teaching duties, her frequent inability to eat or to
rise from her bed, and her lack of strength to work on her music. She described
the condition graphically, and metaphorically: “My leg has become thinner and
shorter steadily, something radical has to be done. But what worries me more is
the piercing pains through my heart (caused by our friendship). These pains seem
to pierce right through to the spine and cause paralyzing of both legs at times.”23
The deterioration of her leg made it difficult for her to climb her Jane Street
apartment stairs, and her neighbors began to help her by bringing up her mail,
for example. She wrote: “You see, they were used to my ‘dancing’ up and down
and now I have to pull myself up with my arms and rest in between. I never see
them watching me, but they hear me.” She assured him: “All this sounds bad and
I shall not speak of it again. Perhaps the sun, the rest, and the double amount of
pills will help.”24
Cowell’s 1941 datebook contains a few brief references to Beyer. The first is
her name at the end of a “to-do” list, on Monday, March 10. The other is written
on March 24: “45 cents to Hanna.”25 In June 1941 he told Beyer that he believed
85
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Beyer’s Final Years

86 “that it is best for us to discontinue contact altogether.”26 He announced he would

return her “Indian record” (about which she had reminded him on many occa-
sions) and her copy of Maestoso. The destruction of ties was almost complete.
One day after Cowell made his final “break,” Beyer’s bitterness about his
indifference toward her music erupted in an uncharacteristically angry letter, one
that alluded to specific situations about which we have no further information:
Aggravations:
When I visited you in White Plains you showed me a letter by you to the League of Com-
posers, in which you recommended new composers to be played. In vain did I look for my
name—I did not say one word. You went to Yaddo, Rochester, WPA, Mahler—I had also works
in all these places—you never mentioned anything, I took it silent. There was a possibility
with Sevitzky. Did it ever occur to you to say a word for me? You may have, I don’t know,
you never mentioned anything. When I asked you about the American Music Festival, in a
strange way you said, no, you did not know anything about it, but it wasn’t a good festival
because Riegger was not on. That same evening Richard told me, that it was through your
recommendation that he was being played at the festival, that he was not even a member
of the League. . . . Then there was that New Music and also recording business. Once you
made a lot of fun about the lovely song I had written and that you would see to be one
of the jury and that I would win the prize because nobody else could write such a song.
Well, not so long ago you had the chance to make that come true, unfortunately somebody
informed me about it too late. Once you wrote about the originality, the bare beauty, humor,
wit, and what not in my new things, but when you presented me at the New School, I was
rather stunned by your remarks but instead of responding (not to speak of aggravation)
to your attitude, I tried to master the whole situation and to quiet down the commotion in
the audience. It was not only that one woman. Different people in the audience spoke to
me afterwards and Schillinger gave me some sound advice. . . . There was the big chance
for me with Stokowski. I wrote the work with enthusiasm and dedicated it to him. It is on
the score: To Leopold Stokowski and already in this version [at] the Philadelphia library.
The work has not been sent back nor have I heard a word and you tell me today casually, it
is put aside till next year. That would mean, I cannot do anything with it until then. I really
must have advice about it; please: where can I reach Stokowski directly? Or will you ask him
what I should do with that work? I surely have made a fool of myself with Mahler through
his Stokowski affair of which I wrote you in detail. As you remember, he said he could play
my work after the middle of June. However, so far, he has not asked for parts. He has here 3
works of mine: Symphonic Movements I and II and Symphonic opus 5. I am sure that if you
expressed interest directly to Mahler now, I might get a chance there. Above all, I ought to
hear at least one work once. With all these festivals and goings on and I belonging to two
composers organizations since years etc. etc. and having written over 100 works anyway,
6 symphonic works and no chance to hear one of them! Tell them some of my forefathers
fought in the Civil War of America, some are English [men?], and that I have alive native
 close Irish-English relatives walking around in Washington today. My own father lived for
a number of years in France and England, his [moving?] back to Germany was merely acci-
dental! Why do I mention this now? Perhaps because you brought out the 100 % American
once too often. All these percentages make me laugh!27

This remarkable letter shows Beyer finally allowing herself to feel exploited
and betrayed by Cowell: for his lack of advocacy, his silence about possible oppor-
tunities, his promotion of male colleagues, his chauvinism about her immigrant
status. She also clearly felt frustration about having done all the right things—help-
ing others, joining composers’ organizations, writing large amounts of music—
and having been met with nothing but indifference. Whereas her energy usually
emerged as enthusiasm and curiosity, here we witness a justifiably deep anger
full of “aggravations” about a kind of unspoken exclusion, one Cowell could have
altered easily by being an advocate rather than a gatekeeper.
The last available dated correspondence from Beyer to Cowell, written on
June 8, 1941, is a postcard about a check from the Kansas City Philharmonic
Orchestra. The immediacy of Beyer’s developing illness might have been a con-
venient way for Cowell to back away from her completely. On June 1, 1940,
Reynolds took Beyer to Bellevue Hospital for an exam. (The following day, Lou
Gehrig died, after his own battle with ALS.) On June 9, Reynolds wrote: “Johanna
told must have operation on her semi-paralyzed leg. No income. I wrote soc.
service at Bellevue about her.” Less than a month later, Cowell’s civil rights were
restored, and in September he and Robertson married. It is uncertain whether
Cowell and Beyer had any contact after that point. Robertson later claimed that
due to Cowell’s rejection, Beyer “had some sort of a breakdown, following which
she killed herself.”28
In the absence of further letters to Cowell after summer 1941, or any other
evidence aside from Beyer’s last dated compositions, we turn again to Bertha
Reynolds, who continued to document the painful reality of Beyer’s final years.
The following are her remaining diary entries mentioning “Johanna,” from Sep-
tember 1941 through January 1944:
22 September 1941: Johanna in Bellevue. No diag. yet.
28 September 1941: Visited Johanna at Bellevue. Being seen by big neurologist.
22 October 1941: Visited Johanna. Had injections of Vit. E.—nerve pain and soreness.
1 December 1941: Visited Johanna and taught her solitaire. Out on porch only mornings
when sun out. Has multiple sclerosis.
4 January 1942: Erdix for visit over Sun. before going back to army in 2 weeks. Doing
churches today and I meet him to go to Bellevue to see Johanna.
9 February 1942: Johanna has invitation to home of a teacher to whom she gave music 87
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Beyer’s Final Years

88 lessons. Home Relief will pay board. Bellevue s.w. [social work] hadn’t been able to
find any place.
16 July 1942: Called on Johanna, now moved to 1st floor apart. her colored helper made
the agency find.
23 August 1942: Called on Johanna. John Cage, young composer there.29
13 June 1943: Johanna in bad shape. Music Foundation pays for woman to stay with her
all day. She is on list for House of the Holy Comforter. Is directing packing and giving
away her things. Wanted to give me her terra cotta butter dish since I am the only one
of her friends who doesn’t have ice. Sec. of Musician’s Alliance (?) picked up all her
compositions to be cataloged—over 100.30
4 July 1943: Johanna went to House of Holy Comforter.
1 August 1943: Call on Johanna. Nurses short.
12 December 1943: Johanna in bed now.
11 January 1944: Johanna died yesterday. Had not seen her since Dec. 12.
16 January 1944: Wednesday forenoon went to Js funeral at House of the Holy Comforter.
3 nieces, Gertrude’s husband, and several friends there. Service in chapel, and
patients sat in wheelchairs.
 Conclusion
“May the Future Be
Kind to All Composers”

shortly before moving to the House of the Holy Com-

forter in June 1943, Beyer supervised the packing of her life’s work. These boxes
of manuscripts rested at the American Music Center in New York for over two
decades. Paul Price, a percussion instructor and assistant professor of music at
the University of Illinois in Urbana, was among a small number of people who
maintained interest in Beyer’s work after her death; in 1953 he attempted to gain
information about any heirs. He enlisted Vladimir Ussachevsky (then editor of
New Music Editions), who, after consulting with Cowell, provided no informa-
tion.1 In 1961 Price conducted a performance of Beyer’s March for percussion
ensemble at the Manhattan School of Music.2 Rosario Mazzeo continued to pro-
gram her Three Songs for Soprano and Clarinet with his Crown Chamber Play-
ers between 1966 and 1976. Around 1969 John Cage seems to have considered
including an excerpt from one of Beyer’s percussion works in his book Notations.3
In summer 1965 a young Charles Amirkhanian explored the holdings of
the American Music Center, and discovered Beyer’s “iconoclastic scores . . . lan-
guishing in obscurity.”4 A few years later, Peter Garland published the score of
Music of the Spheres, without commentary, in Soundings 7–8 (1973), and Beyer’s
Three Movements for Percussion appeared in Soundings 10 (1976). Subsequently,
a number of composers and musicians, including Garland, Michael Byron, Gor- 89
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Conclusion

90 don Mumma, Thomas Siwe, and Larry Polansky, began to express curiosity about
this mysterious, pioneering figure. In August 1977 Music of the Spheres and Three
Movements for Percussion were performed at the Cabrillo Music Festival (Santa
Cruz, California) on a program called “Only the Lonely: Music of the Experimen-
tal Tradition.” Music of the Spheres was recorded by the Electric Weasel Ensemble
and released as the opening track on the “first compilation disc of electronic music
by women composers” called New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, Women
in Electronic Music.5 Beyer might have been surprised to find herself in the com-
pany of Laurie Anderson, Annea Lockwood, and Pauline Oliveros.
Amirkhanian and New York Public Library librarian Karen Famera tried to
track down information about Beyer’s life, to no avail: the American Music Cen-
ter had no biographical records, and the Library of Congress held no records of
deposit from her in the copyright office. According to George Boziwick, long-
time curator of American Music and chief of the Music Division at the New York
Public Library, Beyer’s manuscripts remained at the American Music Center until
March of 1981, “when they were brought to the New York Public Library as part
of a long-standing agreement to transfer scores from the AMC to the NYPL 25
years (or more) after the death of their composer/members.”6 Between 1980 and
1984 clarinetist William Powell at California State University-Long Beach made
several attempts to acquire copies of Beyer’s clarinet works, writing, “I am very
interested in the prospect of bringing to light the works of this much neglected
American pioneer.”7
Not until 1988 did Beyer receive a concert devoted solely to her work. In
celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of her birth, John Kennedy, Charles
Wood and the ensemble Essential Music produced two landmark concerts in
November at the Greenwich House Music School on Barrow Street in New
York. (Kennedy had initially stumbled upon some of Beyer’s manuscripts while
researching the John J. Becker collection in the Americana Collection at the New
York Public Library and was encouraged by Nicolas Slonimsky, who agreed that
Beyer “certainly deserves a remembrance.”8) Kyle Gann wrote a statement for
the event: “Almost forgotten now, Johanna Magdalena Beyer was the only woman
involved in electronic music in 1930s New York. She worked with Henry Cowell,
and experimented with tempo modulation, rhythmic processes, and new electronic
instruments as early as or before male counterparts like John Cage.”9 For this
occasion Kennedy wrote his essay “‘Total Eclipse’: The Life of Johanna Magdalena
Beyer,” based on the small amounts of information available at the time. Making
a few understandable but speculative leaps due to a lack of counterevidence, and
based on the murky remembrances of John Cage, Sidney Robertson Cowell, Lou
Harrison, William Russell, and Otto Luening, Kennedy wrote that Beyer was
“painfully shy” and close to no one, and that she did not maintain ties to family
in Germany. Similarly, Amirkhanian’s essay—titled “Johanna Magdalena Beyer: A
Discovery Waiting to Happen”—reinforced assumptions that Beyer was “socially
awkward,” “unprepossessing,” possibly suffering from “terminal alcoholism,” and
that she had a “depressing personal existence,” a “lack of personal charisma,” and
“an apparently lonely existence.” As we have seen, Beyer was poor and suffered
physically and emotionally, but she was neither lonely nor alone.
The charge of neglect also loomed large in discussions of Beyer’s reception.
Reviewing one of the Essential Music concerts, John Rockwell wrote in the New
York Times: “Johanna Magdalena Beyer was a neglected member of the New York
classical-music avant-garde in the 1930’s—so neglected that she doesn’t even
appear in the New Grove Dictionary of American Music.”10 He continued: “To judge
from Thursday’s short program, Miss Beyer was something of an avant-garde dog-
matist, determined to work out earnest, radical compositional ideas without much
concern for just how the music might sound.” Still, very little accurate information
was available about Beyer, and scholarly publications, as if trapped in an eternal
game of “telephone,” continued to repeat and embellish the few fragments that
had been written about her. In 1993, for a example, a massive encyclopedic bio-
bibliography on women in music erroneously claimed that Beyer was an “opera
composer, electronic music composer, [and] musicologist.”11
Around this time, composer Larry Polansky, then a faculty member at the
Mills College Center for Contemporary Music and director of the Mills Col-
lege Contemporary Performance Ensemble, became interested in Beyer via his
research on Ruth Crawford Seeger. In 1994 Polansky announced the establish-
ment of the Frog Peak/Johanna Beyer Project, which enlisted volunteer editors—
mostly composers themselves—to edit and annotate Beyer manuscripts, which
were published (with facsimiles) and distributed in critical editions by Frog Peak
Music, the composers’ collective co-founded by Polansky and Jody Diamond.
The call for editors included these statements:
Naturally, we are interested in getting Beyer’s work out in performable form first, but we
are open to other ideas. We envision this project as a way for the Frog Peak Collective to
facilitate composers taking care of another composer’s work. The main idea is to make an
important composer’s work available for the first time. There will be no royalties involved
in the project, it is purely voluntary.12

In 1994, Bees was published as the first Frog Peak/Johanna Beyer Project edition;
in the following two years a consequential flurry of editorial work brought eight
more editions to press. In August 1995, Polansky delivered a paper titled “The 91
 j o h a n n a b e y e r  | Conclusion

92 Works of Johanna Magdalena Beyer” at a symposium on American women in

music at the University of Colorado at Boulder; a year later, Kennedy and Polan-
sky’s groundbreaking article—“‘Total Eclipse’: The Music of Johanna Magdalena
Beyer; An Introduction and Preliminary Annotated Checklist”—was published
in Musical Quarterly. Including a description of each manuscript held in the New
York Public Library and the Fleisher Collection, this fifty-nine-page article has
remained the single most valuable resource on Beyer for nearly twenty years.
Already the first paragraphs of the article point to the main themes of her recep-
tion: obscurity, mystery, enigma.
The twenty-one Frog Peak editions of Beyer’s music that are currently avail-
able have facilitated an increasing number of performances and recordings of
Beyer’s music that have in turn stimulated performers and scholars to take up the
challenge of studying and disseminating this almost-lost body of work.13 Some
of the recent explorers of this terrain include: pianists Sarah Cahill, Rory Cowal,
Judy Gordon, and Deborah Richards; conductor John McCaughey and the Astra
Chamber Music Society in Melbourne, Australia; musicians Robert Black, Dan-
iel Goode, and Margaret Lancaster; the Todd Meehan and Doug Perkins Duo;
the DownTown Ensemble, which mounted performances of Beyer’s songs and
clarinet suites during their 2004–05 season; musicologist Melissa de Graaf’s study
of the Composers’ Forum-Laboratory events; Marguerite Boland’s theoretical
analyses; John Spilker’s work on dissonant counterpoint; Ron Coulter’s perfor-
mances, recordings, and analyses of heretofore unknown percussion works; and
many more. In 1996 the Astra Choir, conducted by John McCaughey, gave two
evenings of Beyer’s music, including the premieres of three of Beyer’s five cho-
ral pieces as well as the sixty-year-old song Have Faith! When Astra released its
two-CD recording of fourteen of Beyer’s compositions in 2008, Art Lange wrote:
“The New World release of previously unknown music by Johanna Beyer (under
the title ‘Sticky Melodies’) provided ample evidence of her shamefully neglected
importance among the American Modernist composers of the 1930s.”14 Preparing
for the recording, Astra curated a concert at the Gasworks Theatre in Melbourne
on November 4, 2007, that included four of Beyer’s five WPA-era choral works.
Some of the other pieces on the program had not been heard for some seventy
years, following single performances.
Both Beyer the woman and Beyer the composer have been received and inter-
preted in a variety of ways that warrant further exploration and consideration.
Her biography itself is intriguing, and her compositions are important works of
their time, but the story of her absence from history following her death is fas-
cinating in and of itself, as is the revival and reassessment of her work in recent
decades. From her disappearance from the historical record to the many archival
sources, editions, performances, recordings, and works of scholarship that we have
available today, Beyer seems to have finally achieved the attention she so desper-
ately—and futilely—sought for her music during her lifetime. In the end we are
left with both a paucity of information and a wealth of riches from Beyer’s life: a
volume of personal and professional correspondence, a diary written by a friend,
a few legal documents, a census with misinformation, three photographs, a name
spelled wrong on a gravestone—and some fifty-six compositions that deserve to
be heard.

93
 appendix a: biogr aphic al data

Annotated Chronology of Selected Events in Johanna Beyer’s Life:

July 11, 1888: born in Leipzig, to Bernhard Hermann Beyer (b. 1843–d.?) and Maria
Richter Beyer (b. 1850-d. circa 1936). At the time, Leipzig’s state of Saxony had
recently been absorbed by the newly unified, Prussian-governed German Empire.
September 1, 1905–November 11, 1905: lives at Könneritzstraße 48, Leipzig.
November 11, 1905–March 7, 1909: lives at Könneritzstraße 70, Leipzig.
March 7, 1909: travels (or moves) to Elgershausen, then to Gießen.
Before World War I: citizens’ registry papers held at the Leipzig city archive that
document Beyer’s moves between 1905 and 1911 describe her as a “correspondent,
teacher, and music student.”1
April 24, 1911: arrives at Ellis Island on the S.S. Washington from port of Bremen.
According to the passenger ship manifest, Beyer paid for her own second-class pas-
sage and carried at least $50. As her destination she lists an uncle Henry Birch, who
lives at 661 Columbus Avenue (New York City).2
June 21, 1914: returns to Leipzig following her first three-year trip to New York.
From June 27, 1914: lives at her brother-in-law Kühnel’s address at Hospitalstraße 26.
March 1, 1915: lives in a household named Michaelis.
March 11, 1915: registers her residence as her parents’ house.
April 26, 1915: travels to Dessau.
September 1923: graduates from a German music conservatory (according to Beyer’s
1937 curriculum vitae).
November 1923: sails back to the United States on the S.S. Munich from Bremen, nam-
ing Essen as her last residence. Again she pays for her own passage and is carrying
$25. (Her records also claim that she had never before been to the United States.)
She listed her “nearest relative or friend” back home as her mother, in the Leipzig
district of Schleußig (Oeserstraße 5). As her final destination she indicates a “friend”
named Miss Marie Brueck, at 77 South Munn Street in East Orange, New Jersey.3
95
 Biographical Data

96 At the time of her immigration, Beyer is five-foot-six, has brown hair and brown
eyes, and, according to the ship-manifest questionnaire, she is neither a polygamist
nor an anarchist.
June 1, 1925: New York State Census documents a “Johanna Beyer” at 9 King Street in
New Castle, Westchester County, New York, in a household belonging to a wealthy
family named Guinzburg. The head of household is listed as Ralph K. Guinzburg,
director of the I. B. Kleinert Rubber Company. The family includes Guinzburg’s wife,
Edna, and three children under age ten. Beyer is listed as “servant” and “governess.”
Two other German servants work as “butler” and “laundress.” A young American
man is listed as a chauffeur. The census record states that Beyer is thirty-five years
old (in fact, on that date she would have been thirty-six). The entry records that she
has been in the country for fourteen years, which would place her entry in 1911,
the year Beyer first came to the United States. Ralph Guinzburg held a U.S. patent
for an improvement to the garter belt, and in 1925 he co-founded Viking Press with
George S. Oppenheim. In January 1938, Beyer includes her former employers, now
living at 1165 Park Avenue, on a mailing list for New Music Quarterly Recordings.
May 1927: earns a “diploma for solfege” at the Mannes School of Music.
Circa summer 1927: moves to Sunnyside Gardens, 3961 Forty-Third Street, Long
Island City, N.Y.
October 30, 1927: meets Bertha Reynolds, who rents a room in Beyer’s Sunnyside home.
May 1928: earns a teacher’s certificate at the Mannes School of Music.
August 1928: visits Washington, D.C., with niece Frida Kastner.
January 24, 1930: naturalized as an American citizen.
April 11, 1930: obtains an American passport.
July 5, 1930: travels to Germany.
September 7, 1930: arrives back in New York on the S.S. Stuttgart from Bremen.
1931: composes first known dated work (Waltz, for piano).
February 1932: meets Ruth Crawford and Charles Seeger; begins composition lessons.
Summer 1932: submits piece to Olympic Arts Competition.
Circa March 1933: meets Henry Cowell.
October 25, 1933: first known performance of Beyer’s work, the Three Songs for
Soprano, Piano, and Percussion at the New School for Social Research.
February 12, 1935: earliest extant letter from Beyer to Cowell.
April 17, 1935: obtains a second American passport.
June 5, 1935: travels to Germany; goes from there to London in July for performance
of her music; returns to United States in September.
October 1935: Beyer’s Sunnyside home forecloses.
May 20, 1936: Beyer’s first Composers’ Forum-Laboratory concert.
Summer 1936–Summer 1940: extensively involved in Cowell’s business affairs while he
is incarcerated at San Quentin Federal Penitentiary.
September 1936: moves to 40 Jane Street in Manhattan.
May 19, 1937: Beyer’s second Composers’ Forum-Laboratory concert.
March 1938: appointed to Promotion Committee for New Music Quarterly Recordings.
1938: diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis during this year (according to Beyer’s
death certificate).
Late 1938: applies for Guggenheim Foundation grant to support work on opera Status
Quo.
April 9, 1940: census entry for Beyer at 40 Jane Street lists her as “Elsie Beyer” and
says that she is thirty-nine years old (she was fifty-two). Her place of birth is given
as New York; no college-level education is reported.
Summer 1940: spends much of the summer house-sitting for families of piano students
on Staten Island and the New Jersey shore.
January 1941: becomes ill; is told she has multiple sclerosis in June.
Summer 1941: last known correspondence between Beyer and Cowell.
September 1941: enters Bellevue Hospital; is treated for nerve pain by neurologist.
July 1942: moves to 303 West Eleventh Street.
June 1943: oversees the packing of her manuscripts for storage at a musicians’ organi-
zation; that month she also composes her last dated work.
Early July 1943: moves to House of the Holy Comforter, Bronx.
January 9, 1944: Johanna Beyer dies. A funeral is held at the House of the Holy Com-
forter one week later. On her death certificate, the cause of death is listed as amyo-
trophic lateral sclerosis. Beyer’s niece Frida notifies the Philadelphia-based Fleisher
Collection of her aunt’s death.4

97
 appendix b: chronologic al list
of be yer’s known works

1931
Waltz, solo piano

1932
Suite for Clarinet I
Suite for Clarinet Ib

193?
Dissonant Counterpoint, solo piano

1933
Percussion Suite in 3 Movements
Suite for Clarinet and Bassoon
Quintet for Woodwinds
Sky-Pieces, soprano and piano (poem by Carl Sandburg)
Three Songs for Soprano, Percussion, and Piano (“Timber Moon”;
“Stars, Songs, Faces”; “Summer Grass”; all poems by Carl Sandburg)

1933–34
String Quartet No. 1

1934
Gebrauchs-Musik, solo piano
Ballad of the Star-Eater, soprano and clarinet
Three Songs for Soprano and Clarinet (“Total Eclipse”; “Universal-Local”;
“To Be”; all texts by Beyer)

1934–35
Piano-Book: “Classic-Romantic-Modern”

1935
Percussion, suite in five movements (including “IV”)
March, large ensemble
The Robin in the Rain, choir
1936
Sonata for B-flat Clarinet and Piano
Suite for Bass Clarinet and Piano
Movement for Double Bass and Piano
Movement for Two Pianos
String Quartet No. 2
Clusters (or, New York Waltzes), solo piano
Winter Ade and five other folk song settings, solo piano
The Federal Music Project, choir

1936–37
Have Faith! soprano and flute (text by Beyer)
1937
Suite for Violin and Piano
CYRNAB, chamber orchestra
The Main-Deep, choir
The People, Yes, choir
The Composers Forum-Laboratory, choir
Fragment for Chamber Orchestra
Symphonic Suite

1938
Movement for Woodwinds
Movement for String Quartet (“Dance”)
Music of the Spheres, three electrical instruments or strings, from Status Quo
Elation, concert band
Reverence, wind ensemble
Dance for Full Orchestra, from Status Quo

1939
March for 30 Percussion Instruments
Percussion, opus 14
Three Movements for Percussion
Waltz for Percussion
Six Pieces for Oboe and Piano
Suite for Oboe and Bassoon
Suite for Piano
Symphonic Movement I
Symphonic Opus 3

1940
Symphonic Opus 5

1941
Symphonic Movement II
Strive, percussion ensemble
99
 Chronological List of Beyer’s Known Works

100 1942
Horizons, percussion ensemble

1943
Sonatina in C, solo piano
194?
Trio for Woodwinds

1943?
String Quartet No. 4

Undated
Prelude and Fugue (in C Major), solo piano
Bees, solo piano
“Three More Pieces for Oboe and Piano, to Joseph Marx, Cincinnati”
 appendix c: public ations of
be yer’s music

Individual Publications
IV. Percussion ensemble. New Music Orchestra Series No. 18, New Music Editions
(1936).
Music of the Spheres. For three electrical instruments or strings. Facsimile. Soundings
7–8 (1973).
Three Movements for Percussion. Percussion ensemble. Facsimile. Soundings 10 (1976).
Sonata for Clarinet and Piano. Volker Hemken, ed. Friedrich Hofmeister Musikverlag
(2009).
Suite for Bass Clarinet and Piano. Volker Hemken, ed. Friedrich Hofmeister Musikver-
lag (2009).
Percussion. Percussion ensemble. Edited by Ron Coulter. Smith Publications (2012).

Frog Peak Music/Johanna Beyer Project

Frog Peak editions of Beyer’s music include copied and edited scores, editorial notes, and
facsimiles of the original manuscripts. Series editor: Larry Polansky.
Bees. Solo piano. Copied and edited by Larry Polansky (1994).
Movement for Double Bass and Piano. Copied and edited by David Fuqua (1995).
Ballad of the Star-Eater. Clarinet and soprano. Copied and edited by Charles Shere
(1996).
The Federal Music Project. Chorus. Copied and edited by Margaret Fisher and Lou
Harrison (1996).
Dissonant Counterpoint. Solo piano. Copied and edited by David Fuqua (1994).
Three Songs for Soprano and Clarinet. Copied and edited by Mark Warhol (1996).
String Quartet No. 2. Copied and edited by Pamela Marshall (1996).
Gebrauchs-Musik. Solo piano. Copied and edited by Carter Scholz (1996).
Movement for Two Pianos. Copied and edited by Drew Krause (1996).
Suite for Violin and Piano. Copied and edited by Kim Bastin (2004).
March for 30 Percussion Instruments. Copied and edited by J. B. Smith (2004).

101
 Publications of Beyer’s Music

102 Have Faith! Flute and soprano. Copied and edited by William Matthews, with edito-
rial assistance from Margaret Lancaster and Beth Griffiths (2005).
Three Movements for Percussion. Copied and edited by Thomas Smetryns (2005).
Waltz for Percussion. Copied and edited by Thomas Smetryns (2005).
Percussion Opus 14. Copied and edited by Thomas Smetryns (2005).
Suite for Clarinet I. Edited by Daniel Goode, copied by Dennis Bathory-Kitsz (2006).
Suite for Clarinet IB. Copied and edited by Marguerite Boland (2007).
Percussion Suite. Copied and edited by Ron Coulter (2010).
Movement for String Quartet. Copied and edited by Andrew Kohn (2010).
Clusters. Edited by Amy C. Beal, with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz and Larry Polansky
(2010).
Suite for Piano. Edited by Amy C. Beal, with Jay Arms (2014).
 appendix d: selec ted recordings
of be yer’s music

A number of important live and archival recordings in private hands or

housed in research facilities are not listed here, including recordings made by
the John Cage Percussion Players, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Essential Music,
the Astra Chamber Players, Rory Cowal, and the DownTown Ensemble, to name
just a few.
1938
Suite for Clarinet and Bassoon; II. Lentamente and IV. Allegro ponderoso
Rosario Mazzeo, clarinet, and Raymond Allard, bassoon. New Music Quarterly Edi-
tions 1413A-B (78 RPM).

1977
Music of the Spheres
Electric Weasel Ensemble with Charles Amirkhanian. New Music for Electronic and
Recorded Media, Women in Electronic Music. 1750 Arch Street. [Re-released by New
World Records in 2006.]

1991
IV
Essential Music. The Aerial no. 3. Non Sequitur Recordings.

2001
Gebrauchs-Musik and Dissonant Counterpoint
Sarah Cahill, piano. 9 Preludes. New Albion Records 114.

2003
Suite for Clarinet IB
Patrick O’Keefe, clarinet. Zeitgeist, If Tigers Were Clouds. Innova Recordings.

2006
Suite for Violin and Piano
Miwako Abe, violin; Michael Kieran Harvey, piano. Works for Violin by George Antheil,

103
 Selected Recordings of Beyer’s Music

104 Johanna Beyer, Henry Cowell, Charles Dodge, Ruth Crawford, David Mahler, Larry
Polansky, Stefan Wolpe. New World Records 80641-2.

2008
Fourteen chamber, vocal, and choral works
John McCaughey and the Astra Chamber Music Society. Sticky Melodies. New World
Records 80678-2.

2009
Have Faith!
Margaret Lancaster, flute; Beth Griffith, soprano. Io. New World Records 80665-2.

2011
IV; Percussion Op. 14; Three Movements for Percussion; Waltz; Percussion Suite
Meehan/Perkins Duo and the Baylor Percussion Group. Restless, Endless, Tactless:
Johanna Beyer and the Birth of American Percussion Music. New World Records
80711-2.

Movement for Double Bass and Piano

Robert Black, bass; John McDonald, piano. Modern American Bass. New World
Records 80722-2.

2012
Strive; Percussion; Horizons
Ron Coulter and the Southern Illinois University Carbondale Percussion Group.
Origins: Forgotten Percussion Works, Vol. 1. Kreating SounD 4.
 appendix e: be yer’s poe try

Total Eclipse
Moving of masses,
Stirred by astro-phenomena,
Directing matter,
Their slave, yet their master,
Still to be.
Effort, research, action,
Thought bearing power, strength,
And courage abundant
To wrestle from the elements
The secret kept.
The world is aghast,
Nature pales in hush
And feeble protesting
Sinks into last motions,
Activity before death.
Birds and beasts bow in fear,
Frightened leaves tremble,
Emaciated sunbeams die below swaying grass,
Leaving the planet colorless,
Faint, deathlike at rest.
Here and yonder,
Beads of light—lost,
Erring through valleys of the moon,
Still shed their love upon earth,
While shadow-bands pattern designs.
But behold the heavens,
Phenomenous climax!
Bursting the shielding surface,
105
 Beyer’s Poetry

106 The fiery glow of the corona

Circles its dance of life.
And its secrets alight,
Reaching out beyond spheres,
Expanding toward searching,
Restless thoughts of men,
Begging to be known, to be loved.
But though men try,
Time and again,
These longing elements flee back,
Hiding their shame—“misunderstood”—
Wearing mourning-veils another time untold!

To Be
To be a sunbeam, a sparkling ray,
To fall as raindrop, chattering gay,
To be a grain of sand, bathing in sun and wind,
Waiting for tides to come and go—
To be a tiny shoot, just from home “root,”
To leaf off from the stem that holds you firm,
To be a blossom, oh, with spellbound hue,
Forthcoming fruit promise, crystalled in dew—
To be a wandering cloud, sailing along,
To shine as star above, meet moons and sun,
To rise and fall in curves, in space and time,
Thus, an enduring cycle, majestic, sublime.

Universal-Local
Stars, moons, suns,
Penetrating love—
Endless time, infinite space—
Forever—
Boundless beauty—
Sleepers, toiling with a minute,
With a grain of soil—
Poor, forgotten creatures, dragging on—
But void,
Where could be wings!
H ave Faith!
Here is a song for you,
oh, nightingale!
a song of what!
of hope, of future, present, past?
it does not matter, it does not matter.
But essential is,
that you and I and all the others
have faith in things to come,
in things that passed, and are
and we must try to understand
and love and help each other,
have faith in things to come,
have faith!

The Feder al Music Project

I know of an active bee-hive,
it busses [buzzes] and bubles [sic] all day,
is full of creative ideas,
a nucleus of a future so gay!
To it come all happy children
and adults so young and so old
to find the key to music,
to know of the secrets untold.
It all is taught with knowledge
with love through games and fun.
Unavoidably what may happen
is surely a wonderful thing.
Glad people will breath [sic] in music,
the babies with their milk
and soon we will have creators
of enduring music and skill.
The Federal Music Project,
the bee-hive I’m talking about,
is a remarkable living idea
with a future, oh, so bright!

107
 Beyer’s Poetry

108 The Composers Forum-Labor atory

If you are a composer,
and don’t know what to do,
go to the Forum-Laboratory
they’ll surely hear you.
Whether “old” or “new,”
abstract or true,
quite fancy or plain,
for orchestra or choir,
percussion or piano,
woodwinds or strings,
a Mass or a dance,
they’ll give you your chance,
and furnish an audience, so big as the hall,
who comes to see, to hear, to know,
whether it is really so
that we have composers, quite a long row,
who will bear testimony of our epoch
so great, so tense,
so vast, so immense,
full of vigor and strength,
fateful at glance
but of future enhanced
and response we get spontaneously
just you are being criticized on the spot
whether you like it or not,
and all is recorded,
so you better be for it,
The Composers Forum-Laboratory.
 notes

Introduction
1. See Appendix A for a selected and annotated chronology of Beyer’s known addresses,
travels, and key life events.
2. Beyer’s 1937 CV accompanied her 1938 Guggenheim application. This important
document is held in both the Serge Koussevitzky Collection and the Nicolas Slonimsky
Collection in the Music Division, Library of Congress.
3. It is unclear when and where Beyer might have studied with Rudhyar. In an undated
letter to Cowell (probably 1941), Beyer expressed doubt about listing Rudhyar as one of
her teachers on official documents.
4. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, is also known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease,” after
the legendary New York Yankee who died of ALS on June 2, 1941, the day after Beyer was
examined at Bellevue Hospital for her severely deteriorated condition purportedly caused
by advanced ALS.
5. John McCaughey, program notes for Astra 2007, “Johanna Magdalena Beyer, Cham-
ber and Choral Works 1931–36,” concert at Gasworks Theatre, Melbourne, November 4,
2007.
6. See, for example, Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner, Women Composers, 13, 90.
7. See Spilker, “Origins,” 516. According to Spilker’s analysis, less than a third of Beyer’s
works use dissonant counterpoint techniques.
8. Siwe, “Lou Harrison,” 30.
9. Composers’ Forum Transcripts, May 19, 1937; see de Graaf, “Documenting Music,”
91.
10. However, neither Tick nor Hicks had access to Beyer’s letters in the Cowell papers
at the New York Public Library; that collection was still sealed at the time of these publi-
cations.
11. Several manuscripts and copies are held at the Fleisher Collection in the Free Library
of Philadelphia, and several percussion ensemble scores are held in the John Cage Papers
at Northwestern University.
12. Beyer Scores (1931–1943), JPB 82-77; Kennedy and Polansky, “‘Total Eclipse.’”
13. Cowell Papers, JPB 00-03.
109
 Notes to Introduction, Chapters 1 and 2

110 14. Reynolds Papers.

15. Woolfe, “Composers,” 73.

Chapter 1. Sunnyside
1. Reynolds, Uncharted Journey, 105.
2. Reynolds, “Informal Autobiography,” typescript, held in the Reynolds Papers.
3. Reynolds, Uncharted Journey, 105.
4. I am grateful to Herbert Reynolds of the Sunnyside Gardens Historic District Coun-
cil for providing this information.
5. Beyer might have been able to save up the average $1,000 to $2,000 down payment for
a new home in Sunnyside through her work for the wealthy Guinzburg family around 1925.
6. Stein, Toward New Towns, 34.
7. Unless otherwise noted, specific details about Beyer’s Sunnyside community and daily
life are taken from Bertha Reynolds diaries held in the Reynolds Papers.
8. In December 1931, Reynolds took Beyer and a friend named Dorothy Jenks to the
debut concert of the eighteen-year-old piano student of Abby Whiteside’s—and later Pulit-
zer Prize–winning composer—Morton Gould.
9. Quoted in Schwartz, “New Negro Renaissance,” 54.
10. Gregory, “Drama of Negro Life,” 158.
11. “F. Eugene Corbie Dies at Home in Trinidad,” New York Age, October 20, 1928.
12. The household was one of politics but also healthy eaters: on February 20, 1929,
Reynolds recorded a dinner of brown rice and mushrooms for herself, Beyer, and Beyer’s
niece Frida; on other occasions, recipes for shared salads are described.
13. For example, on May 23, 1929, Beyer accompanied a singer and a violinist in a
musical program for the Mothers’ Club of P.S. 125 in Woodside; see “Fathers Invited to
Mothers’ Meeting,” Daily Star (Queens Borough), May 22, 1929.
14. Many thanks to Herbert Reynolds for locating these Sunnyside News ads in the E. E.
Wood Papers.
15. Perhaps due to the economic collapse of the Depression, around 1938 piano teach-
ers at the Greenwich House Music School were still only paid between $1.00 and $2.70
per hour.
16. Games of the 10th Olympiad. I have not been able to determine which piece she sent
to the competition.
17. See Kennedy and Polansky, “‘Total Eclipse,’” 720.

Chapter 2. Compositional Beginnings

1. Bick, “Tradition of Dissent,” 141, 181.
2. The enrollment for this course listed just four participants, including Jessie Baetz,
a pianist who would later take lessons from and perform with Beyer, and live in the same
building at 40 Jane Street around 1940.
3. Siwe, “Lou Harrison,” 30.
 4. This concert, titled “A Program of American Music,” took place on March 12, 1933.
The program included music by Marion Bauer, John Becker, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell,
Ruth Crawford, Celius Dougherty, Charles Ives, Wallingford Riegger, and Carl Ruggles.
5. Crawford, America’s Musical Life, 590.
6. Unless otherwise noted, all quoted letters from Beyer to Cowell, as well as corre-
spondence between Cowell and his parents, Beyer and Cowell’s parents, and all of Cowell’s
prison years (1936–1940) correspondence are held in the Henry Cowell Papers at the New
York Public Library.
7. On July 13, 1935, Richard Strauss resigned his post as president of the Reichsmusik-
kammer. The following month, the Reichsmusikkammer issued a decree forbidding Jews
and other non-Aryans from participating in German orchestras. See Slonimsky, Music Since
1900, 394.
8. This letter is held in the “programs and clippings” section of the Ruth Crawford
Seeger Papers. The letter was written on the back of a program for a concert of “Works by
American Women” at the Society of Women Musicians on December 8, 1934. The concert
was arranged by Fiona McCleary and Katharine Eggar in conjunction with the New York
International Exchange Concerts. The program included music by Marion Bauer, Evelyn
Berckmann, Suzanne Bloch, Ethel Glenn Hier, Marguerite Fischel, Fiona McCleary, and
Gena Branscombe. A note at the bottom of program announced: “The Council much regrets
that owing to difficulties of rehearsal, it has not been possible to include three songs (Rat
Riddles, Prayers of Steel, and Honeybees) for Contralto, Oboe, Percussion and Pianoforte by
Ruth Crawford.”
9. This letter provides evidence that Beyer knew the Seegers reasonably well and con-
sidered herself a friend. She used the more intimate signature “Hanna” in letters to Cowell
and presumably with other close friends and family. She also alluded to the fact that she
knew that another Seeger child was on the way. In fact, Peggy Seeger was born on June
17, 1935, just twelve days after Beyer left for Europe.
10. According to Kennedy and Polansky’s description of Beyer’s String Quartet No. 2
(1936), the name “Persephone” is crossed out on the front page of the manuscript. Beyer’s
letters frequently referred to the myths of Persephone and Prometheus, and she often used
the phrase “Sunny Hades.” Her first three letters to Cowell are all addressed to Sunny
Hades. Even after Cowell’s arrest she addressed his letters to Sunny Hades (those letters
ended up at the Sheriff’s office in Redwood City, California) until Alvin Johnson strongly
advised her to stop doing so (see letter from Beyer to Olive Cowell, September 19, 1936).
Several letters to Olive Cowell were also addressed to Sunny Hades. Sunny Hades also
seems to have referred to Beyer’s own basement in Sunnyside, where she lived for some
time after her foreclosure and before moving to Jane Street.
11. “New York Philharmonic Sponsors Concert,” Musical America, April 25, 1936.
12. Letter from Beyer to Cowell, postmarked June 4, 1941, Cowell Papers. This letter
is examined in greater detail in chapter 10.
13. For an in-depth description and analysis of Beyer’s 1936 and 1937 Composers’
Forum-Laboratory events, see de Graaf, Forum Concerts.
14. “Two Composers Heard.”

111
 Notes to Chapters 3 and 4

112 Chapter 3. Having Faith

1. Beyer’s three-story Greek Revival building, built in 1845 as a block of several resi-
dential and commercial buildings at the intersection of Jane Street and Eighth Avenue, had
greatly deteriorated by the late 1960s, was nearly destroyed by a fire in 1972, and was then
demolished. Soon after, the Jane Street Block Association turned the site into a neighbor-
hood garden.
2. Beyer added: “Already I am loved up here at the school”; letter from Beyer to Olive,
August 1, 1936, Cowell Papers.
3. Letters from Beyer to Olive during the second half of 1936; letter from Beyer to
Alvin Johnson, August 30, 1936, Cowell Papers.
4. Beyer mentioned that Alvin Johnson blamed Cowell’s heavy sentence on the “public
hysteria over sex-crimes out there” in a letter to Olive, August 30, 1937, Cowell Papers.
5. She wrote “especially since my cancer” to Cowell on June 24, 1936, with no further
commentary. I have not found any other evidence of an earlier illness or references to
medical conditions prior to 1941 except for this entry in Reynolds’s diary on October 3,
1934: “Johanna having varicose veins treated.”
6. Beyer announced the completion of her quartet to Cowell in a letter written on June
9, 1936, Cowell Papers.
7. This is probably not the “Indian record” Beyer wrote to Cowell about on June 2, 1941;
in an undated letter from around the same time, she mentions a “Shan Kar” [sic] record
that Cowell had borrowed from her: this was possibly a record titled “The Original Uday
Shankar Company of Hindu Musicians, Recorded During the Historic 1937 Visit to the
United States,” which was originally released in 1938.
8. A biographical sketch for Beyer, possibly intended for the New Music Quarterly
Recording of the Suite for Clarinet and Bassoon, lists in her works “one stage play for stu-
dents: The Modern Composer, lyrics and incidental music” (Cowell Papers).
9. I have speculated about whether Beyer is in the photograph, but given the image in
her 1935 passport photo, I do not believe that she is.
10. See letter from Beyer to Olive, April 24, 1937, Cowell Papers.
11. Selections from “The Nature of Melody” have been published in Higgins, Essential
Cowell.
12. “Concert at WPA Theatre.” See also de Graaf, Forum Concerts.
13. The photograph in question was located by Melissa J. de Graaf in the Composers’
Forum papers at the National Archives and Records Administration and has been repro-
duced in de Graaf, “‘Never Call Us Lady Composers,’” 291; de Graaf, “Intersection,” 8;
and Beal, “Her Whimsy,” 1.
14. Charles Seeger, “Ruth Crawford,” in Cowell, American Composers, 114.
15. Letter from Cowell to Olive, August 14, 1937, Cowell Papers.
16. Beyer gave Olive the address of Reynolds, 3947 Forty-Eighth Street in Long Island
City (announcing, “I still have my New York apartment, I just stay here for the summer
months”). She told Koussevitzky that she would be returning to Jane Street on September
16, 1937.
17. Letter from Olive to Beyer, August 24, 1937, Cowell Papers.
18. Letter from Cowell to Beyer, August 15, 1937, Cowell Papers.
 19. Thanks to John Kennedy for demystifying the meaning of CYRNAB.
20. On November 30, 1937, Reynolds wrote: “J. writing another symphony. Has to pay
$100 to have recording made of her comp. by Bst. Symph. Players. (Performances have
been very poor and she can never get her works known.)”
21. “Composers Organize,” 92–95. Kennedy and Polansky posit that this article may
have been written by Aaron Copland himself (“‘Total Eclipse,’” 765).
22. Letter from Beyer to Olive Cowell, September 16, 1939, Cowell Papers. Many other
letters from this period document Beyer’s management of Cowell’s financial affairs while
he was in prison.
23. This portion of Cowell’s prison correspondence is contained in the Cowell Papers.
24. Otto Koischwitz later became a Nazi propagandist during World War II. See chap-
ter 4, note 6.
25. Beyer is not mentioned in George Boziwick’s discussion of “materials [in the New
York Public Library] that shed light on how Cowell coped with his prison existence.” See
Boziwick, “Henry Cowell,” 51.
26. Letter from Cowell to Blanche Walton, February 1, 1938, Cowell Papers.
27. Letter from Cowell to Harry Cowell, February 1, 1939, Cowell Papers.
28. Letter from Cowell to Becker, March 31, 1940, Cowell Papers. Cowell was acknowl-
edging several radio broadcast performances of his work during March 1940, which Beyer
had arranged with Wallenstein, Sevitzsky, and Solomon.
29. See Beyer’s “invitation” for the event, reproduced in Kennedy and Polansky, “‘Total
Eclipse,’” 722.
30. Letter from Beyer to Olive Cowell, February 12, 1940, Cowell Papers.
31. Letter from Beyer to Sevitzky, February 29, 1940, Sevitzky Papers.
32. Letter from Beyer to Sevitzky, April 17, 1941, Sevitzky Papers.
33. See, for example, letters from Beyer to Koussevitzky, Sevitzky, and Alvin Johnson, all
written on March 10, 1940; similar letters exists to Quincy Porter, dated March 17, 1940
(Porter Papers) and Lou Harrison, dated March 25, 1940 (Harrison Papers). In a letter to
Charles Ives written on May 24, 1940, Beyer announced, “I have over 40 wonderful letters
from prominent people all over the States” (Ives Papers); I am grateful to Robin Preiss for
transcribing and sharing this letter. Beyer had written the same thing to Sevitzky, April 12,
1940 (Sevitzky Papers).
34. Letter from Beyer to Grainger, March 24, 1940, Grainger Papers. All letters from
the Grainger correspondence were made available by Larry Polansky.
35. Letter from Beyer to Sevitzky, May 14, 1940, Sevitzky Papers.
36. On May 16, 1940, Cowell wrote to Grainger: “My parents and Johanna Beyer will
be the only ones I shall tell of this plan, and I shall tell them not to inform anyone else”;
see also Cowell to Grainger, June 5, 1940, and Cowell to Grainger, June 29, 1940, Cowell
Papers.
37. Letter from Cowell to Grainger, June 5, 1940, Cowell Papers.

Chapter 4. New York Waltzes

1. The festival took place on May 7, 1931. In addition to Seeger’s lecture, the festival
included a program of compositions by Marion Bauer and others. 113
 Notes to Chapters 4–7

114 2. Bauer, Twentieth-Century Music (1933), revised edition (1947), 256. Internal quotation
marks are Bauer’s.
3. See Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger, 22–23; letter from Beyer to Cowell, December 17,
1935, Cowell Papers.
4. Letter from Beyer to Cowell, December 17, 1935, Cowell Papers.
5. See Bees, Frog Peak/Johanna Beyer Project No. 1, editorial notes by Larry Polansky.
6. On November 5, 1934, Reynolds wrote in her journal: “Johanna composing a book
of rhymes for teaching music to chn. And Dr. Koischwitz to illustrate it.” In 1938 Beyer
listed Sunnyside resident Professor Otto Koischwitz as a possible future subscriber to New
Music Quarterly Recordings. Six illustrations of seasonal scenes signed “O.K.” are included
in the manuscript of Piano-Book. German-born, U.S.-naturalized, Sunnyside resident Oscar
Max (Otto) Koischwitz was later accused of treason when he returned to Nazi Germany
and worked as a propagandist during World War II. He died of tuberculosis in Berlin in
1944 before he could stand trial.
7. See Kennedy and Polansky, “‘Total Eclipse,’” 742.
8. Letter from Cowell to “Father and Mother,” March 9, 1938, Cowell Papers.

Chapter 5. Horizons
1. Oteri, “Sounds Heard.”
2. Kennedy and Polansky, “‘Total Eclipse,’” 726.
3. Kennedy, “Restless—Endless—Tactless,” 11.
4. Percussionist and scholar Ron Coulter asserts: “It is worth noting that Beyer’s earli-
est percussion work, Percussion Suite (1933), is only predated by three other percussion
works: Amadeo Roldán’s Ritmicas V & VI (1930), Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation (1931), and Wil-
liam Russell’s Fugue (1931–32). The [exact] completion date for Percussion Suite is unknown
and therefore could possibly also be predated by William Russell’s Three Dance Movements
(April 1933), José Ardévol’s Estudio en forma de preludio y fuga (May 1930 to June 3, 1933),
and/or John J. Becker’s The Abongo: a primitive dance for percussion orchestra with 2 solo danc-
ers & dance group (1933).” Coulter, “Forgotten Works,” 2.
5. Kennedy, “Restless—Endless—Tactless,” 11.
6. The complete suite was edited by Coulter and published by Smith Publications in
2012.
7. Coulter, “Forgotten Works,” 6, 7.
8. I am grateful to Gordon Mumma for providing documentation of these performances.
9. Kennedy, “Restless—Endless—Tactless,” 7.
10. Ibid., 10.
11. Coulter, “Forgotten Works,” 8. The Cage Notations collection at Northwestern holds
Cage’s copies of Strive and Horizons.
12. Ibid., 9.
13. Thanks to Melissa de Graaf for pointing out this connection.
14. Beyer to Harrison, July 11, 1942, Harrison Papers.
Chapter 6. The People, Yes
1. Crawford’s Three Songs to Poems by Carl Sandburg was published by Cowell in the
New Music Orchestra Series in 1933. According to Tick, who cites Charles Amirkhanian,
Beyer translated Sandburg poems for the Universal Edition of Crawford’s Three Songs. A
manuscript source in the Ruth Crawford Papers in the Library of Congress names Beyer
as the translator for “Prayers of Steel” only, dated November 1932, the same year Beyer
met and began studying with the Seegers. (See also Mead, Henry Cowell’s New Music, 223.)
2. Sky-Pieces was performed by Beth Griffith and Michael Blake in Johannesburg, South
Africa, on July 3, 2003, in what might have been the world premiere of this song, seventy
years after its composition.
3. See Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger, 183.
4. See Rubin, Songs of Ourselves, 139–40.
5. See Boland, “Experimentation and Process.”
6. Polansky, “Sticky Melodies,” 13.
7. Woods’s poem was published in 1911 in book called A Harp of the Heart; it had been
previously published in 1904 in a New York publication called Current Literature.
8. A young William Schuman won the contest.
9. The Main-Deep was included in Stephens’s A Poetry Recital, published in June 1925.

Chapter 7. Sonatas, Suites, and String Quartets

1. Katie Clare Mazzeo, personal communication with the author, February 24, 2013.
According to Mrs. Mazzeo, this piece was listed as part of the Crown Chamber Players’
repertoire during this ten-year span while Rosario Mazzeo was still playing. She added:
“He spoke to me several times of his admiration for her writing.”
2. Boland, “Experimentation and Process.”
3. See Spilker, “Origins,” 481–533.
4. Boland, “Experimentation and Process.”
5. See Cowell, New Musical Resources, 98–108.
6. Polansky has written at length about Beyer’s clarinet suites: see Kennedy and Polansky,
“‘Total Eclipse,’” 752–55; Polansky, “Sticky Melodies,” 9–13; and Polansky (with Margue-
rite Boland), “Tempo Melodies in the Johanna Beyer Clarinet Suites (Fourth Movements)”
(2008), available at http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~larry/beyerjpegs/beyer_tempo_melodies
_boland_polansky.pdf (accessed July 10, 2014).
7. See Kennedy and Polansky, “‘Total Eclipse,’” 721; and Siwe, “Lou Harrison,” 30.
8. Copland, “Scores and Records,” 122–25.
9. Bassist Robert Black gave the world premiere of the Movement for Double Bass and
Piano in New York City on December 14, 1995, with Anthony de Mare at the piano.
10. Carl, Modern American Bass, 4.
11. See Kennedy and Polansky, “‘Total Eclipse,’” 723, 767.
12. Polansky, “Sticky Melodies,” 17.
13. Mozart apparently borrowed the melody from a German folksong about religious
righteousness; I am grateful to Rachel Lumsden for bringing this to my attention. Lums-
115
 Notes to Chapters 7–10

116 den has speculated about the significance of this quotation and its meaning, in the context
of Cowell’s imprisonment and Beyer’s offer to marry him around the time she wrote the
String Quartet No. 2. See Lumsden, “Beyond Modernism’s Edge.”
14. For a longer analytic description of Beyer’s String Quartet No. 2, see Polansky,
“Sticky Melodies,” 18–20.

Chapter 8. Symphonic Striving

1. In Arthur Cohn’s announcement about the Fleisher Collection in Modern Music, he
included Beyer in the group of “tone-clusterites.” See Cohn, “Americans,” 116–19.
2. Tick, “Women,” 105.
3. In a letter to Koussevitzky written from Sunnyside on August 8, 1937, Beyer
announced, “I have just finished my First Symphony, that is, I call it: Symphonic Suite”
(Koussevitzky Collection).
4. Letter from Beyer to Grainger, November 15, 1937, Grainger Papers. Some seven-
teen letters from Beyer to Grainger exist from November 1937 through June 1940.
5. Letter from Beyer to Grainger, April 22, 1939, Grainger Papers.
6. See Kennedy and Polansky for further details on the Beyer-Grainger connection,
and for longer excerpts from the Beyer-Grainger correspondence in general.
7. Letter from Cowell to Grainger, May 16, 1939, Cowell Papers.
8. Letter from Beyer to Grainger, May 16, 1939, Grainger Papers.
9. See Kennedy and Polansky, “‘Total Eclipse,’” 739.
10. Koussevitzky’s comment is included in Beyer’s 1938 Guggenheim file. See also let-
ter from Beyer to Olga Naoumoff, Secretary to Koussevitzky, May 16, 1938, Koussevitzky
Collection.
11. Beyer to Harrison, July 11, 1942, Harrison Papers.

Chapter 9. Status Quo

1. On August 8, 1937, Beyer wrote to Koussevitzky about her Guggenheim application;
on October 11, 1937, she sent him her 1937 CV and “work plan” for Status Quo (Kous-
sevitzky Collection).
2. This list is not exhaustive.
3. Letter from Beyer to Koussevitzky, October 11, 1937, Koussevitzky Collection.
4. Beyer, “Work Plan” for Guggenheim Foundation grant proposal, 1937; copies held
with Beyer’s 1937 CV in the Koussevitzky Collection and the Slonimsky Collection, Library
of Congress.
5. Letter from Beyer to Grainger, August 14, 1938, Grainger Papers.
6. Mary Kiffer (Guggenheim Foundation), correspondence with the author, September
12, 2007.
7. Letter from Green to Charles Amirkhanian, March 6, 1977, quoted in Amirkhanian,
“Johanna Magdalena Beyer.”
8. A copy of this typescript introduction is held in Grainger Papers (Melbourne) and
in the Grainger Papers at the Library of Congress.
 9. A copy of Beyer’s Guggenheim file was obtained from the Guggenheim Foundation.
10. Hannas was the first woman to earn a doctorate in music in the United States,
graduating from the Eastman School of Music in 1934.
11. Nonetheless, the 1987 edition of Aaron I. Cohen’s International Encyclopedia of Women
Composers lists Status Quo under the category of “Opera” in Beyer’s works list (p. 53).

Chapter 10. Beyer’s Final Years

1. Letter from Cowell to Olive and Harry Cowell, July 10, 1940, Cowell Papers.
2. Letter from Beyer to Cowell, July 20, 1940, Cowell Papers.
3. Letter from Beyer to Cowell, August 7, 1940, Cowell Papers.
4. Sidney Robertson’s tape (transcribed), October 18, 1974, Cowell Papers.
5. This is evident from letters to his parents written on August 3, 1940, August 9, 1940,
and August 30, 1940 (Cowell Papers).
6. Letter from Beyer to Cowell, December 5, 1940, Cowell Papers.
7. Cowell to Olive and Harry Cowell, December 20, 1940, Cowell Papers.
8. Letter from Beyer to Cowell, January 4, 1941, Cowell Papers. The two compositions
she mentions in this letter—the “movement for winds” and “four movements for strings”—
are most likely the Trio for Woodwinds and String Quartet No. 4.
9. Letter from Beyer to Sevitzky, April 17, 1941, Sevitzky Papers.
10. Letter from Beyer to Cowell, January 7[?], 1941, Cowell Papers.
11. See Reynolds, “Informal Autobiography,” typescript, Reynolds Papers.
12. Letter from Beyer to Cowell, January 7[?], 1941, Cowell Papers. The friends she
alludes to are Bertha Reynolds and the Overstreets (mentioned earlier in the letter).
13. Letter from Beyer to Cowell, January 14, 1941, and postcard from Beyer to Cowell,
postmarked January 17, 1941, Cowell Papers.
14. Letter from Cowell to Beyer, January 15, 1941, Cowell Papers.
15. Cowell’s financial records, check stubs, Cowell Papers.
16. Letter from Beyer to Cowell, January 15, 1941, Cowell Papers.
17. Letter from Cowell to Sidney Robertson, January 25, 1941.
18. Letter from Beyer to Cowell, February 5, 1941, Cowell Papers. The piece she had
finished “for Stokowski” was her Symphonic Movement II.
19. Both of Graham’s new pieces were premiered at Bennington College on August 11,
1940, with Cunningham as one of the soloists in El Penitente.
20. Letter from Reynolds to Cowell, January 22, 1941, Cowell Papers.
21. Letter from Beyer to Cowell, March 22, 1941, Cowell Papers.
22. Letter from Beyer to Cowell, March 14, 1941, Cowell Papers.
23. Letter from Beyer to Cowell, undated, Cowell Papers.
24. Letter from Beyer to Cowell, April 3, 1941, Cowell Papers.
25. Cowell’s datebooks (pocket calendars), Cowell Papers.
26. Letter from Cowell to Beyer, June 3, 1941, Cowell Papers.
27. Letter from Beyer to Cowell, postmarked June 4, 1941, Cowell Papers.
28. On typed page marked 7/11—5-a—, “footnote 7, Johanna Beyer”; in folder labeled

117
 Notes to Chapter 10, Conclusion, and Appendix A

118 “Sidney Cowell book on Henry Cowell [1944] chapter headings, footnotes [12/19/1975],”
Cowell Papers.
29. On January 25, 1988, Cage wrote to John Kennedy: “I remember Johanna very little
though I enjoyed her when I was with her”; copy provided by Kennedy.
30. The American Composers Alliance was established in 1937, and the American Music
Center was established in 1939. It is unclear who picked up Beyer’s manuscripts and where
they first went before being stored at the American Music Center. (Just a few years after
Beyer’s death, the American Music Center’s board of directors included Marion Bauer
[treasurer], Quincy Porter, Aaron Copland, Harrison Kerr, Ray Green [executive secre-
tary], Otto Luening [chairman], William Schuman, Howard Hanson, and Douglas Moore,
among others.) This is the second reference I have found to Beyer’s having written some-
thing close to one hundred pieces, the other reference being in the letter from Beyer to
Cowell, postmarked June 4, 1941, quoted above (n27).

Conclusion
The title of this chapter, “May the Future Be Kind to All Composers,” are Johanna
Beyer’s words to Henry Cowell in a letter dated March 22, 1941 (Cowell Papers).
1. Letter from Paul Price to Ussachevsky, September 21, 1953; letter from Ussachevsky
to Price, January 12, 1954, New Music Society Archives Papers.
2. The performance took place on May 11, 1961; see “Concert and Opera Programs.”
3. Thanks to Ron Coulter for providing information about the location of Beyer’s
percussion ensemble manuscripts in the John Cage Notations collection at Northwestern
University.
4. Amirkhanian, liner notes for the New World Records reissue of the 1750 Arch Street
label’s recording called “New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media: Women In Elec-
tronic Music 1977.”
5. The musicians on the 1750 Arch Street recording of Music of the Spheres were Donald
Buchla, Brenda Hutchinson, Allen Strange, David Morse, and Stephen Ruppenthal, with
Robert Shumaker (recording engineer).
6. Boziwick, email communication with the author, February 15, 2013.
7. Letter from William Powell to Frank Campbell, chief of Music Division, New York
Public Library, August 9, 1984.
8. Letter from Slonimsky to John Kennedy, after January 24, 1988. Amirkhanian has
written: “Slonimsky, who knew of Beyer through Cowell, and who is the most thorough
of musical investigators, refused for years to include her in Baker’s Dictionary of Musicians
because he did not have her exact dates of birth and death.” See Amirkhanian, “Johanna
Magdalena Beyer.”
9. This short write-up prior to the November 1988 concerts probably appeared in the
Village Voice; I found a copy in the Peter Garland Papers, Harry Ransom Center at the
University of Texas in Austin. On another occasion Gann referred to Beyer as “obscure
but extremely innovative.” See Gann, “Subversive Prophet,” 208.
10. Rockwell, “Long-Forgotten Works.” This sentiment is echoed by the descriptive
abstract in the New York Public Library’s Finding Aid for the Johanna Magdalena Beyer
scores (1931–1943), JPB 82-77: “The Johanna Magdalena Beyer scores represent the work
of a neglected woman composer.” Emphasis added.
11. Hixon and Hennessee, Women in Music, 103. Hixon and Hennessee’s sources included
Slonimsky’s 1984 and 1992 editions of Baker’s Biographical Dictionary, Cohen’s International
Encyclopedia of Women Composers (1987), and an anthology of flute music by women com-
posers.
12. Emphasis added.
13. For more information on the Frog Peak/Johanna Beyer Project, see http://www
.frogpeak.org/fpartists/beyer.lists.html (accessed July 10, 2014). Additional Beyer-related
resources are available at http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~larry/misc_writings/talks/beyer
.index.html (accessed July 10, 2014).
14. Lange, “Reviews.” Emphasis added.

Appendix A. Biographical Data

1. Letter from Anett Müller, Stadtarchiv, Stadt Leipzig, to Cordula Jasper (Berlin),
August 19, 1997; copy provided by Larry Polansky.
2. According to the American Druggist and Pharmaceutical Record, vol. 34 (1899), and the
Druggists’ Circular and Chemical Gazette, vol. 43 (May 1890), a Henry Birch lived at 661
Columbus Avenue and was a member of the Manhattan Pharmaceutical Association.
3. An immigration record for a Marie Brueck shows that she was traveling to Mont-
clair, New Jersey, in 1922; the name Mary [sic] Brueck also appeared on Beyer’s 1911 ship
manifest record.
4. Frida Kastner died on June 10, 1997 in Redding, Connecticut.

119
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125
 inde x

Abe, Miwako, 103 Beach, Amy (Mrs. H. H. A. Beach), 20, 63

Allard, Raymond, 103 Beal, Amy, 102
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Becker, John J., 29, 90, 111n4, 114n4 (ch.
11 5)
American Composers Alliance, 27, Bellevue Hospital (New York), 87–88, 97,
118n30 109n4
American Composers on American Music, 26 Bengal Tiger, The, 24
American Music Center (New York City), Berckmann, Evelyn, 111n8
38, 89, 90, 118n30 Berg, Alban, 2
Amirkhanian, Charles, 89, 90, 91, 103, Beyer, Bernhard Hermann (father), 95
115n1 (ch. 6) Beyer, “Elsie,” 30, 97
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS; or Beyer, Johanna Magdalena: American-
“Lou Gehrig’s disease”), 3, 23, 97, ness, 20–21, 74–75, 86–87; illness,
109n4 3, 23, 80, 82–83, 84, 85–88, 112n5;
Anderson, Laurie, 90 misperceptions of personality traits, 14,
Antheil, George, 69 90–91; reception history, 89–93
Ardévol, José, 114n4 (Ch. 5) —works: IV, 19, 41, 42; The Ballad of the
Armstrong, Louis, 2 Star-Eater, 48–49; Bees, 36, 38, 41, 91;
Astra Chamber Music Society (Mel- Cluster Suite, 13, 32, 33, 34–35; The
bourne, Australia), 92, 103, 104 Composers Forum-Laboratory, 50, 51;
CYRNAB, 27, 66–67, 113n19; Dance
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 7, 21 for Strings; Dissonant Counterpoint, 32,
Bach-Fest (Leipzig), 18–19 33, 34; Elation, 66; “England—old
Baetz, Jessie, 21, 38, 39, 110n2 (ch. 2) popular song 1672,” 38; “excerpts from
Barcelona (Spain), 20 different piano suites”, 21, 26, 33, 34;
Barlow, Howard, 28 The Federal Music Project, 50, 51, 60;
Bartók, Béla, 2, 33, 36, 38 Fragment for Chamber Orchestra, 64,
Bastin, Kim, 101 65; Gebrauchs-Musik, 32, 33; “German
Bathory-Kitsz, Dennis, 35, 102 Folksong with various versions,” 38;
Bauer, Marion, 13, 17, 20, 24, 27, 32, 76, Have Faith!, 21–22, 50, 92; Horizons for
77, 111n4, 111n8, 113n1, 118n30 percussion ensemble, 3, 40, 43–45, 68,
127
 Index

128 114n11; “Ireland,” 38; “Italian Folk- 68, 86, 117n18; Symphonic Op. 3, 43,
song,” 38; The Main-Deep, 50, 52–53, 66; Symphonic Opus 5, 29, 43, 66;
115n9 (ch. 6); March, 63, 64; March Symphonic Suite (First Symphony),
for 30 Percussion Instruments, 42, 65, 66, 67, 75, 116n3 (ch. 8); Sym-
43, 89; “The Modern Composer,” 24, phonic Suite II, 66; Three Movements
112n8; Movement for Double Bass for Percussion, 40, 42, 89, 90; Three
and Piano, 58, 59, 60, 115n9 (ch. 7); Songs for Soprano and Clarinet (“To Be,”
Movement for String Quartet (Dance “Total Eclipse,” “Universal-Local”),
for Strings), 59, 60, 62; Movement for 14, 17, 21. 45, 48, 49–50, 54, 89; Three
Two Pianos, 21, 38–39; Music of the Songs for Soprano, Percussion, and
Spheres, 5, 70, 73–75, 89, 90; “Origi- Piano (“Three Carl Sandburg Songs”:
nal New York Waltz,” 35; The People, “Timber Moon,” “Stars, Songs, Faces,”
Yes, 50, 53; Percussion, 19, 41–42; “Summer Grass”), 16, 20, 40, 47, 48,
Percussion Opus 14, 42, 43; Percus- 96; Trio for Woodwinds, 117n8; Waltz
sion Suite in Three Movements, 16, for piano, 13, 33, 96; Waltz for percus-
40, 41, 114n4 (ch. 5); “Piano-Book: sion, 42, 43; “Winter Ade,” 38.
Classic—Romantic—Modern”, 18, Beyer, Maria Richter (mother), 95
38, 114n6; Prelude and Fugue in C Bick, Sally, 15
Major, 36; Quintet for Woodwinds, Birch, Henry, 95, 119n2
16, 26, 40, 55; Reverence, 65, 66; The Black, Robert, 58, 92, 104, 115n9 (ch. 7)
Robin in the Rain, 19, 50–51; “Russian Blake, Michael, 115n2 (ch. 6)
Folksong,” 38; See Saw, 38; Six Pieces Blitzstein, Marc, 27
for Oboe and Piano, 58; Sky-Pieces, Bloch, Suzanne, 111n8
16, 40, 47, 115n2 (ch.6); Sonata for Boland, Marguerite, 4, 54, 55, 92, 102
Clarinet and Piano, 26, 48; Sonatina Bortman, William, 26
in C for piano, 3, 36, 37, 79; Status Boston, 17, 20
Quo, 43, 69–88 (ch. 9), 97, 116n1 (ch. Boston Symphony Orchestra, 48, 54, 57,
9), 117n11 (ch. 9); Status Quo, Part of 63
Act IV: Geneva (Dance for full orches- Bowles, Paul, 27
tra), 70, 73; “Stille Nacht,” 38; String Boziwick, George, 90, 113n25
Quartet No. 1, 21, 59–60; String Branscombe, Gena, 111n8
Quartet No. 2, 51, 59, 60, 61, 111n10, Brant, Henry, 13, 17
115–16n13, 116n14; String Quartet IV, Brooklyn Museum, 13
59, 60, 62, 117n8; Strive, 43, 114n11; Brueck, Marie, 95, 119n3
Suite for Bass Clarinet and Piano, 48; Buchla, Don, 118n5
Suite for Clarinet I, 48, 54–56; Suite Byron, Michael, 1, 2, 89
for Clarinet IB, 48, 54–55; Suite for
Clarinet and Bassoon, 16, 17, 26, 40, Cabrillo Music Festival (Santa Cruz, CA),
54, 55, 57, 112n8; Suite for Oboe and 90
Bassoon, 57–58; Suite for Piano, 36; Cage, John, 4, 6, 41–44, 46, 75, 81, 88, 89,
Suite for Violin and Piano, 26, 58–59; 90, 118n29, 118n3
“Switzerland—1839,” 38; Symphonic Cahill, Sarah, 92, 103
Movement I, 26–27, 29, 66, 68, 82, Campus News (City College, New York
86; Symphonic Movement II, 63, 67, City), 11
Capen, Erdix Winslow, 11, 14, 24, 28, 91, 96, 111n4, 111n8, 111n9, 115n1
76–77, 87 (ch. 6)
Cape Smoke, or, The Witch Doctor, 11 Creston, Paul, 69
Carl, Robert, 58 Crown Chamber Players. See Mazzeo,
Caturla, Alejandro García, 4, 13 Rosario
Central Manhattan Music Center, 24 Crumb, George, 60
Chandière, Rie and Herbert, 80 Cunningham, Merce, 84, 117n19
Chávez, Carlos, 67, 69
“Chinese dancer” (C. Chew), 29 Davidson, Harold, 41
Choral Contest Committee (WPA), 50, Day, Clarence (This Simian World), 7
51, 53 de Graaf, Melissa J., 25, 92, 112n13,
City College of New York, 11, 48 114n13
clusters, 6, 26, 35, 36, 38 de Mare, Anthony, 115n9 (ch. 7)
Cohn, Arthur, 28, 45, 116n1 (ch. 8) Denishawn School of Dancing and
Coleman, Herbert, 26 Related Arts, 12, 17
Columbia Broadcasting System, 28 Diamond, David, 69
Columbia Phonograph Company, 27, 28 Diamond, Jody, 91
Communist Party USA, 24 dissonant counterpoint, 5, 32–36, 49, 55,
Community Church (New York City), 11 64
Composers’ Forum-Laboratory, 1, 17, 20, Dorsha Hayes Theater for the Dance, 13
21, 25, 26, 29, 33, 34, 38, 49, 50, 51, 55, Dougherty, Celius, 111n4
57, 58, 92, 96, 97, 108, 111n13 DownTown Ensemble, 92, 103
Copland, Aaron, 2, 17, 20, 24, 28, 57, 69, Downtown Music School, 29
78, 111n4, 113n21, 118n30
Corbie, Francis Eugene, 11, 14 Eastman School of Music, 117n9 (ch. 9)
Cornish School, 42 Edwin A. Fleisher Collection of Orches-
Coulter, Ron, 4, 41–42, 43, 92, 101, tral Music, Free Library of Philadel-
102, 104, 114n4 (ch. 5), 114n6 (ch. 5), phia, 40, 45, 63, 64, 97, 116n1 (ch. 8)
118n3 Eggar, Katharine, 19, 111n8
Cowal, Rory, 92, 103 Electric Weasel Ensemble, 5, 90, 103
Cowell, Henry, x, 2, 3, 6, 7, 13–21, 23–31, Ensemble Resonanz, 64
33, 35–43, 48, 50, 51, 55, 57, 63–69, Espy, Willard, 11
75–87, 89, 90, 96, 97, 111n4, 115n1, Essential Music, 7, 90, 91, 103
116n13 (ch. 6); 118n8; Anthropos, 83;
“Drums Along the Pacific,” 81; Old Famera, Karen, 90
American Country Set, 29; “Nature of Federal Music Project (WPA), 3, 17, 19,
Melody, The,” 24, 112n11, 65; Reel, 65; 24, 45, 85, 86
Rhythmicana, 29; Tocanta, 29, 83 Finlandia (Jean Sibelius), 76
Cowell, Olive, 23, 26, 27, 29, 80, 111n10 Finney, Ross Lee, 69
Cowell, Sidney Robertson. See Robert- Fiorillo, Dante, 69
son, Sidney Fischel, Marguerite, 111n8
Crawford, Richard, 17 Fischer, Walter, 28
Crawford, Ruth (Seeger), 2, 3, 6, 14, 16, Fischer Publishing, 24, 65
18, 19, 26, 28, 33, 47, 48, 59, 60, 69, 76, Fisher, Margaret, 101
129
 Index

130 Fleischer, Edwin A., 28. See also Edwin A. Hayes, Paul, 13
Fleisher Collection Helfer, Walter, 26
Fonaroff, Nina, 28 Hemken, Volker, 101.
Four Saints in Three Acts, 70 Henderson, Fletcher, 2
Frog Peak Music/Johanna Beyer Project, Hicks, Michael, 6
1–2, 35, 41, 90–91, 92, 101, 119n13. See Hier, Ethel Glenn, 111n8
also Polansky, Larry Hindemith, Paul, 13, 24
Fuqua, David, 101 Hitler, Adolf, 2, 14, 18, 19
Hölderlin, Friedrich (Hyperion), 7
Gann, Kyle, 90, 118n9 Holliday, Judy, 12
Gardiner, John Eliot, 7 Holm, Hanya, 15, 29
Garland, Peter, 1, 2, 89 Holmes, (Reverend) John Haynes, 11
Gebrauchsmusik, 13, 32, 51 Home Relief, 84
Gehrig, Lou, 87 homosexuality, 23, 80, 112n4
Gershwin, George, 2 House of the Holy Comforter (The
Gertrude [Beyer’s niece; last name Bronx), 3, 5, 88, 89, 97
unknown], 11, 88 Humphrey, Doris, 12, 15, 33, 41
Glanville-Hicks, Peggy, 69 Hutchinson, Brenda, 118n5
Goldfarb, Israel, 81 Huxley, Aldous (“Fashions in Love”), 7
Goode, Daniel, 92, 102
Goosens, Eugene, 67 Indianapolis Symphony, 29
Gordon, Judy, 92 Indian music, 24, 86, 112n7
Gould, Morton, 110n8 Interlochen International Music Camp
Graham, Martha, 28, 83, 84, 117n19 (Michigan), 65
Grainger, Percy, 28, 30, 65–66, 70 International House (Morningside
Green, Ray, 41, 71, 118n30 Heights, New York City), 11
Greenwich House Music School, 13, 24, Ippolito, Carmela, 26, 58
32, 90, 110n15 Irving Berlin Standard Music Corpora-
Greenwich Village Music Festival, 13 tion, 64
Gregg, Richard B. (The Power of Non- Ives, Charles, 13, 20, 111n4
Violence), 7
Griffith, Beth, 102, 104, 115n2 (ch. 6) Jane Street (New York City), 3, 23, 30,
Guggenheim Foundation (and fellow- 45, 71, 80, 83, 85, 97, 110n2 (ch. 2),
ships), 3, 65, 69–88 (ch. 9), 97, 109n2, 111n10, 112n1, 112n16
116n10, 116n1 (ch.9), 117n9 (ch. 9) Jenks, Dorothy, 110n8
Guinzburg family, 2, 28, 96, 110n5 Johanna Beyer Project. See Frog Peak
Music
Hannas, Ruth, 76, 77, 117n9 (ch. 9) John Cage Percussion Players, 42, 103
Hanson, Howard, 67, 118n30 Johnny Johnson (Kurt Weill), 24
Harris, Roy, 15, 69, 76, 77 Johnson, Alvin, 23, 28, 74, 76, 78
Harrison, Lou, 4, 6, 15, 45, 57, 68, 81, Joplin, Scott, 7
90–91, 101
Harvey, Michael Kieran, 103 Kansas City Philharmonic Orchestra, 87
Hayes, Dorsha, 13, 14, 33 Kastner, Frida, 10, 11, 96, 97, 119n4
Kennedy, John, 1, 4, 6, 7, 40, 41, 43, 66, Marshall, Pamela, 101
68, 90–91, 92, 113n19, 118n29 Marx, Joseph, 100
Kensico Cemetery, 3, 5 Martin Beck Theatre, 11
Kerr, Harrison, 28, 55, 70, 118n30 Matthews, William, 102
Kikisch, Arthur, 63 Mazzeo, Katie Clare, 115n1 (ch. 7)
Kindler, Hans, 28, 29, 67, 82 Mazzeo, Rosario, 20, 21, 26, 28, 48, 49,
Klemperer, Otto, 67 54, 89, 103, 115n1 (ch. 7)
Knopf Press, 24, 65 McCaughey, John, 4, 92, 104
Kohn, Andrew, 102 McCleary, Fiona, 111n8
Koischwitz, Otto, 28, 113n24, 114n6 McCollin, Frances, 64
Koussevitzky, Serge, 26–27, 29, 58, 67, McDonald, John, 104
68, 70, 75, 109n2, 112n16, 116n3 (ch. McDowell Club, The, 16
8), 116n10, 116n1 (ch. 9) Meehan, Todd, 92, 104
Krause, Drew, 101 Menlo Park, Calif., 21
Krueger, Karl, 67 Messiaen, Olivier, 32
“metric modulation,” 55
Labastille, Irma Goebel, 24 Miller, Leta, 6
Lancaster, Margaret, 92, 102, 104 Mills College (Oakland, Calif.), 42, 43, 91
Lang, Margaret, 63 Modern Art Quartet, 21
Lange, Art, 92 Modern Music, 57, 81, 115n1 (ch. 8)
Lange, Hans, 64, 67 Monterey, Calif., 42
Lawson, John Howard, 24 Monteux, Pierre, 67
Lawton, Dorothy, 28 Moore, Arthur, 12
League of Composers, 86 Moore, Douglas, 118n30
Leipzig (Germany), 2, 18–19, 95 Morse, David, 118n5
Leitner, Roland, 36, 79 Moscow, Idaho, 42
Leuning, Ethel, 28, 50 Mothers’ Club of P.S. 125, Woodside,
Leuning, Otto, 24, 27, 28, 50, 69, 91, 110n13
118n30 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 60, 115n13
Lockwood, Annea, 90 multiple sclerosis, 3, 10, 97
London, 18, 21, 96 Mumma, Gordon, 1, 89, 114n8
Los Angeles, 14 Musical America, 20, 24, 64
“Lou Gehrig’s disease.” See amyotrophic Musical Quarterly, The, 92
lateral sclerosis Music School Settlement, 20
Lumsden, Rachel, 115–16n13
National Association for the Advance-
Magaloff, Nikita, 58 ment of Colored People (NAACP), 11
Mahler, Fritz, 67, 86 National Symphony Orchestra, 82
Mannes, David, Mrs., 78 New Grove Dictionary of American Music, 91
Mannes, Leopold Damrosch, 69 New Music Editions, 19, 54, 89, 101
Mannes School of Music, 2, 96 New Music for Electronic and Recorded
Manhattan School of Music, 89 Media, Women in Electronic Music, 90
Mara Mara, 13 New Music Orchestra Series No. 18, 41,
Marching Song (John Howard Lawson), 24 101
131
 Index

132 New Music Quarterly Recordings, 28, Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 3

57, 86, 97, 103, 112n8, 114n6, 115n1 Reynolds, Bertha Capen, 7, 9–14, 19, 21,
(ch.6) 24, 26, 33, 47, 48, 57, 81, 82, 84–85,
New Music Society, 17, 28 87–88, 96, 110n7, 113n20
New School for Social Research, 2, 3, 5, Reynolds, Herbert, 13, 110n4, 110n14
13, 15–16, 20, 23, 47, 48, 86, 96 Rice, Elizabeth, 11
New World Records, 92, 103–104 Richards, Deborah, 92
New York Herald-Tribune, 59 Riegger, Wallingford, 16, 17, 27, 76, 86,
New York Public Library, Music Divi- 111n4
sion, x, 6, 7, 90, 92 Robertson, Sidney, 81, 84, 87, 90
New York Times, The, 7, 16, 21, 91 Robertson, Thomas Chalmers, 19
Northwestern University, 41, 44, 46 Rockwell, John, 91
Rodzinsky, Artur, 67
O’Keefe, Patrick, 103 Roldán, Amadeo, 4, 114n4 (ch. 5)
Oliveros, Pauline, 90 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 12, 14
Olympics, Summer (Los Angeles, 1932), Rosenfeld, Paul, 15
14, 96, 110n16 Rudhyar, Dane, 3, 109n3
Open Road, Inc., 12 Ruggles, Carl, 6, 13, 111n4
Oteri, Frank J., 40 Ruppenthal, Stephen, 118n5
Overstreet, Bonaro Wilkinson (Alice), Russell, William, 4, 40, 81, 91, 114n4
28, 48 (ch. 5)
Overstreet, Harry Allen, 15, 28, 48, 76
Sachs, Joel, 6
Pan-American Association of Compos- Saint Marks the Evangelist Church, 11
ers, 13 Saminsky, Lazare, 28, 67
Pazmor, Radiana, 48 Sandburg, Carl, 16, 47, 48, 50, 53, 115n1
Penderecki, Krzysztof, 60 (ch. 6)
Perkins, Doug, 92, 104 San Francisco, 17, 42
Persephone, 19, 111n10 San Francisco Examiner, 57
Pettis, Ashley, 28, 50, 51, 76 San Quentin Federal Penitentiary, 3, 21,
Philadelphia Orchestra, 64 23–31, 68, 97
Pickhardt, Ione, 64 Santa Clara University Orchestra, 68
Pioneer Youth of America, 14 Schillinger, Joseph, 17, 28, 86
Piston, Walter, 69, 70 Schirmer Press, 24, 38
Polansky, Larry, x, 2, 4, 6, 35, 40, 59, 66, Scholz, Carter, 101
90, 91–92, 101, 102. See also Frog Peak Schubert, Franz, 12
Music Schumacher, Robert, 118n5
Porter, Quincy, 69, 118n30 Schuman, William, 115n8 (ch. 6), 118n30
Powell, William, 90 Seattle, 42
Prague, 20 Seeger, Charles, 3, 13–16, 18, 19, 26, 28,
Price, Paul, 89 32, 47, 59, 96, 111n9, 113n1
Prohibition, 14 Seeger, Michael, 18
Prometheus, 111n10 Seeger, Peggy, 111n9
Seeger, Ruth Crawford. See Crawford, Talma, Louise, 69
Ruth Tartaronis, Amelia, 21
serial techniques, 6, 33 tempo melodies, 6, 55
Sessions, Roger, 15, 69 Theatre Union, 24
Sevitzky, Fabien, 28, 29, 30, 67, 86, Theremin (instrument), 5, 13
113n28 Theremin, Léon, 13
Shere, Charles, 101 Thompson, Randall, 69
Shostakovich, Dmitri, 62 Thomson, Virgil, 27, 70
Shultis, Christopher Tick, Judith, 6, 63, 115n1 (ch. 6)
Siwe, Thomas, 90 Town Hall (New York City), 20
Slonimsky, Nicolas, 1, 13, 24, 26, 27, 28, Town Hall Club (New York City), 11–12
48, 67, 90, 109n2, 118n8 Tuvim, Helen Gollomb, 12
Smetryns, Thomas, 102
Smith, J. B., 101 ultramodernism; ultramodernists, 5, 6, 58
Smith College, 9 University of Colorado, Boulder, 92
Smith Publications, 101, 114n6 (ch. 5) University of Illinois, Urbana, 89
socialism, 12, 13, 14, 47 University of North Carolina, Greens-
Society of Women Musicians (London), boro, 76
18, 111n8 Ussachevsky, Vladimir, 89
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Percussion Group, 104 Varèse, Edgard, 4, 27, 114n4 (ch. 5)
Spilker, John, 92, 109n7
Sprechstimme, 48, 50 Walla Walla, Wash., 42
Stearns, Theodore J., 70 Wallenstein, Alfred, 28, 67, 113n28
Stein, Clarence S., 10 Walton, Blanche, 2, 28
Stein, Gertrude, 70 Warhol, Mark, 101
Stephens, James, 50, 53, 115n9 (ch. 6) Washington, D.C., 11, 95
Still, William Grant, 69, 70 Webern, Anton von, 33
Stokowski, Leopold, 27, 28, 63, 64, 67, Weill, Kurt, 24
86, 117n18 Weiss, Adolph, 69, 70
Strang, Gerald, 28, 41, 76 Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 64, 103
Strange, Allen, 118n5 West Eleventh Street (New York City), 3,
Strasberg, Lee, 24 36, 45, 97
Strauss, Richard, 111n7 Whiteside, Abby, 11, 14, 110n8
Stravinsky, Igor, 2 Wood, Charles, 90
“Sunny Hades,” 111n10 Woods, Charles Coke, 50, 115n7 (ch. 6)
Sunnyside Gardens, 3, 9–14 (ch. 1), 17, Woolfe, Zachary, 7
19, 23, 24, 26, 28, 47, 76, 77, 96, 110n4, Works Progress Administration. See Fed-
110n7, 111n10, 114n6, 116n3 (ch. 8) eral Music Project
Sunnyside News, 12, 13 World Tomorrow, 11
Survey Graphic, 12
Szigeti, Joseph, 28, 58, 67 Yaddo, 69, 86

133
amy c. be al is a professor of music at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, and the author of Carla Bley and
New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in
West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification.
american
Composers

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James Wierzbicki
Carla Bley
Amy C. Beal
Christian Wolff
Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund
Robert Ashley
Kyle Gann
Alec Wilder
Philip Lambert
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Leta E. Miller
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Amy C. Beal
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