IMAGinations of the nation - Amy Beach´s Gaelic Symphony

Amy Beach (1867-1944) is one of the most influential American composers of her time. Her Gaelic Symphony in E minor, op. 32, composed in Boston in 1894-1896, is one of her best- known pieces, not least because the symphony`s four movements contain numerous references to contemporaneous European symphonic repertoire. In previous research, the piece`s relation to contemporary efforts to define national U.S. music compositionally against the backdrop of the state`s migratory history has become the central criterion for evaluation. This is in contextual tension with the contemporary reception of the symphony`s premiere and first performances, in which evaluations focused primarily on the author`s gender as a factor possibly influencing the musical facture. The project work places the existing academic evaluations of the Gaelic Symphony in a new, overarching methodological framework by constructing and exploring philosophical, historical, and cross-media interpretive spaces of the piece in its time. In the process, not only do new scholarly perspectives emerge on the relevance of music to U.S. cultural self- definitions in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, with its asymmetrical hierarchies of gender, class, and race. The composer`s intention to compose a symphony with echoes of Gaelic musical cultures also inevitably brought her into relationship with European symphonic repertoire in several respects, which is thus also placed in a new, different light by the new perspectives on Beach`s symphony. With a conference on the project topic and a project website, the research results will be made easily accessible way also beyond academic circles.