Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867–1944) was a musical prodigy whose professional career vacillated between piano performance and composition. Her professional debut was delayed until age sixteen because of parental misgivings, and then her performance career was curtailed at age eighteen when she married a prominent physician, Dr. H. H. A. Beach. His insistence that she devote her energies to composition rather than performance, along with his desire that she remain self-taught, inspired her to develop a unique late-Romantic compositional style. With the support of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its musicians, she produced a Mass with orchestra, a symphony, a concerto, and numerous chamber works. Her trailblazing accomplishments included many firsts for American women composers. After the death of her husband and mother in 1910 and 1911, she reinvented herself as a virtuoso performer while still composing. Her compositional output is widely varied in genre, instrumentation, and musical style.

Song served as a primary generative force throughout Amy Beach’s prolific compositional career. Her three major pieces for orchestra alone-Bal Masqué (1893), the “Gaelic” Symphony (1896), and the Piano Concerto (1900)-are no exception. This chapter argues that Beach’s affinity for song not only shaped her approach to large-scale orchestral composition, but also facilitated positive responses to her works well beyond their premieres. Beach’s ultimate success with song-inspired orchestral composition reflected broader trends of the era overshadowed by experimental modernisms.