The Year's At The Spring By Amy Mercy Cheney Beach

As a male vocalist singing classical music, I always strive to sing big pieces with high notes and a great piano part. In the search for that song I found a song called “The Years At The Spring” by Amy Mercy Cheney Beach, who was born in 1867 and died in 1944. This song is a solo arrangement with a piano accompaniment. Beach was an American composer who had european training .Despite the popularity of the songs, there are no single-composer collections of Beach's songs. In 1890, Beach became interested in folk songs. She and several of her colleagues soon came to be the first nationalist movement in American music. Beach's contributions mentioned thirty songs inspired by folk music, including Scottish, Irish, Balkan, African-American, and Native American origins.. I chose this piece because she was a successful woman in writing art music; she composed 300 musical works including piano concertos, Symphonies and one-act operas, and in fact she was the first female to compose a symphony. This song is from a song cycle called three Browning songs that was dedicated to the Browning Society of Boston. The earliest Browning Society, and longest continuing, was constituted in 1877 .This song caught my attention because of the intensity of the lyric’s and the accompaniment starting and ending with a forte. “The Years at the Spring” by Amy Mercy Cheney Beach is amazing to sing, not only because of the dynamics and music structure but also the strong meaning of the lyrics and history.