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Experimentation and Process in the Music of Johanna Beyer

The music of German-American composer Johanna Beyer (1888-1944) is no longer as unfamiliar to us as it was twenty years ago. The efforts of those associated with Essential Music and Frog Peak Editions in the USA, Musik und Gender im Internet (MUGI) in Hamburg, and the Astra Chamber Music Society in Australia not to mention those individuals who have written about, performed and recorded Beyer’s music have brought to light the compositions and life story of this enigmatic yet fascinating composer. 1 Nevertheless, as everyone who comes in to contact with Beyer’s music realises, many questions about her remain unanswered, many compositions unplayed, many more unrecorded. Beyer was part of a network of experimental composers active in New York between the two World Wars, and her teachers, mentors and friends, who included Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford, Charles Seeger, Dane Rudhyar and Percy Grainger, had a clear influence on her compositions. But what is striking about Johanna Beyer’s music is not only the historical context that gave rise to it, but also its spirit of experimentation, which it shares with so much of the American modern music of that time. This experimentation is expressed in the radical approaches to sound, the overt structural devices and the compositional processes that make explicit the thinking behind the music. This, on occasion, lends the music a rawness, and even stark power.