Priscilla Alden Beach City Trees
Priscilla Alden Beach City Trees Program Notes
A descendant of 1620s Mayflower passengers John & Priscilla Alden, Priscilla Alden Beach spent her childhood in Rome, NY (near Syracuse), where her father owned a lumber company. She demonstrated commendable musical talent in school, which may have provided some impetus to study at Smith College, with its strong music department. From Smith, she went to Eastman in 1924, beginning her master’s degree in composition at that newly-minted school (it was founded in 1921 by Kodak’s George Eastman). Also starting in 1924 was its new director, composer and conductor Howard Hanson. Hanson conducted the Rochester Philharmonic in the premiere of this work on June 8, 1928 in Kilbourn Recital Hall – the stage would have been quite small! In an A-B-A form, the languid outer sections evoke light, breezy nature. The central, più mosso section, has a heroic feel to it, introducing its heraldic material in the trumpets and horns over tremolo strings. This material has reminded several listeners of Hanson’s 1930 Symphony No. 2, ‘Romantic,’ and there’s no doubt these musical ideas were discussed among the composition faculty and students. A fellowship at Juilliard in New York City followed, and then her career and life took other directions. Most of her compositions are lost, though they intriguingly include music for the “Silent Motion Picture Series” of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She co- authored books about pets with a Los Angeles radio evangelist John Hosford Hickey in the 1940s, was a laboratory technician at Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory, and worked at Shelton College in Cape May, NJ, directing Special Research.City Trees is an orchestral work by American composer Priscilla Alden Beach, inspired by the poem of the same name by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It is a lyrical and evocative piece that captures the resilience and beauty of trees growing in an urban environment.
Beach composed City Trees in the twentieth century as part of her output of orchestral and choral works. She was among a generation of American women composers who worked to establish their voices in a field dominated by men.
A typical performance lasts approximately 6 to 8 minutes.
Listen for the expressive orchestral writing that evokes both the urban setting and the natural world pressing through it. Beach's music has a poetic sensibility well suited to the imagery of Millay's poem.
Beach represents an important strand of American musical life — composers who worked outside the major metropolitan centers and whose music deserves wider recognition than it has typically received. Performances of her work contribute to the broader project of recovering underrepresented voices in the American concert repertoire.
