With great anticipation I slid Amy Beach’s Gaelic Symphony into my computer CD player moments after it arrived from Amazon.
“They must have called it ‘powerful’.” That was my first thought. She had to compose “powerfully” to convince them all that she had what it took to be a composer - like they told me I had to do when I was an art student: “paint powerfully.” No wimpy girly symphonies from Amy Beach. No wimpy feminine decorative art from Terry Bailey. Only I had defied them. I did not have powerful painting in me. I had no interest in standing in front of a canvas and throwing paint at it. And I could not afford a studio large enough to create stadium-sized paintings or sculpture like the power male artists did. continues on page 2
