It’s a glaring truism but there are very few Cambridge Companions to female composers, and on that basis alone this book is most welcome. It feels like the culmination of a gargantuan endeavour, begun by Amy Beach herself – becoming and remaining a pianist-composer of standing at the turn of the 20th century – leading to the championing of her work and associated scholarship from the 1970s onwards. If we already have in mind a brief sketch of her career and music, the present volume, curated by E Douglas Bomberger, fills out that story thoroughly and will become a touchstone and starting point for musicians and scholars.

There are chapters on the topics of Beach’s biography and performance career; her position in the contexts of the American women’s club movement and the MacDowell artists’ colony; her relationships with publishers; the music itself, including keyboard, chamber, orchestral, choral and dramatic works, as well as songs; and a consideration of her posthumous reputation, as well as worklists and a selected bibliography.

We learn of Beach’s prodigious childhood talent, knowing the tunes to 40 songs by the age of one, harmonising lullabies at bedtime as a toddler, and playing Bach fugues and Chopin nocturnes at the age of seven; of her commitment to a life as a concert pianist, only to be held back by her mother; of her marriage at 18 to a husband of social standing who did not wish her to perform other than for the occasional charity concert, but who helped to set her up as a self-taught composer and introduced her to a publisher; of her relationships with women’s clubs and her collaborations with female musicians and contemporaneous poets. There are discussions of bound volumes of her choral works being rediscovered behind crates of tinned fruit in the crypt of St Bart’s church in New York, where she became a parishioner in the 1920s; and in-depth analyses of her works, including her widespread use of folk-song quotations, spanning the main genres and extending to 152 works with opus numbers.

I have two principal points of critique. First, I would have liked a selected discography, with a list of recommended recordings. This is not only because such a list would appeal to Gramophone readers. Beach was a performer of her own works and toured extensively with carefully chosen collaborators – she would have wanted us to hear her music! Secondly, while these chapters understandably err towards the factual, thorny issues are glossed over and not sufficiently problematised. The sociological question of ‘the place of women in classical music and upper-class family life during the turn of the twentieth century’ (page 180) is raised several times but never really examined. The problematic aspects of how she seemed to be controlled by her parents and later by her husband, denied lessons in piano and then in formal composition, are glossed over. Was Dr Beach altruistically supportive of her, or was she merely a valuable commodity, socially and financially? We are told that the sale of her song ‘Ecstasy’, Op 19, paid for the purchase of their house in Cape Cod, and that surprisingly she was not left a wealthy widow, since they had probably been living beyond their means. It is striking that she started giving concerts again as soon as her husband and mother died, quickly departing to Europe to gain more experience and secure an international reputation. There are many times when we arrive at a thread that needs to be pulled, only for an author to veer away rather than examine more closely. Clearly you can’t do everything in a single book, so let’s hope that this volume becomes the basis for deeper readings to emerge.

In her writings, Beach hints at the mixed blessing of having to put aside her concert career in order to compose, which did at least give her the time to master her craft and find her compositional voice. The MacDowell colony offered her much-needed ‘solitude and a studio of her own’ in which to work. I am reminded of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), with its message about what a woman – or any person – needs in order to write, to make, to create: time, some money, the opportunity to acquire an education, and a quiet room in which to work. This continues to resonate in our busy, digitally saturated and still unequitable age. What begins to emerge from this volume is a sense of a musician of true grit and principle, one who fought for what she wanted to achieve, and who advocated and agitated for women’s participation in the arts. If The Cambridge Companion to Amy Beach can bring us just a bit closer to an understanding of this clearly remarkable artist, then it has done its job.