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Artist
Johanna Beyer
12+ albums
experimentalgermanpianoClassicalcomposer
about
Johanna Beyer was born in Leipzig, Germany, but very little is known about her life prior to her move to the United States in 1923/4. She sang for three years at the Leipziger Singakademie and graduated from the Deutscher Konservatorien and Musikseminare, having studied piano, harmony, theory, counterpoint, singing, and dancing. Colleagues in New York recalled that her pianism and musicianship were excellent and that her musical training seemed traditional and solid. She spent 1911–1914 in America, though nothing is known of her activities during those years. Returning to the U.S. in 1923 (according to the biographical notes she provided in a Composers’ Forum concert program), she studied at the Mannes College of Music, receiving two degrees by 1928. She taught piano to support herself, and may have taught at Greenwich House Music School, but struggled to make ends meet, resorting at times to WPA work and Ladies’ Home Aid. In the late 1920s or early thirties she began studying with Ruth Crawford, Charles Seeger, and Dane Rudhyar and in 1934 took Henry Cowell’s percussion class at the New School for Social Research. Her musical life during these years was intertwined with Seeger, Crawford, Cowell, John Cage, and others in this modernist circle such as Jessie Baetz, a now-forgotten composer and painter who studied with Beyer. Though she was largely ignored as a composer, even by the experimental music community in New York, she did have a number of important performances. The
top songs
1
Music of the Spheres
1,3372Suite for Clarinet I: I. Presto
2003Suite for Clarinet I: II. Largo
1234Suite for Clarinet I: III. Moderato
1145Suite for Clarinet I: IV. Rallentando
1116String Quartet No. 1: I. Allegro
1087Bees
968String Quartet No. 1: II. Lento
969suite for violin and piano: iii
9410Movement For Double Bass And Piano
91albums
Johanna Beyer: Sticky Melodies
New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media: Women In Electronic Music - 1977
Sticky Melodies
Johanna Beyer: Music for Woodwinds
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Sticky Melodies - CD 1
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An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music / Second A-Chronology 1936-2003
Crawford -9 Preludes (Cahill)
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Sticky Melodies - CD 2
Modern American Bass
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Crawford Seeger: 9 Preludes; Beyer: Dissonant Counterpoint, Gebrauchs-Musik
Restless, Endless, Tactless
New Music For Electronic And Recorded Media