Johanna Beyer

Johanna Magdalena Beyer (Leipzig, 11 July 1888 – New York, 9 January 1944) was a German-born composer who spent almost her entire career in the United States. Her work belongs to the New York avant-garde of the 1930s, a milieu to which her music is especially naturally suited, although during her lifetime she received little attention from her fellow composers.

She arrived in the United States around 1924, where she studied with Dane Rudhyar, Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford. She maintained a close working relationship with Cowell, assisting him as an administrative assistant during the years he was imprisoned at San Quentin. Between roughly 1932 and 1940 she composed very prolifically, producing a catalogue that encompasses orchestral, chamber and choral music, songs and pieces for solo instrument.

Her works of the early 1930s, particularly those written for piano, reflect the influence of Crawford and Seeger in their use of dissonant counterpoint. Her pieces for percussion are considered especially innovative. The two string quartets combine a formalist tendency with a rather peculiar sense of musical humour. During her lifetime, however, her compositions were performed very rarely; the only work published in her lifetime was IV (1936), included in Cowell's New Music Edition.

Her legacy has been recovered over the past few decades, thanks above all to the edition of her selected works coordinated by L. Polansky, begun in 1994. She is now regarded as a singular figure in interwar American experimental music, whose output remained largely unpublished and forgotten.