Beach the modernist?

Abstract Beach A Modernist? How Can That Be? No discussion of her as a composer has ever judged her anything but a Victorian, a late Romantic composer and, during her later years, an anachronism in a new age. What has been almost uni versally ignored has been the adventurousness of some of Beach’s music writ ten during her last decades, at a time oflife when creative artists are expected instead to become more conservative. It is ironic that, while exploring modernism’s less extreme aspects in her music, she rejected the new music in her discourse. Perhaps nowhere in her life and work has the conflict between her Victorian mores and her musical practice been more clearly defined.