Welcome to the BLOOM listening guide.
About the program: Bloom
Bloom explores two remarkable piano suites inspired by flowers and the natural world: From Grandmother’s Garden by Amy Beach and Blumenleben (The Life of Flowers) by Dora Pejačević. Each suite is comprised of miniature pieces named after individual flowers, inviting us to wander through a musical garden.
At first glance, perhaps flowers seem an unlikely subject for serious musical expression. Yet Beach and Pejacevic transform floral subjects into expressive musical portraits. Their music not only evokes the physical qualities of each flower (i.e. their movement, fragrance, growth habit), but also the symbolic meanings flowers carried in Western culture through the Victorian “language of flowers.”
These works are not simply works about flowers; ultimately, they are explorations of how music can transform the natural world into a space for reflecting on memory, emotion, and human experience.
Like a garden, these intimate pieces encourage attentive observation. You may find the following categories helpful as you listen:
An invitation to listen to:
how the music captures the physical qualities of each flower
how the music captures each flower’s symbolic and emotional associations
how each miniature contributes to a larger journey across the suite
how the musical ideas develop within each piece
From Grandmother’s Garden
Amy Beach
Year composed: 1922
Dedication: Lillian Buxbaum
Movements: Morning Glories, Heartsease, Mignonette, Rosemary and Rue, Honeysuckle
Composed in 1922 during a residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, Amy Beach's From Grandmother's Garden is a suite of five floral miniatures. The title itself immediately evokes female lineage and memory. Rather than depicting Grandmother's Garden as a single landscape, Beach offers flowers from that garden—a collection that invites listeners to imagine flowers gathered from that place. As musicologist Adrienne Fried Block observes, though the harmony is distinctly modern, the title suggests "a sentimental look backward," encouraging us to hear the suite through the lens of memory.
The flowers Beach chooses would have been familiar to many early twentieth-century listeners. Morning glories, heartsease, mignonette, rosemary and rue, and honeysuckle all carried well-established symbolic associations through the Victorian "language of flowers." Their selection therefore functions on multiple levels: each flower is both a botanical subject and a cultural symbol that evokes ideas such as comfort, remembrance, affection, regret, and devotion.
Gardens occupy a unique relationship to time. Unlike a photograph or a monument, they are continually renewed: familiar flowers return each year while never blooming in exactly the same way twice. Beach's imagined garden seems to inhabit this same cyclical conception of time. Beach assembles flowers from different seasons, and perhaps even different moments of the day. The suite opens with Morning Glories, whose blossoms famously unfurl with the sunrise, and concludes with Honeysuckle, a flower celebrated for its evening fragrance.
“For Lillian Buxbaum with the love and best wishes of Amy M. Beach”
The Dedication
From Grandmother's Garden is dedicated to the American mezzo-soprano Lillian Buxbaum, one of Amy Beach's closest friends and artistic collaborators. While the title looks to an older generation of women, the dedication honors her younger friend. In their correspondence, flowers often appear: postcards depicting daisies, carnations, tulips, alongside everyday observations about the natural world. Other floral works that Beach dedicated to Lillian include “Dark Garden” and “May Flowers.”
The postcards and greeting cards pictured above are drawn from the Amy Beach Papers at the University of New Hampshire. In March 2025, I had the opportunity to spend several days at the University of New Hampshire, exploring Amy Beach's correspondence, postcards, manuscripts, and personal papers. Flowers appear time and again—not only in her music, but also in her letters, postcards, gifts, and her everyday life.
From Grandmother’s Garden
Morning Glories
Heartsease
Mignonette
Rosemary and Rue
Honeysuckle
“…the sea was a ‘heavenly blue’ — like the morning glories…”
Amy Beach to Lillian Buxbaumsprawling nature - sevenths (slowed down and then a tempo)
opening up towards the sun (directional)
Morning Glories
Heartsease
“Communication was top-notch and the final outcome was even better than we imagined. A great experience all around.”
Mignonette
“Every detail was thoughtfully executed. We're thrilled with the outcome.”
Rosemary and Rue
Honeysuckle
A note on gender
The prominence of flowers and gardens in the music of women composers reflects more than personal taste. It also reveals the gendered realities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As musicologist Denise Von Glahn observes, women's musical engagement with nature often "reflected the boundaries of what was considered a woman's sphere" (Music and the Skillful Listener).
While the wilderness was frequently imagined as a masculine space of exploration and conquest, gardens were associated with domestic life and feminine accomplishment. For many women composers, these cultivated landscapes became familiar sites of observation and creativity. Floral character pieces also aligned with the expectations of the salon, and were considered appropriate for women composers.
Rather than limiting artistic expression, however, composers such as Amy Beach and Dora Pejačević transcend decorative conventions and use flowers as a means to create psychologically rich character pieces.