Johanna Magdalena Beyer was born in Leipzig, and studied piano, harmony, theory, counterpoint, singing, and dancing at German conservatories. She spent three years in the US between 1911 and 1914, listed as a bookkeeper on the ship manifest. The German-American composer and pianist immigrated to the USA in 1923 and completed her studies at the Mannes College of Music in New York in 1928. While earning her living as a piano teacher, Beyer attended classes by a number of prominent contemporary American composers. She belonged to the American “ultra-modernist” stylists together with artists such as John Cage and Henry Dixon Cowell. During his prison years, she acted as Cowell’s unsalaried secretary and also may have been in a romantic relationship with him. Beyer wrote some of the first female works for electronic instruments but earned little public acclaim for her compositions. Beyer’s major contribution to the development of new music are her compositions for percussion like her 1933 Percussion Suite, one of the earliest works for percussion as a solo instrument. In her later years, she suffered from the nervous disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS / Lou Gehrig’s Disease).
United States