David Stanley Smith, a native of Toledo, Ohio (1877), belongs to this New England group, for he was graduated from Yale University and since 1903 has been, first, instructor in the music department and later full professor. He has composed some excellent chamber music, and several of his string quartets were played by the famous Kneisel Quartet (1886–1917) which organization has had a generous share in improving musical taste in this country. Edward Burlingame Hill, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1872), is one of the professors of music at Harvard University. He has composed piano pieces, songs, and orchestral works, and has written many articles on music. MRS. H. H. A. BEACH PREPARES THE PATH FOR AMERICAN WOMEN One of the most important composers of the New England group, is Mrs. H. H. A. Beach (1867). She was Amy Marcy Cheney, an astonishing little child who before her second year sang forty tunes. Louis Elson tells that at the age of two she was taken to a photographer, and just as he was about to take the picture, she sang at the top of her voice, _See, the Conquering Hero Comes!_ She could improvise like the old classic masters, and could transpose Bach fugues from one key to another, at fourteen. When sixteen, she made her début as a pianist, and at seventeen she played piano concertos with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, also with Theodore Thomas’ orchestra. Mrs. Beach received her training in America. Her first work in large form was a mass sung in 1892 by the Handel and Haydn Society. She next composed a _scena_ and _aria_ for contralto and orchestra, sung with the New York Symphony Society. It was the first work by a woman and an American to be given at these concerts, which Walter Damrosch conducted. The next year, Mrs. Beach was invited to write a work for the opening of the woman’s building at the Chicago Columbian World’s Exposition. She has two piano concertos and a symphony (_The Gaelic_) to her credit, also a violin sonata, a quintet for flute and strings, many piano pieces and splendid songs among which must be mentioned _The Year’s at the Spring_, _June_, and _Ah, Love, but a Day_. Mrs. Beach prepared the way for other American women, not only by showing that women could write seriously in big forms, but also by her sympathetic encouragement of talent and sincerity wherever she finds it. Margaret Ruthven Lang (1867), daughter of B. J. Lang, is also a Boston composer. _Irish Mother’s Lullaby_ is the best known of her many art songs, in addition to which she has written an orchestral _Dramatic Overture_ which Arthur Nikisch played, when he was conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.