My latest Music for a While includes three pieces by Amy Beach — two piano pieces and one song. That song is “Ah, Love, but a Day,” one of her Three Browning Songs (the poet in question being Robert Browning, not his wife, Elizabeth Barrett). And the piano pieces? “A Hermit Thrush at Eve” and “A Hermit Thrush at Morn.” (Should they be in the opposite order? Well, they’re not.)

Amy Beach was a New England composer who lived from 1867 to 1944. When I was growing up, she was known as “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach” — such a distinctive name. But it was right, I think, to accord her her own, and her full name is “Amy Marcy Cheney Beach.” That name is itself, I think, musical.

She heard sounds of the hermit thrush at the MacDowell Colony, where she spent many a summer. (This is an artists’ colony, or residency program, in Peterborough, N.H., founded in 1907 by the composer Edward MacDowell and his wife, Marian.)

The MacDowell Colony is now just “MacDowell.” Its board of directors changed the name in 2020, claiming that “colony” has “oppressive overtones.” I could talk for an hour about this or simply quote Bart Simpson: “Ay, caramba.”

While my podcast is Beach-heavy, I open with an organ piece by Johann Gottfried Walther, whose dates are almost exactly the same as Bach’s — 1684 to 1748. (Bach’s are 1685 to 1750.) Walther was, in fact, Bach’s cousin. Actual cousin.

Can you imagine being the cousin of Johann Sebastian Bach? And a composer?

I also have Beethoven, twice: in a concerto (a triple concerto) and a sonata (for violin and piano). (Actually, Beethoven called these pieces “sonatas for piano and violin.” Pianists are liable to point this out.)

If this is up your alley, check it out — again, here.