In 1988, on the occasion of Essential Music's 100th Birthday Commemoration Concerts, a number of her former colleagues were interviewed in the hope of learning more about her enigmatic life. John Cage, Sidney Cowell, Lou Harrison, William Russell, Otto Luening, and others all offered similar recollections of Beyer. They knew her, but hardly knew her. She struck people as strange, difficult to know, and determined in her convictions. She is described as having been tall, angular, awkward and self-conscious. Though her English was very good, she is remembered as being extremely quiet, almost painfully shy. No one in her circle of colleagues felt close or intimate with her, and feel it is likely she was close to no one. She told others she had no family and did not maintain ties to relatives in Germany. Her pianism and musicianship is recalled as being excellent, and her musical training in Germany as traditional and solid.
Born in Leipzig on July 11, 1888, Beyer came to New York in 1924, one year after graduating from a German music conservatory at the age of 35. We can only wonder at what motives or artistic spirit compelled her to the New World and the struggles she endured. By 1928, she had two degrees from the Mannes College of Music, and in this period began studying composition with Dane Rudhyar, Ruth Crawford, Charles Seeger, and Henry Cowell. She became a friend and correspondent of Percy Grainger's. She earned her living by teaching piano, the profession listed on her death certificate. Though never listed as a faculty member, colleagues recall she long taught at Greenwich House Music School, perhaps as a substitute for Henry Cowell. From 1936 to 1940, during Henry Cowell's imprisonment in San Quentin, Beyer worked as Cowell's secretary. She helped manage the affairs of the New Music Editions, handled Cowell's correspondence and advocated his work. She had very little money, and some believe her income was supplemented by WPA work and Ladies Home Aid. From 1933 to 1936, her address was 39-61 43rd Street in Long Island City, Queens. In 1937, she moved to 40 Jane Street in Greenwich Village.
Otto Luening remembers Beyer as being devoted to the cause of contemporary music and active in the community, "always there to lick stamps and help". He recalls that others viewed her as "problematic" - not sure if her compositions were deliberately primitive or lacking in "technique".
Archives show Beyer was involved in concerts and events of the WPA Federal Music Project and Composers' Forum-Laboratory, the Central Manhattan Music Center, the League of Composers, and the New School. The first instance of her name in print is in Cowell's New Music Orchestra Series issue #5 of 1933, in which Beyer is credited with translating Carl Sandburg's Prayers of Steel into German for Ruth Crawford's Three Songs for Alto.
One of the first public performances of her music that we know of was on February 15, 1934, in one of Cowell's New Music Society of California concerts in San Francisco, as documented in Rita Mead's Henry Cowell's New Music 1925-1936. The work of "J.M. Beyer" was presented in a program that included works by Piston, Honegger, Copland, and Hindemith. The "Lentamente" from her Suite for Clarinet and Bassoon was played and reviewed in the San Francisco Examiner as a "doleful dull duet". In 1938, this movement and the Suite's "Allegro Ponderoso" were recorded and issued on the New Music Quarterly Recordings #1413A-B. On the flip side was Cowell'sTwo Chorales and Ostinato.
The first, and only publication of Beyer's music (apart from a reproduction of Music of the Spheres in Peter Garland's Soundings 7-8) was in the New Music Orchestra Series #18 of 1936, an edition devoted entirely to percussion music. Beyer's IV appeared along with music of Harold Davidson, Ray Green, William Russell, Gerald Strang, and the Dance Rhythms of the choreographer Doris Humphrey, as notated by Wallingford Riegger.
Beyer's music was twice featured on WPA Composers' Forum-Laboratory concerts, a series in which she also appeared as a pianist in the music of Cowell. On May 20, 1936, her half of a program included her Movement for Two Pianos, Three Songs for Soprano and Clarinet, String Quartet No. 1, and "excerpts from Piano Suites", possibly her just-completed Clusters. A New York Times review gave no assessment of the work. On May 19, 1937, she presented her Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, Suite for Clarinet and Bassoon, Suite for Violin and Piano, and again, "an excerpt" from a Piano Suite. The New York Herald Tribune described the works as "experimental in form and modernistic in harmony", and noted there as a "good-sized audience".
In the early 1940's, John Cage led concerts and tours of percussion music from Seattle and Northwestern University. The programs included music of Cage, Green, Russell, Lou Harrison, and two movements from Beyer's Three Movements for Percussion, "Endless" and "Restless". Beyer had composed the work in 1939 and dedicated it to Cage, whom she had met in the early 1930's in Cowell's percussion class at the New School.

Beyer died on January 9, 1944, her cause of death listed as "amyotrophic lateral sclerosis", or ALS, the onset of which occured in 1938. It was during these very years that ALS became famous as "Lou Gehrig's Disease", for killing baseball great Lou Gehrig of the Yankees in 1941. The last years of Beyer's life show little compositional activity, and in fact her last manuscripts are not in her hand, suggesting a friend or hired copyist assisted her because of her decreasing manual abilities. Beyer was confined to a bed in the House of the Holy Comforter in the Bronx for six months prior to her death.
If indeed Beyer suffered from ALS from 1938 until her death, then perhaps her purported alcoholism was an unkind diagnosis by observers who did not know of her affliction. ALS slowly attacks the nerves and muscles, affecting one's thought, slurring one's speech, and ultimately inhibiting the ability to walk and use one's hands. That such symptoms could be misconstrued as alcoholism seems quite likely given her lonely persona.
Since her death, performances of her work have been rare. Her solo oboe music and solo clarinet music has possibly received isolated performances. The Three Movements for Percussion and IV are known to have been performed by ensembles at the Oberlin Conservatory, the University of Illinois, and SUNY/Buffalo. Essential Music presented the first concerts devoted entirely to Beyer's music with two different programs on November 10 and 15, 1988, at Greenwich House in New York, to mark the 100th Anniversary of her birth. Since the 1988 concerts, a number of Beyer's works are regularly performed, although nearly forty works still await their premiere.

Beyer's works often share a determined austerity and brevity, with a conscious sense of understatement. Even when daringly experimental, her work has a strong formal sensibility. What appeared and appears to some as primitive, is, in any case, a disciplined focus on the development of single ideas and overall shapes, and an economy of scale and tools that proclaims a minimalist approach somewhere between Webern and Cage. Many of her works betray a sardonic sense of humor, and a hint of embittered mockery. Among the evidence that she indeed felt frustrated and indignant is that her major unfinished work was to be a political opera called Status Quo, in which she hoped to express the injustice of the time in which she was living.
Looking at a single Beyer score might inspire one to respond that it is a creative student composition, and it seems this is the response she usually encountered. Rarely did she have the opportunity for feedback from others on her scores or the trial and error learning process that comes from having works performed. Yet there are too many scores with the same sense of internal discipline and conscious definition of limits, for us not to recognize that she chose the nature of her work. She was, after all, an apparently courageous soul: a German by birth and musical training, who moved to New York as a single woman to devote her composition study and practice to the experimental vanguard.
Beyer's work includes a wide array of experimental ideas that sometimes resemble those of her colleagues in the 1930's, yet her incorporation of certain processes and techniques is highly individualized. The Suite for Clarinet(1932) is her earliest composition and includes unmetered continuums and metric modulation. The String Quartet No. 2 places a theme from Mozart's The Magic Flute amidst an Ivesian accompaniment. Its third movement renders the violins in 3/8 and the viola and cello in 2/4, while the fourth movement is continuous glissandi. Music of the Spheres, an interlude from her unfinished opera Status Quo, was composed for electrical instruments or strings with lion's roar and triangle. All intervals in the string parts are continuous glissandi, with the tempo a constant accelerando/rallentando.
The Percussion Suite of 1933 is one of the earliest works for percussion ensemble and explores the understated and quiet expressive possibilities of percussion in a manner quite different from what any other composers were doing. IV is composed for nine unspecified percussion instruments, and the work is a continuous state of flux in which tempo and volume are from the first beat to the last constantly ungoing gradual change. The March for 30 Percussion Instruments is one of the most gorgeous orchestrations for percussion ensemble ever composed, with metric and dynamic surprises rendering the title ironic. Finally, the Three Movements for Percussion, particularly the movement "Endless", contains processes and structures that take the genre of the percussion ensemble far beyond a focus on the rhythmic.
Some of the rare non-musical writings we have of Beyer are the three poems for her Songs for Soprano and Clarinet. While of dubious value in and of themselves as poems, much of their language poignantly reflects Beyer's life and yearnings, with an earnest optimism in eternity and a sacramental appreciation of nature and life. In retrospect, the tragedy and struggle of her life renders these poems very moving.

Restless thoughts of men, begging to be known, to be loved...
Stars, moons, suns - penetrating love...
To be a blossom - forthcoming fruitpromise...

We hope that for Johanna Beyer, the total eclipse has lifted, and that she has come to be.