James Beale was born in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, in 1924. He received his A.B. degree from Harvard in 1945 and a M.Mus. from Yale in 1947. His teachers were Irving Fine, Aaron Copland, Walter Piston and Richard Donovan. He joined the faculty of the University of Washington in 1948 as a teacher of composition, and has been Professor-Emeritus of that institution since 1994. He was Visiting Professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, 1969-70.

Honors include a TIME "Newsmaker of Tomorrow" award for the city of Seattle (1953), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1958-59). In 1990, Beale was honored as "composer of the year" for Washington State by the National and State Music Teachers Association. A CD if his Ballade for Viola and Strings is recorded by Eric Shumsky, violist and conductor, under the Ambassador Label.