Quartet: How Four Women Changed The Musical World - 'Magnificent' (Kate Mosse)

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I’m a historical musicologist, and all my work focuses on unfamiliar histories. I’m fascinated by the people and music who are at the margins of histories about Western Art Music. Currently, my research is focused on women composers in twentieth century Britain. I’m working particularly on four composers — Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell, and Doreen Carwithen. The project establishes their relative significance in their lifetimes, explores how this changes our narratives about British music of this period, and looks at how their music has been received since their death. In their time, these women were celebrities. They composed some of the century’s most popular music and pioneered creative careers; but today, they are ghostly presences, surviving only as muses and footnotes to male contemporaries like Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten – until now. ALEXANDRA HARRIS Aninspiring read​, illuminating fourextraordinary women who forged careers in music through passion and determination. Radio 3 Time Travellers, regularly from 2019-2021 (Short segments on music history, mainly about women in music)

Hidden Women: Silenced Scores' Sunday Feature, BBC Radio 3, 23 Jan. 2022 (Presenting feature on British women and modernism) And they certainly need championing, because they’ve had to battle against a male-dominated profession which has denigrated and belittled them for centuries. Women were considered too physically delicate and emotionally unstable to muster the sustained effort needed for a symphony or a concerto. A charming little salon song or piano “character piece” was the most that could be expected from them. Even really gifted ones who tried to break free, such as Clara Schumann, eventually had to admit defeat.With a panoramic sweep – encompassing the suffragette movement and two world wars, from London to New York – Dr Broad’s majesticgroup biography resurrects their extraordinary lives and music for a new generation.’ Quartet has been reviewed in the Guardian, New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Telegraph, Financial Times, Sunday Times, ​ The Spectatorand The SpectatorWorld, The New Statesman, Caught by the River, VANMagazineand Country Life. It has received a starred review from Kirkus, was featured in the Sunday Timesand on the QI podcast No such thing as a fish, selected as the London Review Bookshop's Book of the Week, as a book to look out for in 2023 by both the Observerand The Scotsman, and chosen by Kate Mosse as one of her top 15 non-fiction books. Rebecca Clarke (b.1886):This talented violist and Pre-Raphaelite beauty was one of the first women hired by a professional orchestra in London, later celebrated for her modernist experimentation. Broad's eye for character is allied to a way of describing musicthat makes you want to hear it immediately... readable and inspiring.

Ethel was brave and eccentric and had passionate friendships with a number of women during her life, including Emmeline Pankhurst, who she taught to throw stones at targets on her local golf course, and Virginia Woolf. With a different family she might have been sectioned for her boldness and refusal to conform, and my thoughts turn to the women who were, and to those who didn’t have enough fight in them, or who just didn’t succeed against such huge odds, and to all their combined missing music (and art and writing). Marriage too put an end to careers, so it’s unsurprising that only two of Quartet’s four married, and neither until their fifties. Shakespeare in Sweden: Wilhelm Stenhammar and Modern Theatre Music', The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music ed. Mervyn Cooke & Christopher Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 479-507 Broad’s quartet were not lone voices. In fact, one of the surprising things we learn from this book is how numerous women composers were in this country. One or two, such as the modernists Elizabeth Maconchy and Elizabeth Lutyens, have a fairly secure if occasional presence in concert life. One extraordinary British female composer not mentioned is Daphne Oram, a mainstay of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop for decades, whose Still Point of 1950 has a claim to be the first piece in history to combine live orchestra and live electronics. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.Leah is a public historian at the University of Oxford. She researches twentieth century music, particularly women in music, and regularly works with performers and institutions to programme and contextualise marginalised historical figures. An Unconventional Teacher' Sunday Feature, BBC Radio 3, 9 Oct. 2022 (Presenting a feature on women taught by Vaughan Williams) JESSICA DUCHEN, TheSunday Times Engaging... Broad has a vivid turn of phrase, conjuring up images in a handful of words... Most importantly of all, she describes the daily battles these women had to fight. There are some pieces of music that are so extraordinary you remember exactly where you were the first time you heard them.

This article was amended on 10 March 2023 to further clarify it is Leah Broad’s view that Benjamin Britten’s operas “often focused on the working classes”, and that this is an assessment the reviewer contests. None of these women are part of the musical canon, despite the valiant efforts of performers and scholars, in the way their British male contemporaries were. Elgar is heard rather than Smyth, and Delius rather than Clarke. Britten is given many more performances than either Howell or Carwithen.Winner of the 2015 Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism, Leah’s writing has appeared in outlets including the Guardian, Observer, BBC Music Magazine, Huffington Post, and The Conversation. She has written articles and programme notes for institutions including Glyndebourne, London Chamber Orchestra, Longborough Festival Opera, the Wigmore Hall, Oxford Lieder Festival, Birmingham Symphony Hall, and the Elgar Festival.