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. ALEXANDRA COGHLAN, ​The Spectator Broad resists heralding her composers as moral heroes... QUARTETmakes a forceful case for re-establishing these four women as composers of note.

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Radio 3 in Concert interval talks, from 2018 (Discussions about music by composers including Sibelius and Nielsen) Doreen Carwithen (b.1922): One of Britain’s first woman film composers who scored Elizabeth II’s coronation film, her success hid a 20-year affair with her married composition tutor . Ideas: Beethoven’s Scowl on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 22 Sept. 2020 (Guest academic in discussion about Beethoven’s impact on music history)

Scaramouche, Scaramouche: Sibelius on Stage’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 145/2 (2020), 417-456

Due to be published in Spring 2023, Quartet will be a radical feminist history of four ‘trailblazing’ women composers. 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.DEBBIE WISEMAN Wonderful... A brilliant introduction to Ethel Smyth and her fellow musical pioneers, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen: so neglectedand so deserving.

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. In focusing on Carwithen’s achievements as a film composer, Broad plays down Lutyens’s pioneering work in the film industry. She also claims, as do many others, that when Clarke and five other string players joined the Queen’s Hall Orchestra in 1913, they were “the first women in England to be employed in a professional orchestra”. In fact, women had been playing in professional orchestras for many years. Record Review, BBC Radio 3, 10 Dec. 2022 (Review of new recordings including works by Laura Netzel, Undine Smith Moore, Dobrinka Tabakova and Jean Sibelius) To mark International Women’s Day, join us for a celebration of the lives, loves, adventures and trailblazing musical careers of four extraordinary women – Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen – the subjects of Leah Broad’s new book Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World.

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Leah Broad’s magnificent group biography resurrects these forgotten voices, recounting lives of rebellion, heartbreak and ambition, and celebrating their musical masterpieces. Lighting up a panoramic sweep of British history over two World Wars, Quartet revolutionises the canon forever. Her book appears at a timely moment. Modernism has lost its cachet, and women composers are increasingly well represented in musical life (as witness the King’s choice of composers of the new pieces for his coronation, of which almost half are women). These four composers in particular are enjoying a revival. To say that they changed the musical world might be a stretch; to say they blazed a trail, which scores of other women are now turning into a highway, is surely praise enough. Nicola’s passion for chamber music has led to a wide range of partnerships, in duos as well as larger ensembles. She has won both the chamber music and solo awards in the Royal Overseas League Music Competition. A stellarwork of social and music history sprinkled with emotional dashes of love, sex, and politics... In her first book, a vibrantnarrative, music historian Broad redefines whom musicians could be and what they could do. Broad paints vivid, at times over-imagined, pictures of all four women and the worlds in which they lived and worked. She deftly interweaves their stories in a chronological tapestry, although she opens the book in 1930 with Ethel Smyth, then in her seventies, conducting the Metropolitan Police Band in musical works including a piece by the then 32-year-old Dorothy Howell.