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

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Dorothy Howell (b.1898): A prodigy who shot to fame at the 1919 Proms, her reputation as the ‘English Strauss’ never dented her modesty; on retirement, she tended Elgar’s grave alone. Oliver Soden is the author of Michael Tippett: The Biography (Orion) and Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), published later this month 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 .

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. My previous projects have focused on twentieth-century theatre music in the Nordic countries. I am especially interested in the roles that music and sound played in productions, and the way this impacts on how plays were interpreted. I wrote my thesis on theatre productions for which music was written by Jean Sibelius, Ture Rangström, and Wilhelm Stenhammar. Viewing the music as an integral part of the production, I looked at how music was involved in the attempt to build a ‘people’s theatre’ in Sweden. Leah was selected as a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker in 2016, so is frequently on the BBC discussing her research. As a public speaker, she has appeared at events including the BBC Proms, Elgar Festival, Oxford Lieder Festival, Southbank Festival, Being Human Festival, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Free Thinking Festival, and Hay Festival.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.

For me, Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata is one of those pieces. I was having a miserable day and was sat in an optician’s waiting room with a migraine. I’d put on a podcast to try to distract myself from the world wavering disconcertingly around me, but I wasn’t really paying attention to it. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. 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.HELEN PANKHURST With original research and a powerful sense of purpose. Broad brings four brave and creative lives into fascinating counterpoint. Music history after 1750, music & gender, theatre music, British music, Nordic music, women in music, music analysis. Research Interests Music Matters, BBC Radio 3, 4 Mar. 2023 (Live International Women's Day coverage, discussing Quartet) BBC Proms, BBC Four, 29 Jul. 2022 (Expert guest for TV broadcast of the 'Sea' Prom featuring Carwithen, Vaughan Williams and Grace Williams) Due to be published in Spring 2023, Quartet will be a radical feminist history of four ‘trailblazing’ women composers.

Dr Leah Broad, a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford, is currently writing a group biography of Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen for Faber. When the eldest of the women, Smyth, died in 1944, the youngest, Carwithen, was 21. It was Smyth who was the most radical of the four, loudly challenging assumptions about women’s musical capabilities and refusing to be the meek woman she was expected to be. 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.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. A graduate of New York’s Juilliard School, Nicola held a Fulbright Scholarship to study with Joseph Kalichstein. She previously studied in London with Danielle Salamon, and then with Christopher Elton at the Royal Academy of Music, where she was subsequently awarded a Fellowship and then nominated an Associate of the Academy. 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.

Quartet by music historian Leah Broad is a group biography of four female classical musicians and composers — Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen — whose combined lives spanned 150 years from the 1850s to the early 2000s. All four were hugely talented and famous in their day, yet have been all but written out of musical histories which focus on their male contemporaries like Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten; to the extent they are included, they’re reduced to muses and footnotes. Quartet serves to remind us that music was never exclusively a man’s world, and that, ‘if we choose it, music histories could be filled with the notes of surprising, exciting and delightfully difficult women. It’s time their stories were told.’ ERICA JEAL, ​The Guardian In this absorbinggroup biography, Broad deftly handles the complexities of different lives and personalities... Broad has a rare gift for eloquent evocation of the music itself and answers the key question (was the work any good?) resoundingly in the affirmative,making a persuasive case for a revision and expansion of the musical canon. Dorothy Howell (b.1898):A prodigy who shot to fame at the 1919 Proms, her reputation as the ‘English Strauss’ never dented her modesty; on retirement, she tended Elgar’s grave alone. Quartet runs chronologically and begins with Ethel, who was best known for her operas. She was a trailblazing queer Victorian composer, who rebelled against the few roles, like teaching, permitted to musical Victorian women, instead battling her father to study in Leipzig, to have a career and to earn her own living. Women before her had composed, but Ethel was the first to demand equal treatment and for her work not to be judged differently because of her gender. These are certainly stories that need to be told; stories of women who created bodies of often remarkable, beautiful and powerful music. Broad creates compelling, readable narratives underpinned, as one would expect from an Oxford University musicologist, with considerable research.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.