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

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On a scorching summer's day, Clare Wadd undertakes a long-distance west London walk down Uxbridge Road It's been a strange...

HELEN PANKHURST With original research and a powerful sense of purpose. Broad brings four brave and creative lives into fascinating counterpoint.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) 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. I am a music historian working on music in the twentieth century. 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. They are the focus of my first book, Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World, published by Faber and Faber in 2023.

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. I completed my thesis on theatre music at Christ Church, where I was a lecturer from 2016-2019. Research communication forms a large part of my work - I was a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker in 2016, and I won the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism in 2015 for an article on Sibelius, one of the composers whose music I research. Undergraduate Teaching 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. Faber Members have access to live and online events, special editions and book promotions, and articles and quizzes through our weekly e-newsletter.

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. 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. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? 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.

A new kind of music biography, one embellished with intimate detail and nuance not found in the hagiographies of male composers written by men... it makes for captivating reading. In 1977, 90-year-old Rebecca Clarke was at Alice Tully Hall in Manhattan to hear a performance of her Viola Sonata, written more than half a century earlier. Clarke had been a successful composer, the Sonata her breakthrough work – and yet for most of the audience her music was still an unexpected discovery. “Had she not been a woman composer,” conceded the New York Times, “Miss Clarke might be heard more today.” Soon afterwards, Clarke reflected that there had always been people who could not believe that her muscular, modern, “unfeminine” music was written by a woman: “I take this opportunity,” she wrote wryly, “to emphasise that I do indeed exist.” Although Broad is a passionate advocate for these women’s music, convincingly arguing that it should be heard far more, she never really explains how her chosen women might have changed their or our musical worlds – or even what changing the musical world might mean. Given the book’s title, this is a fundamental flaw.

The oldest of her four composers, Ethel Smyth, born in 1858, was a doughty figure in the Suffragette movement, and during a period of imprisonment once conducted her fellow inmates in a rousing rendition of her own Suffragette anthem The March of the Women. Clarke, born nearly 30 years later, carved out an impressive performing as well as composing career, and astonished listeners with the daring modernism of her music. Dorothy Howells, a decade younger than Clarke, cultivated a rhapsodically romantic style tinged with chinoiserie which soon fell out of fashion, so despite early successes – such as the rapturously received premiere of her symphonic poem Lamia at the 1919 Proms – she slipped from view in later years. Doreen Carwithen, born in 1922, was the first notable film composer in Britain, and scored dozens of productions including the Pathé documentary about the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Fenella performs widely as a soloist. Her recent album of Sibelius’ solo works with BBC National Orchestra of Wales and George Vass has been featured in BBC Radio 3’s Building a Library, Gramophone Magazine’s Guide to the Concerto, and was Album of the Week on Scala Radio. 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.

It’s not complete erasure: Nichols interviews soprano Irène Joachim about Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” and organist Dame Gillian Weir about Messiaen. But rarely do women appear with complete—or even the majority of—creative agency. Not that Nichols is pursuing a particularly exclusive agenda: His study of music in Paris after the Great War, Harlequin Years, discusses Boulanger and Tailleferre, as well as the famed patron of the arts, Winnaretta Singer. That fact makes the scarcity of women in this larger collection all the more curious. “If we choose it, music histories could be filled with the notes of surprising, exciting and delightfully difficult women,” says Broad. Consciously or not, From Berlioz to Boulez makes its choice painfully clear. 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. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. 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. Radio 3 in Concert interval talks, from 2018 (Discussions about music by composers including Sibelius and Nielsen)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. 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. At last, here's issue number 3 of our occasional foray into print and paper. This issue of An Antidote To...