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

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Amanda Maier: Violin Concerto in D Minor, Piano Quartet in E Minor, Swedish Tunes and Dances; Sonata for Violin and Piano, Four Songs; Works for Piano’, 19th-Century Music Review (published online 7 May 2019), 1-5 Broad's eye for character is allied to a way of describing musicthat makes you want to hear it immediately... readable and inspiring. 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. Although Quartet shines a bright light on the prejudices and obstacles faced by women in the music industry, it does not show them to be victims. Yet, admittedly all four women were white, English, well-educated, middle-class and all experienced some form of establishment acclaim during their careers. All, save for Clarke, were staunch Conservatives. So while we can admire their personal subversiveness, what does this tell us about the wider social, political and sexual context of both the musical and wider world of the time? Record Review, BBC Radio 3, 28 Nov. 2020 (Review of new recordings of works by Jean Sibelius, Kalevi Aho, Erkki-Sven Tüür)

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. Rebecca Clarke, ‘one of the first female players in a professional orchestra’. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/AlamyLeah 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. HELEN PANKHURST With original research and a powerful sense of purpose. Broad brings four brave and creative lives into fascinating counterpoint. This was the question that, nearly a decade later, led me to write Quartet. There are so many phenomenal pieces that are still very little-known now, and the thing that links all of them is the gender of their composer. These women deserve to be known and for their music to be heard.

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. Debut biographer Leah Broad will introduce this quartet of composers. The evening will feature musical interludes, performed by 97 Ensemble, including: Approaching Incidental Music: "Reflexive Performance" and Meaning in Till Damaskus (III)', Journal of the Royal Musical Association, forthcomingHow did you approach the research for this book? Primary sources such as letters, diaries and memoirs are rendered in the first person and invite readers into the worlds of Ethel, Rebecca, Dorothy, and Doreen. How conscious were you, as an historian, of presenting these sources in such an absorbing and vivid way? Music history after 1750, music & gender, theatre music, British music, Nordic music, women in music, music analysis. Research Interests

There are some pieces of music that are so extraordinary you remember exactly where you were the first time you heard them. So many. This is a world of opportunity – there are so many women to champion. I’m currently writing book two, so watch this space!

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The first, Ethel Smyth, is the most familiar thanks partly to the fact that her life makes such a good story. A tweed-suited, cigar-puffing suffragette whose lovers included Emmeline Pankhurst and Virginia Woolf, she courted ridicule from the all-male musical establishment – “the Machine”, as she called it – yet self-promotion brought her considerable success: her opera Der Wald was, in 1903, the first by a woman to be performed at the august Metropolitan Opera in New York (and the only one until Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin in 2016). The scene of Smyth in Holloway prison conducting her fellow suffragette inmates with a toothbrush as they paraded around the prison yard has been recounted many times before, but Broad goes far beyond that here: the tenderness of her letters, and the mixture of rash temper and tenacity with which she bore her disappointments, reveal a still more intriguing character. Hidden Women: Silenced Scores' Sunday Feature, BBC Radio 3, 23 Jan. 2022 (Presenting feature on British women and modernism) 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.