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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? 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. Research communication forms a huge part of my work. I’m currently writing a group biography of Smyth, Clarke, Howell and Carwithen for Faber & Faber, and was a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and winner of the 2015 Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism. 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 .
Leah Broad is an award-winning music writer and historian. Currently a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, she specialises in twentieth century music and particularly women in music. Her first book, Quartet, is a group biography of four women composers — Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell, and Doreen Carwithen. However, this is not an academic book. There is no assumption of technical musical knowledge, and lives are carefully placed in wider political and social contexts. Broad perhaps tells us more about these women’s relationships than their music, from Smyth’s long procession of female lovers, through Clarke’s prolonged affair with a married man and Howell’s resolute singledom, to Carwithen’s bewildering devotion to Alwyn. Ethel Smyth (b.1858):Famed for her operas, this trailblazing queer Victorian composer was a larger-than-life socialite, intrepid traveller and committed Suffragette. You can read interviews with Leah about Quartetin The Times, The London Magazine, The Strad, Feminist Book Cluband Gramophone, or listen on Presto Music, LostLadies of Lit, and ABC Australia.There's an extract of the book available on Unseen Histories, andyou can listen to musical highlights from Quartet here. 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.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. The lives, loves, adventures and trailblazing musical careers of four extraordinary women from a stunning debut biographer. Clear, happy, and naïve: Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Music for As You Like It’, Music & Letters, Vol. 99/3 (2018), 352-385 Book Chapters 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
The book’s most moving passages come when the “shining threads” of friendship are pulled apart. Quartet’s outlier is Doreen Carwithen, the prolific film composer born much later than the rest. Her story follows the beautifully egalitarian tale of Rebecca Clarke’s marriage to James Fiskin; by contrast, Carwithen, who changed her name to Mary Alwyn by deed poll, had her romantic life marred by isolation and self-immolation, as she fell deeply, secretly and completely in love with the great-grandfather of Taylor Swift’s boyfriend (who also taught Carwithen composition). The one-sidedness of their romantic correspondences, the suppression of her compositional activities until after his death, and her utter dedication to her husband’s boundlessly Byronic projects (which could carry flagrantly misogynistic sentiment) is a deeply tragic, “I Can Fix Him” tale for the ages. That Quartet has been supported by the William Alwyn Foundation shows an organization braver than the man himself, who comes across as an utter rotter. “I keep on using the word ‘brilliant,’ but I can’t think of any other word because I had quite exceptional gifts,” he once told a biographer. 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. There are some pieces of music that are so extraordinary you remember exactly where you were the first time you heard them. 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. MIRANDA SEYMOUR The characters are fascinating, the composition is brilliant: a finely developed musical quartet in literary form.Carwithen was in many ways the most conventional, giving up her own composing career to promote and nurture composer William Alwyn, her demanding and often unpleasant married lover and later her husband.
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. 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. ALEXANDRA HARRIS Aninspiring read, illuminating fourextraordinary women who forged careers in music through passion and determination. Rebecca Clarke: Down by the Salley Gardens (voice and piano) and Viola Sonata I, Impetuoso (Viola and piano)Scaramouche, Scaramouche: Sibelius on Stage’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 145/2 (2020), 417-456 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 . 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) 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
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