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

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They composed some of the century’s most popular music and pioneered creative careers; but today, they are ghostly presences, surviving only as muses and footnotes to male contemporaries like Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten – until now. Faber Members Event: join us on 9 March 2023 for an evening of words and music at St George’s Church, Bloomsbury, to mark the publication of Leah Broad’s Quartet. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. All experienced some form of establishment acclaim during their careers, and all, save for Clarke, were staunch Conservatives, with supreme faith in institutions (Smyth in the armed forces and monarchy, Howell in religion, Carwithen in marriage).

It’s an optimistic use of the past tense, as music histories continue to nervously cha-cha—forwards, backwards, side-to-side—between the heralding of the unsung and the comfort of the pre-known. 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.Like the figures they recount, historians themselves hold more agency than is traditionally assumed. But rejecting completeness as a goal while doing little to dislodge the function of the book (it could easily be subtitled “A History of Modern French Music,” or “A Guide to French Music”) actually makes things worse than if the book was through-composed. Technical terms are avoided completely but the challenge of creating informative description for the general reader is often dodged. Broad deftly weaves their stories together, showing how they were beneficiaries of an era when women were being granted more freedoms – but only up to a point. There are some pieces of music that are so extraordinary you remember exactly where you were the first time you heard them.

FLORA WILLSON , The Times Literary Supplement I defy any reader of Broad's splendid, necessary and absorbing book to remain unstirred by these uplifting , harrowing and troubling stories. Of course, things have changed enormously, yet Victorian Ethel building her Old Girls’ network of women patrons to counter the Old Boys’ one which worked against her, feels very modern. But I am unsure that the musical world – for Broad, classical music – was changed in any meaningful way by composers Ethel Smyth (b.

Quartet adds to what we knew of Smyth, and provides the first detailed biographies of its other subjects.

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. The most vivid of them is Smyth, who could be shockingly self-centred in her dealings with lovers – in a way which might remind us of certain male composers – and whose bisexual love-life was so complicated it’s a wonder she had any time left over for composing. Violinist and winner of the 2018 BBC Music Magazine Award Fenella Humphreys presents a new collaboration with Oxford historian Leah Broad which explores ‘lost voices’ through violin music. More troubling are some of Broad’s assumptions and omissions, such as her sidelining of the generation of UK women composers who were slightly younger than Howell but older than Carwithen. Smyth detested being banded with other female composers, and this book never really clarifies why its subjects should be put together.

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. Her radio work has spanned all the major stations, presenting shows on BBC Radio 1, 2, 6 and 5Live as well as Virgin Radio. With a panoramic sweep – encompassing the suffragette movement and two world wars, from London to New York – Dr Broad’s majesticgroup biography resurrects their extraordinary lives and music for a new generation. As Ethel’s story enters the late 1880s, we’re introduced to Rebecca Clarke, who grew up in Harrow, also with a domineering father who she had fight to follow her talent as a composer and violist.