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

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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.

An Unconventional Teacher' Sunday Feature, BBC Radio 3, 9 Oct. 2022 (Presenting a feature on women taught by Vaughan Williams) 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 .Rebecca Clarke, ‘one of the first female players in a professional orchestra’. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Oliver Soden is the author of Michael Tippett: The Biography (Orion) and Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), published later this month 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. Previously I’ve worked on incidental music in the Nordic countries. 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. A pioneering book about four pioneering women, and one of its many distinctions is to give each of them a strong individual identity while describing their common purpose and shared difficulties, and in the process magnificently expands the story of classical music.

Record Review, BBC Radio 3, 28 Nov. 2020 (Review of new recordings of works by Jean Sibelius, Kalevi Aho, Erkki-Sven Tüür)And then I heard an opening theme that was so arresting that I had to stop and listen. The viola swoops and soars, confident and powerful, conjuring up a fantastical world that seems to make everything else dull by comparison. It felt like this music was speaking directly to me, personally. I was so engrossed that I nearly missed my appointment. 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? Shaping the Narrative: Music for a Public’, The Routledge Companion to Applied Musicology ed. Christopher Dromey (Routledge), forthcoming

BBC Proms 2015: Gary Carpenter, Anders Hillborg, Ørjan Matre, Alissa Firsova, B Tommy Andersson’, TEMPO, Vol. 70/275 (2016), 84-5 Ideas: Beethoven’s Scowl on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 22 Sept. 2020 (Guest academic in discussion about Beethoven’s impact one music history) 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

I remain unconvinced that these four women changed the musical world. Programming and recording more of their music will certainly broaden and enrich the musical world. And this is what Broad seems to be suggesting. 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 . The lives, loves, adventures and trailblazing musical careers of four extraordinary women from a stunning debut biographer. LEAH BROAD is a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, specialising in twentieth-century music. She was a 2016 BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and in 2015 won the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism. She writes and speaks for Glyndebourne, London Chamber Orchestra and the BBC Proms, and she founded the Oxford Culture Review.

Ethel Smyth (b.1858):Famed for her operas, this trailblazing queer Victorian composer was a larger-than-life socialite, intrepid traveller and committed Suffragette. 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. KATE MOLLESON Subtly devastating... one of the author's serious achievements in Quartetis to insist on the ways in which her subjects...can be frustrating or disappointing or simply human... Hugely ambitious, beautifully written​. 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. Rebecca Clarke (b.1886): This talented violist and Pre-Raphaelite beauty was one of the first women ever hired by a professional orchestra, later celebrated for her modernist experimentation.