Radio 3 Music Matters, 9 Mar. 2019 (Discussion about representations of women composers in the media and on academic syllabi)

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. 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) 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. The lives, loves, adventures and trailblazing musical careers of four extraordinary women from a stunning debut biographer.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. 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. 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​. Scaramouche, Scaramouche: Sibelius on Stage’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 145/2 (2020), 417-456

Broad’s quartet were not lone voices. In fact, one of the surprising things we learn from this book is how numerous women composers were in this country. One or two, such as the modernists Elizabeth Maconchy and Elizabeth Lutyens, have a fairly secure if occasional presence in concert life. One extraordinary British female composer not mentioned is Daphne Oram, a mainstay of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop for decades, whose Still Point of 1950 has a claim to be the first piece in history to combine live orchestra and live electronics.Almost brought to tears finishing @LeahBroad’s wonderful Quartet on the tube. A fierce work; truly a joyful read, bringing sentiments of solidarity, insight and hope. At last, here's issue number 3 of our occasional foray into print and paper. This issue of An Antidote To...

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.’ 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 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. My previous projects have focused on twentieth-century theatre music in the Nordic countries. I am especially interested in the roles that music and sound played in productions, and the way this impacts on how plays were interpreted. 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.

These are certainly stories that need to be told; stories of women who created bodies of often remarkable, beautiful and powerful music. Broad creates compelling, readable narratives underpinned, as one would expect from an Oxford University musicologist, with considerable research. With her playing described in the press as “ alluring”, “ unforgettable” and “a wonder”, Fenella is one of the UK’s most established and versatile violinists. She enjoys a busy career combining chamber music with solo work, performing in the most prestigious venues around the world. She is frequently broadcast on the BBC, Classic FM, Scala Radio and international radio stations. MIRANDA SEYMOUR The characters are fascinating, the composition is brilliant: a finely developed musical quartet in literary form. ANNALENA MCAFEE, ​Financial Times There's nothing shouty about Quartet, the musicologist Leah Broad's compelling group biography... The tone is restrained, but the quietly insistent patter of events, statistics, quotations and facts adds up by the end to a polemical roar.

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 on music history) Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell, and Doreen Carwithen were all white, English, well-educated, middle-class women, born into a country shaped by empire. 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). And yet, in the group’s particular relationship with what Smyth dubbed “the machine”—and the web of counter-networks they spun as a reaction to being shunned by an establishment of Old Boys—their subversive streaks begin to shine through.

Surprising absence

This article was amended on 10 March 2023 to further clarify it is Leah Broad’s view that Benjamin Britten’s operas “often focused on the working classes”, and that this is an assessment the reviewer contests. 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. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side.