Dr Broad added: ‘We’re at a turning point in classical music. Thanks to years of campaigning, women composers are slowly being better represented in our concerts and recordings. These performances are showing us just how much incredible music we’ve been missing and how limited our histories have been.‘

Although Broad is a passionate advocate for these women’s music, convincingly arguing that it should be heard far more, she never really explains how her chosen women might have changed their or our musical worlds – or even what changing the musical world might mean. Given the book’s title, this is a fundamental flaw. Her book appears at a timely moment. Modernism has lost its cachet, and women composers are increasingly well represented in musical life (as witness the King’s choice of composers of the new pieces for his coronation, of which almost half are women). These four composers in particular are enjoying a revival. 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. British Pianist Nicola Eimer has performed as a soloist and chamber music across Europe, Asia and America and has played at the major UK venues including the Barbican and Wigmore Hall. 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.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. 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.

Fenella Humphreys, winner of the 2018 BBC Music Magazine Instrumental Award, has attracted critical admiration and audience acclaim with the grace and intensity of her remarkable performances. Clear, happy, and naïve: Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Music for As You Like It’, Music & Letters, Vol. 99/3 (2018), 352-385 Debut biographer Leah Broad will introduce this quartet of composers. The evening will feature musical interludes, performed by 97 Ensemble, including: 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. Quartet adds to what we knew of Smyth, and provides the first detailed biographies of its other subjects. But it is a book of reactionary taste that sets up a false opposition between its crude conceptions of modernism (“dissonant, jarring”) and non-modernism (“memorable, singable”). The latter is the chief musical territory of Quartet and clearly Broad’s comfort zone. So her wider aim, of making “an unapologetic case for the importance of women in music history”, is weakened by the fact that her subjects are never shown in a larger context attentive or sympathetic to those women who did embrace the musical avant garde. What she deems the “aggressive styles” of Elisabeth Lutyens or Elizabeth Maconchy are given brief cameos; radical innovators such as Priaulx Rainier, Ruth Crawford Seeger and many others are totally absent. As Broad herself concludes, in an epilogue of sobering statistics about gender imbalance in classical music, there is a great deal more to say.Ifthis sounds like a book for classical music buffs, it isn't. If it sounds rather worthy, again, trust me, it isn't... It's fast-paced, engaging, and an absolute riotat times. I laughed out loud... Quartetis a fascinating and compellingread but, just as importantly, a hugely enjoyableone. Record Review, BBC Radio 3, 5 Feb. 2022 (Reviewing Paavo Berglund conducting Sibelius's Symphonies) Winner of the 2015 Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism, Leah’s writing has appeared in outlets including the Guardian, Observer, BBC Music Magazine, Huffington Post, and The Conversation. She has written articles and programme notes for institutions including Glyndebourne, London Chamber Orchestra, Longborough Festival Opera, the Wigmore Hall, Oxford Lieder Festival, Birmingham Symphony Hall, and the Elgar Festival. Shaping the Narrative: Music for a Public’, The Routledge Companion to Applied Musicology ed. Christopher Dromey (Routledge), forthcoming

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.I teach music history, music analysis, and musical thought and scholarship. Within these areas I focus particularly on music and gender, and musical multimedia. Broad paints vivid, at times over-imagined, pictures of all four women and the worlds in which they lived and worked. She deftly interweaves their stories in a chronological tapestry, although she opens the book in 1930 with Ethel Smyth, then in her seventies, conducting the Metropolitan Police Band in musical works including a piece by the then 32-year-old Dorothy Howell. The lives, loves, adventures and trailblazing musical careers of four extraordinary women from a stunning debut biographer. This week, Faber publishes Leah Broad’s ‘Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World’ — which delves into the lives, loves, adventures and trailblazing musical careers of four extraordinary but largely forgotten musicians and composers. It serves to remind us, writes Clare Wadd, that music was never exclusively a man’s world. 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.’

Leah was selected as a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker in 2016, so is frequently on the BBC discussing her research. As a public speaker, she has appeared at events including the BBC Proms, Elgar Festival, Oxford Lieder Festival, Southbank Festival, Being Human Festival, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Free Thinking Festival, and Hay Festival.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. ALEXANDRA HARRIS Aninspiring read​, illuminating fourextraordinary women who forged careers in music through passion and determination. How Four Women Changed the Musical World is the subtitle of this passionate biography of four notable women composers of late 19th- and 20th-century Britain. The author, Leah Broad, is an academic who’s made it her life’s mission to champion women composers.