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

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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. 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. I completed my thesis on theatre music at Christ Church, where I was a lecturer from 2016-2019. Research communication forms a large part of my work - I was a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker in 2016, and I won the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism in 2015 for an article on Sibelius, one of the composers whose music I research. Undergraduate Teaching 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.

Smyth wrote copious memoirs; the other three women left less material, but still emerge brightly. After Clarke, we meet the unassuming Dorothy Howell, whose 1919 orchestral work Lamia brought her acclaim aged just 21 – and the support of the conductor Henry Wood, founder of the Proms and an important gatekeeper. After the second world war she settled into life away from the spotlight, writing mainly for children. Lastly there is Doreen Carwithen, a rising star as a student whose career was subsumed into that of her tutor William Alwyn, whom she would marry following a 20-year affair. Carwithen was elusive – even her own sister didn’t know she had been a very successful film composer until after her death. 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. Radio 3 in Concert interval talks, from 2018 (Discussions about music by composers including Sibelius and Nielsen) Ideas: Beethoven’s Scowl on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 22 Sept. 2020 (Guest academic in discussion about Beethoven’s impact one music history)

Sophie Fuller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Partners Nicola’s passion for chamber music has led to a wide range of partnerships, in duos as well as larger ensembles. She has won both the chamber music and solo awards in the Royal Overseas League Music Competition. Leah Broad’s magnificent group biography resurrects these forgotten voices, recounting lives of rebellion, heartbreak and ambition, and celebrating their musical masterpieces. Lighting up a panoramic sweep of British history over two World Wars, Quartet revolutionises the canon forever. 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.

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. ALEXANDRA HARRIS Aninspiring read​, illuminating fourextraordinary women who forged careers in music through passion and determination. 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. 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.‘ In focusing on Carwithen’s achievements as a film composer, Broad plays down Lutyens’s pioneering work in the film industry. She also claims, as do many others, that when Clarke and five other string players joined the Queen’s Hall Orchestra in 1913, they were “the first women in England to be employed in a professional orchestra”. In fact, women had been playing in professional orchestras for many years.Radio 3 Music Matters, 9 Mar. 2019 (Discussion about representations of women composers in the media and on academic syllabi) Broad's eye for character is allied to a way of describing musicthat makes you want to hear it immediately... readable and inspiring.

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 . Music Matters, BBC Radio 3, 9 Mar. 2019 (Discussion about representations of women composers in the media and on academic syllabi)The synopsis explains: ‘In their day, Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen were celebrities; now, they are ghostly presences in our music histories, on the margins of the classical canon. An Unconventional Teacher' Sunday Feature, BBC Radio 3, 9 Oct. 2022 (Presenting a feature on women taught by Vaughan Williams) 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. 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.

Shaping the Narrative: Music for a Public’, The Routledge Companion to Applied Musicology ed. Christopher Dromey (Routledge), forthcoming Rebecca Clarke, ‘one of the first female players in a professional orchestra’. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy 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. 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. Just finished @LeahBroad’s Quartet - a terrific insight into the life and music of Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell & Doreen Carwithen, and an important rallying cry to us all. Can’t recommend it highly enough!When the eldest of the women, Smyth, died in 1944, the youngest, Carwithen, was 21. It was Smyth who was the most radical of the four, loudly challenging assumptions about women’s musical capabilities and refusing to be the meek woman she was expected to be. 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.