Clear, happy, and naïve: Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Music for As You Like It’, Music & Letters, Vol. 99/3 (2018), 352-385 Book Chapters

ELLEN PEIRSON-HAGGER, ​The New Statesman Fabulous... Each of Broad's quartet...deserves a book to herself, but together they carry this story through the seismic transformations of their world, society and technology. A new kind of music biography, one embellished with intimate detail and nuance not found in the hagiographies of male composers written by men... it makes for captivating reading.

Surprising absence

Clear, happy, and naïve: Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Music for As You Like It’, Music & Letters, Vol. 99/3 (2018), 352-385 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. Ethel Smyth (b.1858):Famed for her operas, this trailblazing queer Victorian composer was a larger-than-life socialite, intrepid traveller and committed Suffragette.

ANDREW MOTION A blast of fresh air... Insightful, probing, full of heart, brilliantly readable... I love that Leah Broad writes about her composers with such up-close fondness and cheeky detail - At times gleefully irreverent as well as fearsomely well-informed... A vivid portrayal of a whole swathe of British music and an important corrective to conventional stereotypes. 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. 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​. 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.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. 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.