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

Product Information

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. 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 teach music history, music analysis, and musical thought and scholarship. Within these areas I focus particularly on music and gender, and musical multimedia.

Approaching Incidental Music: "Reflexive Performance" and Meaning in Till Damaskus (III)', Journal of the Royal Musical Association, forthcomingKATE 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 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.

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. Record Review, BBC Radio 3, 28 Nov. 2020 (Review of new recordings of works by Jean Sibelius, Kalevi Aho, Erkki-Sven Tüür) Quartet by music historian Leah Broad is a group biography of four female classical musicians and composers — Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen — whose combined lives spanned 150 years from the 1850s to the early 2000s. All four were hugely talented and famous in their day, yet have been all but written out of musical histories which focus on their male contemporaries like Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten; to the extent they are included, they’re reduced to muses and footnotes. Quartet serves to remind us that music was never exclusively a man’s world, and that, ‘if we choose it, music histories could be filled with the notes of surprising, exciting and delightfully difficult women. It’s time their stories were told.’ Broad's eye for character is allied to a way of describing musicthat makes you want to hear it immediately... readable and inspiring.If you were stranded on a desert island with only five pieces by these composers to play, which pieces of music would you take along with you? In their time, these women were celebrities. They composed some of the century's most popular music and pioneered creative careers; but today, they are ghostly presences, surviving only as muses and footnotes to male contemporaries like Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten - until now. The lives and careers of these four women are interweaved into a single chronological narrative. While the brilliant, difficult and controversial Ethel is undoubtedly the centrepiece, how aware were you of not letting Ethel ’ s huge personality dominate the achievements of the others? 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 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.

Oliver Soden is the author of Michael Tippett: The Biography (Orion) and Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), published later this monthDebut biographer Leah Broad will introduce this quartet of composers. The evening will feature musical interludes, performed by 97 Ensemble, including: Female “voices” and Feminism’, The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers ed. Susan Wollenberg & Matthew Head (Cambridge University Press), forthcoming 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. 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.