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

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ALEXANDRA HARRIS Aninspiring read​, illuminating fourextraordinary women who forged careers in music through passion and determination. Rebecca Clarke (b.1886):This talented violist and Pre-Raphaelite beauty was one of the first women hired by a professional orchestra in London, later celebrated for her modernist experimentation. 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. 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. 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)

Rebecca Clarke, ‘one of the first female players in a professional orchestra’. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Previously I’ve worked on incidental music in the Nordic countries. 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. 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. To mark International Women’s Day, join us for a celebration of the lives, loves, adventures and trailblazing musical careers of four extraordinary women – Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen – the subjects of Leah Broad’s new book Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World.Argh! Erm. I think I’d choose Ethel’s The Prison, Rebecca’s Piano Trio and song ‘The Salley Garden’, Dorothy’s Violin Sonata and Doreen’s Piano Concerto. BBC Proms, BBC Four, 29 Jul. 2022 (Expert guest for TV broadcast of the 'Sea' Prom featuring Carwithen, Vaughan Williams and Grace Williams) 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. The first, Ethel Smyth, is the most familiar thanks partly to the fact that her life makes such a good story. A tweed-suited, cigar-puffing suffragette whose lovers included Emmeline Pankhurst and Virginia Woolf, she courted ridicule from the all-male musical establishment – “the Machine”, as she called it – yet self-promotion brought her considerable success: her opera Der Wald was, in 1903, the first by a woman to be performed at the august Metropolitan Opera in New York (and the only one until Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin in 2016). The scene of Smyth in Holloway prison conducting her fellow suffragette inmates with a toothbrush as they paraded around the prison yard has been recounted many times before, but Broad goes far beyond that here: the tenderness of her letters, and the mixture of rash temper and tenacity with which she bore her disappointments, reveal a still more intriguing character. How did you approach the research for this book? Primary sources such as letters, diaries and memoirs are rendered in the first person and invite readers into the worlds of Ethel, Rebecca, Dorothy, and Doreen. How conscious were you, as an historian, of presenting these sources in such an absorbing and vivid way?

Amanda Maier: Violin Concerto in D Minor, Piano Quartet in E Minor, Swedish Tunes and Dances; Sonata for Violin and Piano, Four Songs; Works for Piano’, 19th-Century Music Review (published online 7 May 2019), 1-5 Clear, happy, and naïve: Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Music for As You Like It’, Music & Letters, Vol. 99/3 (2018), 352-385 Book Chapters Amanda Maier: Violin Concerto in D Minor, Piano Quartet in E Minor, Swedish Tunes and Dances; Sonata for Violin and Piano, Four Songs; Works for Piano’, 19th-Century Music Review (published online 7 May 2019), 1-5

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

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.

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Record Review, BBC Radio 3, 5 Feb. 2022 (Reviewing Paavo Berglund conducting Sibelius's Symphonies)