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

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BBC Proms 2015: Gary Carpenter, Anders Hillborg, Ørjan Matre, Alissa Firsova, B Tommy Andersson’, TEMPO, Vol. 70/275 (2016), 84-5 Ideas: Beethoven’s Scowl on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 22 Sept. 2020 (Guest academic in discussion about Beethoven’s impact one music history)

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. For me, Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata is one of those pieces. I was having a miserable day and was sat in an optician’s waiting room with a migraine. I’d put on a podcast to try to distract myself from the world wavering disconcertingly around me, but I wasn’t really paying attention to it.Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?

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.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. 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. 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.