Quartet | A talk by Leah Broad
Talk Music-
Venue
Library
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Time
6:30 PM
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Price
£5 (plus booking fee)
- Book Tickets
Hear about the lives, loves, adventures and trailblazing careers of four extraordinary women.
Ethel Smyth (b.1858): Famed for her operas, this trailblazing queer Victorian composer was a larger-than-life socialite, intrepid traveller and committed Suffragette.
Rebecca Clarke (b.1886): This talented violist and Pre-Raphaelite beauty was one of the first women ever hired by a professional orchestra, later celebrated for her modernist experimentation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Leah Broad is a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford University, specialising in twentieth-century music. She was one of 2016’s BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinkers and in 2015 won the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism. She writes and speaks for organisations including Glyndebourne, London Chamber Orchestra and the BBC Proms. Quartet is her first book.