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

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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)

My previous projects have focused on twentieth-century theatre music in the Nordic countries. I am especially interested in the roles that music and sound played in productions, and the way this impacts on how plays were interpreted. 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. ANNALENA MCAFEE, ​Financial Times There's nothing shouty about Quartet, the musicologist Leah Broad's compelling group biography... The tone is restrained, but the quietly insistent patter of events, statistics, quotations and facts adds up by the end to a polemical roar. MIRANDA SEYMOUR The characters are fascinating, the composition is brilliant: a finely developed musical quartet in literary form.

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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 CLARE WADD, Caught by the River Passionate... clear-eyed, intelligent​...Broad deftly weaves their stories together... And perhaps most importantly she evokes the experience ofactually listening to their music. ... Her book appears at a timelymoment. British Pianist Nicola Eimer has performed as a soloist and chamber music across Europe, Asia and America and has played at the major UK venues including the Barbican and Wigmore Hall.

I completed my thesis on theatre music at Christ Church, where I was a lecturer from 2016-2019. Research communication forms a large part of my work - I was a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker in 2016, and I won the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism in 2015 for an article on Sibelius, one of the composers whose music I research. Undergraduate Teaching 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.

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The Aeolian Ladies’ Orchestra, for example, was founded and conducted by double bass player Rosabel Watson in the early 1890s. This was not an amateur ensemble and often played canonical repertoire by composers such as Mendelssohn and Grieg, although it also played lighter music at seaside resorts. Surprising absence Hidden Women: Silenced Scores' Sunday Feature, BBC Radio 3, 23 Jan. 2022 (Presenting feature on British women and modernism) For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

Caught by the River began as an idea, a vision and a daydream shared between friends one languid bankside spring afternoon.You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. BBC Radio Oxford, 29 Jan. & 1 Aug. 2019 (Introductions to classical music, comparing composers and biscuits) 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 These are certainly stories that need to be told; stories of women who created bodies of often remarkable, beautiful and powerful music. Broad creates compelling, readable narratives underpinned, as one would expect from an Oxford University musicologist, with considerable research. 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 . Record Review, BBC Radio 3, 28 Nov. 2020 (Review of new recordings of works by Jean Sibelius, Kalevi Aho, Erkki-Sven Tüür)Radio 3 Time Travellers, regularly from 2019-2021 (Short segments on music history, mainly about women in music) Oliver Soden is the author of Michael Tippett: The Biography (Orion) and Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), published later this month Here's a coincidence: On the day that a copy of the new Robert Macfarlane book arrived at the office, I...