QUARTET

A captivating group biography of four impressive British women composers.

In her first book, a vibrant narrative, music historian Broad redefines whom musicians could be and what they could do. Each of her subjects wrote “exquisite, breathtaking music” and achieved “extraordinary” things. Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) is first. A rebellious, eccentric suffragette—she wrote the anthem “The March of the Women” in 1910—she is the “grande dame” of the book. Openly queer, she was a trailblazer for female conductors and composers. “When composing under the immediate influence of a muse,” writes Broad, “Ethel could write music that was both bold and intimate, sprightly and humorous, and always with a driving energy that stunned her listeners.” Her vast body of work would inspire others, including Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979). A viola virtuoso, she spent much of her life in America, eventually settling there. Unlike Smyth’s initial pieces, Clarke’s first musical compositions were far more accepted and celebrated. In 1913, she was “one of only six women to play in the string section of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra—the first women in England to be employed in a professional orchestra.” Conservative and quiet, Dorothy Gertrude Howell (1898-1982) bonded with Smyth, and they “became threads in the rich tapestry of each other’s lives.” The “crunchy chords” in her early pieces, Broad writes, would become the “searing, intense, uncomfortable discords that make her later works so powerful.” Her 1919 symphonic poem, Lamia, was a huge success. Finally, Doreen Carwithen (1922-2003) lived a complex life in the shadows. A star at the Royal Academy of Music, where she studied piano and composition, she received a scholarship to score films and went on to become one of the first women to have a career as a film composer. Her affair and later marriage to the popular, married composer William Alwyn resulted in what Broad calls the “familiar” story: a woman’s work subsumed by the man’s.

A stellar work of social and music history sprinkled with emotional dashes of love, sex, and politics.