Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World

Music historian Broad’s rich and revealing debut resurrects the careers and lives of four trailblazing 20th-century female British composers who “redefined who musicians could be and what they could do.” Exploring her subjects’ musical genius and the obstacles they faced in a nearly all-male music world, Broad spotlights operatic composer Edith Smyth (1858–1944), the “first to really force musical institutions to confront their gender problem” by relentlessly pushing for performances of her work; violist Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979), whose “ear for modern harmony” helped her to create evocative modernist compositions and become among the first women hired by a professional orchestra; pianist Dorothy Howell (1898–1982), who dreamed up “inventive, imaginative” compositions and melodious Catholic church music ; and Doreen Carwithen (1922–2003), one of the first prominent British female film composers, though she later sidelined her musical ambitions to promote the career of her longtime lover and former composition instructor, William Alwyn. Mixing extensive research with keen renderings of the artists’ personalities (“Edith wove a web of legends around herself all her life—without a little self-mythologizing she might never have achieved the things she did”), Broad’s evocative history makes abundantly clear that “music is not and has never been exclusively a man’s world.” Fans of feminist histories and music lovers alike will revel in this scrupulously detailed outing.(Sept.)