Christ Church Music Historian to Release Biographies of Four Women Composers

The biography, titled Quartet, will be released in Spring 2023 and will be previewed at the Doreen Carwithen Festival in June this year.

Dr Broad’s biography of the four women is a radical feminist history of four female composers, all well-known in their time, but who have since been largely forgotten. Quartet’s synopsis notes: '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.'

Despite being overlooked for much of recent times, the four women featured in Quartet are quite remarkable. Doreen Carwithen was Britain’s first full-time female film composer, Ethel Smyth wrote The March of the Women, which would become the anthem of the suffragettes, Dorothy Howell received the nickname ‘the English Strauss’ and Rebecca Clarke was one of the first female professional orchestral musicians.

Dr Broad said: 'We’re at a turning point in classical music. Thanks to years of campaigning, women composers are slowly being better represented in our concerts and recordings. These performances are showing us just how much incredible music we’ve been missing and how limited our histories have been. Smyth, Clarke, Howell and Carwithen wrote phenomenal music and led fascinating lives that we have a lot to learn from today.'

Dr Broad’s work focuses on music in the twentieth century. With a particular focus on unfamiliar histories and the people and music who are at the margins of histories about Western Art Music. She is a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church.