It’s not complete erasure: Nichols interviews soprano Irène Joachim about Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” and organist Dame Gillian Weir about Messiaen. But rarely do women appear with complete—or even the majority of—creative agency. Not that Nichols is pursuing a particularly exclusive agenda: His study of music in Paris after the Great War, Harlequin Years, discusses Boulanger and Tailleferre, as well as the famed patron of the arts, Winnaretta Singer. That fact makes the scarcity of women in this larger collection all the more curious. “If we choose it, music histories could be filled with the notes of surprising, exciting and delightfully difficult women,” says Broad. Consciously or not, From Berlioz to Boulez makes its choice painfully clear. 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. Due to be published in Spring 2023, Quartet will be a radical feminist history of four ‘trailblazing’ women composers. Clear, happy, and naïve: Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Music for As You Like It’, Music & Letters, Vol. 99/3 (2018), 352-385

Ideas: Beethoven’s Scowl on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 22 Sept. 2020 (Guest academic in discussion about Beethoven’s impact one music history) Female “voices” and Feminism’, The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers ed. Susan Wollenberg & Matthew Head (Cambridge University Press), forthcoming To mark International Women’s Day, join us for a celebration of the lives, loves, adventures and trailblazing musical careers of four extraordinary women – Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen – the subjects of Leah Broad’s new book Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World.Quartet by music historian Leah Broad is a group biography of four female classical musicians and composers — Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen — whose combined lives spanned 150 years from the 1850s to the early 2000s. All four were hugely talented and famous in their day, yet have been all but written out of musical histories which focus on their male contemporaries like Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten; to the extent they are included, they’re reduced to muses and footnotes. Quartet serves to remind us that music was never exclusively a man’s world, and that, ‘if we choose it, music histories could be filled with the notes of surprising, exciting and delightfully difficult women. It’s time their stories were told.’ ERICA JEAL, ​The Guardian In this absorbinggroup biography, Broad deftly handles the complexities of different lives and personalities... Broad has a rare gift for eloquent evocation of the music itself and answers the key question (was the work any good?) resoundingly in the affirmative,making a persuasive case for a revision and expansion of the musical canon.

Rebecca Clarke: Down by the Salley Gardens (voice and piano) and Viola Sonata I, Impetuoso (Viola and piano) ANDREW MOTION A blast of fresh air... Insightful, probing, full of heart, brilliantly readable... I love that Leah Broad writes about her composers with such up-close fondness and cheeky detail - At times gleefully irreverent as well as fearsomely well-informed... A vivid portrayal of a whole swathe of British music and an important corrective to conventional stereotypes. 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.And then I heard an opening theme that was so arresting that I had to stop and listen. The viola swoops and soars, confident and powerful, conjuring up a fantastical world that seems to make everything else dull by comparison. It felt like this music was speaking directly to me, personally. I was so engrossed that I nearly missed my appointment.

Shaping the Narrative: Music for a Public’, The Routledge Companion to Applied Musicology ed. Christopher Dromey (Routledge), forthcoming 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.MIRANDA SEYMOUR The characters are fascinating, the composition is brilliant: a finely developed musical quartet in literary form. Broad's eye for character is allied to a way of describing musicthat makes you want to hear it immediately... readable and inspiring. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.