Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World

Award-winning music writer/historian/debut author Broad (music history, Univ. of Oxford) presents this group biography that considers four musical women of the early 20th century as pioneers, although there were few actual firsts among them. Their predecessors had been ignored and quietly erased by men composers and critics. Their intimate connections, networks, loves, and life choices create a fascinating picture of what it meant to be a woman artist in Britain during the interwar and post–World War II period. Ethel Smyth, Doreen Carwithen, Rebecca Clarke, and Dorothy Howell wrote and performed operas, symphonies, and shorter pieces. Carwithen became one of the first women to be known as a film composer. While these women faced obstacles and disadvantages, their class and race also gave them opportunities to build musical careers and develop networks of friends and patrons. This work is also a social history of 20th-century Britain.