Leah Broad: How Women Challenged the Musical World

Women have been celebrity musicians for centuries. They’ve been composers, singers, and performers. They have written popular music and pioneered creative careers, but today they are mostly remembered as ghostly presences, surviving only as muses and footnotes to their male contemporaries.

Biographer Leah Broad resurrects these forgotten voices, rediscovers their music, and writes new stories about music history that put women’s work at the centre. She will be speaking about her first book Quartet: How Four Women Challenged the Musical World — a group biography of British composers Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen — and her forthcoming book about women musicians of the Second World War.