131. Lost Ladies of Music with Leah Broad

Episode 131: Lost Ladies of Music with Leah Broad

KIM ASKEW: Hi everyone, welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host Amy Helmes.

AMY HELMES: Hi everyone. This week we're excited to chat about four extraordinary women from the musical world whom we hadn't heard of before. And Kim, I'll admit that prior to reading this book, I would've been hard pressed to name even a single female classical music composer, which is kind of embarrassing to admit. What about you?

KIM: Well, I can be right there with you, embarrassed, because the only one I can think of off the top of my head is Clara Schumann, and she was married to Robert Schumann, so maybe that's why her name is still known. But anyway, like many of the authors we've discussed on this podcast, three of the four women we're going to be discussing today were celebrities in their own day, yet their captivating life stories and their once acclaimed compositions have been all but forgotten.

AMY: Fortunately, our guest today is bringing them back into the conversation and concert halls with her new highly praised biography Quartet, how four women changed the musical. 

KIM: Dr. Leah Broad is an award-winning music writer and historian who specializes in 20th century music, especially women in music. A research member and fellow at Oxford University's Christ Church, her writing has appeared in outlets including The Guardian Observer, BBC Music Magazine, Huffington Post, and The Conversation. Out this month is her first book Quartet, and it's earning deservedly rave reviews from critics as well as renowned historical novelists. Kate Mosse and Antonio Frasier. Welcome, Leah. 

LEAH BROAD: Hi. Thank you so much for inviting me on.

KIM: We're so happy to have you.

AMY: Yes. Okay. So Quartet tells the story of four British composers: Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell, and Doreen Carwithen, and you weave their stories together so beautifully. Leah, what made you choose these four particular women for the focus of your book?

LEAH: Thank you. So, yeah, the reason that I picked these four, I mean, you can't tell the story of British music, I think, without Ethel Smyth, even though a lot of people have tried to do it. I think that's a mistake. She was such a character. She's so important. Um, so for me, she was always gonna be included. Um, and she, Rebecca Clarke and Dorothy Howell in their lifetimes were considered the three most important women composers of the day. I wanted a cast of some very different personalities and different music, so for me they were a natural three. And for Doreen Carwithen, when I got into the 20th century, it was kind of more like, who did I not want to write about. There are so many women who I could have written about at this point, but I chose Doreen Carwithen because she was famous as a film composer, and that's still something that's seen as a bit exceptional for women to do. A very small proportion of big Hollywood films are scored by women. So that's why I chose Doreen Carwithen, because she has this unusual career, an unusual life story, which again, is very different to the other three. And because I adore her music. I only wanted to write about composers whose music I feel I can really, honestly advocate for. And all four of these speak to me very personally with their music. So that was why I chose these four.

AMY: It's interesting that you said there are so many actually that you could have chosen from, because it wasn't just these four. And that goes throughout the course of history right? I mean, there have always been women composers. It's not a modern phenomenon. 

LEAH: Yeah, and I mean like, you know, the first opera by a woman is back in the 17th century , right? Like this is a really long lineage and a long history. And that's why I guess I felt so frustrated, continually walking into bookshops and you get to the music section, it was like, Oh, music history is by men and written by men as well. That's just not true. These women should be in our history books. Um, and I think part of the reason why the women in Quartet felt so strongly that they had to be the first, and they were often held up as the first to do X, Y, and Z even when they weren't necessarily, is because history books excluded their predecessors. They had no way of knowing they weren't the first. And so I think it's just so important that we start to put these women back where they belong, because especially with some of these women, like, I'm not drawing people out from obscurity. They were really famous in their lifetimes, and it's kind of a choice that they are no longer in our history books. Because they're there in the 1920s, Thirties, when they're alive. They're in those history books. So they've been removed.

AMY: Alright, so let's begin with the story of Ethel Smyth. She was born first of the four women in 1858. And she's a fascinating person who was especially well-known for her operas, but also she was just such a character. I think, Leah, you describe her as a lovable eccentric. So can you kind of give our listeners a little basic sketch of who she was?

LEAH: Oh, this is the question I dread. How do you condense this woman down into a few sentences? Because, oh my goodness, I mean, she really was an extraordinary person. She's most famous for her six operas. She composed prolifically at a time when it was thought sort of biologically impossible for women to write in these really big genres. Um, she has an extraordinary personality. Everything she did, she did to extremes. She has love affairs throughout her life with both men and women. She kind of starts out with a throwaway engagement to Oscar Wilde's brother. She decides, eh, no, actually, she's not that into him. Um, she's much more attracted to women. And so she has love affairs with women, including Emmeline Pankhurst, Virginia Woolf, really anyone who's anyone in the early 20th century she knew and was possibly lovers with. She wrote the anthem for the suffragettes. Yeah. I can kind of go on and on and on with all the extraordinary things that this woman did.

AMY: There was one story where she decided she was gonna practice conducting tied to a tree because she thought it would help her muscles . The image of that is so good.

LEAH: And so I asked a conductor about this. I was like, is this something you might do? Is this completely bonkers? And he was like, well, I mean, I wouldn't go tie myself to a tree, but I might like practice on the floor like lying down to get my posture right. But I think Ethel Smyth just did naturally what other people might have done as a publicity stunt

, right? Like she, I think it didn't occur to her that anybody would think it was weird that she would tie herself to a tree to practice her conducting. She's like, "No, I'm improving my posture. Obviously this is a very good idea." And all the journalists are like, What? They are so perplexed by this woman who really is just larger than life.

AMY: Virginia Woolf, she compared her to a wildcat or something?

LEAH: Oh yeah. She often refers to her as an “uncastrated cat” because she would fly into these kind of indignant rages and she would just go on and on and on and on. And Virginia Woolf found it by turns really entertaining and desperately frustrating. And so there are days in her diary where she's like, " I have to pretend I'm not in. I can't deal with Ethel Smyth today. She's just too much."

KIM: She's too much. Yeah, exactly.

LEAH: Too much. One of her other acquaintances said, um, "One has to be really very well to enjoy you.' I think that sums her up really well.

KIM: Yeah. And at the same time, she had so many friends, so...

LEAH: So many. Those were essential for her, her friendships and, you know, her romances were her lifeblood. A lot of them were inspirations behind her music, and then a lot of them were her patrons as well. And they supported her, and without their support, because she was kind of locked out of the patriarchal music institutions that discriminated against her because of her gender, if she didn't have this circle of really quite powerful women, we wouldn't have heard about her today. I mean, we still haven't heard about her today, but she wouldn't have had the success that she did in her own lifetime.

AMY: I love this anecdote in your book of her performing for Queen Victoria for the first time. Can you retell that, just because it really illustrates her uniqueness? 

LEAH: Let me just go grab a copy of the book because I had it on my desk and then one of my friends came and took it away. One second. Okay. " While Ethel was reliably starstruck when she met her musical idols, royals were another matter. She was quite used to mixing among the upper echelons of society. And although she admitted that the queen was a little awe-inspiring, she was calmed by her smile, which she thought the sweetest, most entrancing that she had ever seen on human face. Undaunted, Ethel launched into a rendition of the Masses, Sanctu and Benedictus in her uniquely unselfconscious way, hollering out all the parts while accompanying herself at the piano and stomping her feet for additional percussion. Queen Victoria was so delighted with this novel experience that she invited Ethel to Balmoral to give a repeat performance. Ethel managed to breach all kinds of court etiquette, but nonetheless, she and Marco, who's her big dog, thrilled the stern Balmoral audience with a rendition of the Mass that was so loud and energetic that the presence of a real chorus and orchestra was scarcely missed."

KIM: I mean, forget Tár, Cate Blanchett needs to play Ethel Smyth. I mean, can you imagine?

LEAH: Why fictionalize when you've got people like this for real! 

KIM: We're gonna talk about Tár more later, but yes.

LEAH: Okay.

KIM: So, let's talk a little bit more about her passionate romances, because her music was deeply inspired by these intense love affairs she had. Do you want to talk about The Wreckers? That's the opera she wrote with HB. Can you talk about HB and their relationship and how it inspired The Wreckers?

LEAH: Yeah. So The Wreckers is her third opera, and she writes it with the only man who she had a sustained romantic and sexual relationship with, and this is a philosopher and writer called Henry Brewster. And their relationship is real messy . This is like the gossip and dramas in this book. Like the Coronation Street of music history that I've written. 

KIM: Yes. Perfect.

LEAH: Okay, so it starts out when Ethel Smyth falls head over heels in love with this woman called Julia Brewster. And she pays absolutely no attention at first to her husband called Henry Brewster. He's fallen for Ethel Smyth and Ethel Smyth eventually kind of falls in love with both of them. And there's this awkward love triangle where Ethel Smyth understood it, that the Brewsters had an open marriage. Julia says, No, I'm not having it. Ethel backs off, Henry chases her and eventually Ethel ends up with Henry Brewster. And this causes an awful lot of heartache. Um, obviously she loses a lot of friends over this. They both do. But Henry Brewster, I think one of the reasons she was so attracted to him is because he also had very unconventional ideas about love and sexuality. He encouraged her to see other women, and I think that she just found that really liberating. And she loved people who challenged her intellectually, and I think Henry Brewster did that. And so she keeps up this relationship with this man for very many years, and they write together this third opera called The Wreckers. With some composers it can be kind of hard to see the connection between their lives and works. It can be a bit opaque. Ethel Smyth is not like that. She's like, "Yes, this is my life! Here it is! Right in the music." Um, and so I think it's not a surprise that The Wreckers features two women fighting over a man basically. So this is an opera that's set in a Cornish town, sort of poverty stricken. And the community is populated by wreckers, so people who wreck ships deliberately to kind of loot the boats and murder any potential survivors. Ethel Smyth called it THE opera, you know, that she she lives or dies by. This was, for her, she felt, the kind of pinnacle of her career.

AMY: I notice, listeners, that you can watch a full rendition of The Wreckers on YouTube. So if this story is intriguing to you and you like opera, it's right there.

LEAH: Yeah, there's also a brilliant recording conducted by Alina de La Martinez that was a recording the first time that this opera got done at the Proms in the UK as well. So there is a CD you can buy as well. The story is quite morally ambiguous, and the critics were absolutely outraged. They said they couldn't believe that a woman had set a story of, and I quote, "Such exceptionally nasty character," and they were really upset about this, which for Ethel Smyth was great, right? Like causing a scandal for an opera. That's the way to make the music succeed. 

KIM: All publicity is good publicity, yeah. . Yeah.

LEAH: Exactly. Um, but really, yeah, it caused quite a bit of controversy when it was first performed.

KIM: So I think this is a good spot to mention that we did put together a playlist on Spotify. It includes the music from The Wreckers and some of the other pieces we're talking about today. We're gonna link to that in our show notes, so that everyone can hear it. Um, I wanna talk about something that I found really intriguing and wonderful about Quartet. Um, it's not just a book about music, it's also about women's rights. I really learned so much about the Suffragette movement in England, especially as it related to Ethel's story. Specifically, you had mentioned earlier she was in a relationship with Emmeline Pankhurst. Pankhurst organized the UK's suffragette movement. Can you tell us a little bit more about the relationship and talk about Ethel's involvement in the movement?

LEAH: Yeah. So Ethel Smyth, effectively around 1910, was gonna take two years off composing to join the militant arm of the UK suffragette movement. This is the Women's Social and Political Union, which was set up by The Pankhursts. One of the ways that she contributes to the women's movement is through her music. She writes this anthem for them called the March of the Women, and this becomes super famous. All the suffragettes have to learn this song. Um, and she becomes Emily Pankhurst's, pretty much her closest confidant. I think they were probably lovers. They were certainly in a romantic engagement. Um, it's one of the difficult things when you're looking at sort of like same sex histories. Nobody commits anything to paper. They were probably lovers. One of the things I really love about their relationship is, again, how much music Ethel Smyth kind of wrote about it. So one of her songs called Possession is dedicated to Emmeline Pankhurst. And I think it gives us a really beautiful insight into their relationship at the time. She was also the kind of main inspiration behind Ethel Smyth's fourth opera called The Boatswain's Mate. And she has this really feisty heroine, and that's definitely modeled on Emmeline Pankhurst. And all the letters we have between Ethel Smyth and Emmeline Pankhurst show how very exactly, she's like mapping the character onto this woman called Mrs. Waters. 

AMY: And I also love the anecdote when Ethel was in prison and at one point she was hanging out her prison window and there were women in the prison courtyard below and she was conducting them to sing a rendition of The Women's March. Again, where's Cate Blanchett? 

KIM: Yes. It's to cinematic. Her story's so cinematic. It's just crying out to be made into a film.

LEAH: It absolutely is. Hint, hint,

KIM: Yes. if you're listening,

LEAH: Yeah, please do. Like It is cinematic stuff. And this is the anecdote that was sort of most famous. She conducted The March of the Women from her cell window with a toothbrush conducting all her fellow inmates in the yard below. That was, uh, a certainly popular image.

AMY: Okay. So before we move on to the next lady, was there anything else you wanted to say in terms of how gender dynamics played into the response of her work? 

LEAH: Yeah. And this was one of the most frustrating things with Quartet is having to read all this very, very gendered reception. And also just a difficulty with repetition, right? I had to sort of keep going, well, I can't just say again, "And they were super sexist."

KIM: Yeah.

LEAH: That is a common thread, unfortunately, that threads throughout the book. And I think it's really important to understand that these women weren't composing in a vacuum, and that we had this kind of idea that, well, if the music was good, we would've heard of it. Read these reviews.

KIM: Mm-hmm.

LEAH: There are so many platitudes and commonalities that are just trotted out about women's music over and over and over again. So one that really demonstrates this well is her Mass, which is a big work. It's an ambitious work. She was a young woman when she wrote it, and it premiered in 1893 at a big venue. And some critics say "It's quite good," you know, they're like, "Oh, it's okay for a woman." um, and this 'for a woman, oh my God, Ethel Smyth hated this. She loathed being called a woman composer because she was like, either I'm a good composer. Like, what does this mean "for a woman?" This is so irritating. Then it gets a bit more negative. Then they go, oh, okay. "This is ambition, which overreaches itself." This woman has tried to be too like a man, therefore she fails because women should be feminine, they should be pretty, and they're very unattractive when they try to be like a man. So she's sort of in this impossible situation where she's either too ambitious for writing like a man or she's too manly and therefore unattractive. And this is the double bind that basically all these women find themselves in. They're seen as women first and as composers second. Second,

KIM: And it's interesting considering the actual response that people had to her music in the moment. I mean, standing ovations, you know? They like ate it up. So then when you compare that to what people were writing about it, the critics were writing, it's just, wow, what a disconnect.

LEAH: Yeah. And that's why I'm so glad you've made a playlist for this . Cause like if you hear this music and think, Ugh, I hate it. Fine. Right? But at least you've had the opportunity to make that choice for yourself. And I think that's so important. That's why we need recordings. It's why we need performances. We should be able to kind of find the pieces that we love and if they're not there, we can't make that choice.

AMY: Correct. All right, so let's talk about our next composer from your book, Rebecca Clarke. She was born in 1886 and home life was very difficult. She had a father who was emotionally abusive for sure, if not physically abusive. Um, he kicked her out of the house and this part of the book was very poignant, that whole ordeal, but then that incident kind of allowed her to become a working musician.

KIM: Yeah. It reminded me of Amy Levy's Romance of a Shop where the orphan sisters open a photography studio together and they have to make it on their own as working women. So it's very much like she's out there living the life she could never live at home. 

AMY: Mary Tyler Moore, a little bit

KIM: Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. 

AMY: Um, so let's talk about her music. What was she known for and what set her compositions apart?

LEAH: So this is one of the things I really love about Rebecca Clarke is that when she's in a sink or swim situation, oh my God, she's a swimmer . Like every single time she will fight. And I think this really comes through in her music. It was Rebecca Clarke, actually, whose music kind of first got me really into studying these women at all. I heard the opening of her Viola Sonata, which was the piece that really she was most famous for. So she wrote this piece for a competition in 1919 and all the entries had to be submitted anonymously. And so obviously for women this was great. So she submits this piece, it comes joint first and when the critics find out that it's a woman, they kind of can't believe it, cause it's so damn good. And then it's this woman we've never heard of, what the hell? And it's one of the most extraordinary pieces I know. And I heard this piece and I just stopped everything I was doing to listen to this Viola Sonata. And I was like, oh my God, I have to know who wrote this. This is great. And then I saw this name Rebecca Clarke, and I was like, I know a fair amount about classical music, and I'd never heard her name before. And I was like, why? Why has this happened? How have I grown up as a pianist and not come across work by Rebecca Clarke? Because her work is fiery. It is modern, it is kind of aggressive sometimes. It makes you sit up and listen. She was seen as a modern composer and was taken very seriously and she performed with people like Ravel. She, she just was right there in the heart of contemporary music making. Also, she was a viola player, which was super unusual at the time. Like, the viola was not thought of as a solo instrument. And she's one of these pioneers who kind of makes the viola a solo instrument, and because she's such a good performer, she kind of has this dual career of being pioneering both as a composer and as a performer. So in 1913, she becomes one of the first women in the UK to be hired into a professional orchestra, because professional orchestras weren't open to women up until this point.

KIM: I've been playing her for my daughter and husband and we all love her music, so thank you. I had never heard of her before reading this book, and I am a complete convert so yeah, you, you're, yeah, you're already making people sit up and take notice, so, um. Let's talk about our third composer, Dorothy Howell. She was born in 1898 and she actually comes from a very different background than the other two. She was comfortably middle class and Catholic. She went to Catholic boarding school before attending the Royal Academy of Music and her symphonic poem Lamia is based on the poem by Keats and it brought her a lot of fame. So can you talk about the response to her work, Lamia, and what made this work so special? 

LEAH: Yeah, so Lamia was her first really big orchestral work, and this is the piece that launches her as a composer. Um, in 1919. It's done at the Proms, which at the time and kind of still is the biggest music festival in London annually. And her piece is chosen to be one of the premieres, and it gets an absolutely extraordinary reception. The audience love it. They have to be repeats scheduled and the conductor of these concerts, a guy called Henry Wood, who at the time is probably the most famous conductor in the UK, was like, this was exceptional for a British composer's work; for a woman? Absolute triumph. So this just makes her famous, really famous overnight. She becomes like one of the most talked about musicians in London. Um, there are some delightful press interviews with her, some of which are very sexist, like, let's be honest. Um, but so this is the piece that launches her, and it's a fantastic piece. It tells the story of a snake transformed into a woman. But if anybody finds out that she's a snake, she's gonna disappear. And oh, it's all sort of fated love and very teenage angsty . It's great fun. And so it's really unsurprising, therefore that the audience absolutely loved it. 

KIM: I love all the politics about the Proms, too, and just what got played and what didn't, and everyone waiting to find out what was going to be on the, ticket, and it's just,

LEAH: Yeah, I mean, like these, these, it's hard to explain how unusual it was to get a really big performance like this. Composers fought over it. And this is one of the things where all these women, when their music is performed, the critics, they kind of have to navigate circumstances that are completely out of their control, right. Because these big performances are so unusual, the critics always have their favorite hobby horses for who's gonna get one of these slots. And if it's a woman instead of the person they were backing, you are already starting on the back foot. The piece has to be so extraordinary for people to say, yeah, I loved it. They're sort of always starting at a bit of a disadvantage. Having said that, Henry Wood is one of these standout guys who does schedule women and he does hire women. 

KIM: Yes. I like him. . 

LEAH: Yeah. And it just shows what a difference an individual can make, because throughout his tenure at the Proms, actually through the 1920s, there were quite a few pieces by women, and then there's this dip when Henry Wood dies, after the Second World War, and it just shows how much women's progress is not linear. There are years where zero works are performed by the Proms. It takes us until 2019 to get back to where we were in 1920. 

KIM: I mean, take a moment and think about that listener as, wow. Wow. That's quite a big chunk of time there. Yeah. Yeah.

AMY: And so speaking of fast forwarding a little bit in time, our. Woman that we're gonna discuss is Doreen Carwithen. She was born in 1922 and she's the one who wrote movie scores. This was during a time when England was trying to compete with Hollywood in the film industry. Um, so talk about Doreen's music and why it lent itself so well to film.

LEAH: Yeah, Doreen's music is so pictorial. Uh, if you wanna hear why Doreen Carwithen was a film composer, go listen to her overture Bishop Rock. It's inspired by a lighthouse and it's an evocation of the kind of the lighthouse, uh, with its beam shining out over the Atlantic. And you can hear that, right? You have all the strings swelling, and she has the kind of splash of the spray against the rocks in the percussion. You can see everything that she's painting for you. She's a born film composer. She has such a talent for musical imagery.

KIM: And wasn't she uncredited in a lot of her works or she got like second billing even when she actually was doing all this hard work and working overtime to get this, these compositions completed? 

 films. 

LEAH: Yeah. So she did start out ghostwriting. Having said that, that was not super unusual. What was a surprise for me was she gets called in as the composer for this really big film, which was the film of Elizabeth II's Coronation. This was a big deal. , like the, uh, the production company could have chosen anybody in the world. They picked Dorian Carwithen. And she's billed as the conductor's assistant.

KIM: Ouch. 

AMY: This was like the documentary film of the Coronation? 

LEAH: Yeah. exactly. And yeah, so that wasn't great. Having said that, like, on her other movies, she was credited. Um, it's often behind the scenes that the main kind of gender bias happens, particularly because she often wasn't paid as much as her male counterparts for exactly the same amount of work, sometimes by the same studio on the same film series. And also she found it really impossible to get an agent to represent her because she was a woman who would then have been able to negotiate proper pay for her and kind of help her navigate those issues. And, you know, the film, company would often say, "Oh, you know, we need you to go and approach this person. Wear a pretty dress and a pretty hat." You know, there's some very sexist stuff going on behind the scenes. 

KIM: Was she as well known as the other women in her time, or not as much?

LEAH: Not really. Like she has a few big concert successes, but because she works on film, she's less well known in general because film was a bit of a kind of second fiddle to big orchestral composition. They were like, ah, you can do film, but you can't write proper music kind of thing. That's a real problem that the establishment kind of still has, right? We are getting away from that now. 

KIM: Right? Yeah. 

LEAH: It's contemporary classical music, right? Like if you ask people to name a classical composer, probably the person they're gonna come back to you with is John Williams. And scoring these films is so hard. It takes such skill to write good film music. There's a reason why these composers for film are now as famous as they are. 

AMY: Right. You're not just writing the music, you also have to time it to what's happening on a screen.

KIM: Yeah. But what power to be able to do that if PE people have such an emotional response. Yeah, it would be amazing.

AMY: Um, I just wanna say, as somebody who is not musically minded at all, I wanna give you a lot of credit for explaining these women's music to the layperson. You're not able to give them evidence, right, in a book. And so to that end, I wanna read what is now my favorite simile of the past year. And it's describing Doreen's music. Let me just read it cause I laughed out loud. So you're, you're explaining sort of what she does as a composer, blah, blah, blah. And then you write, "She would fill her pieces with spicy harmonic and rhythmic surprises. It's like finding a chunk of chili at the middle of a Werther's Original. And as funny as that is, uh, that explains it to me. I'm like, oh, I get it! There's like something fiery inside the smoothness. I get it. You know, it was so brilliant and I laughed out loud when I read it.

KIM: Yeah. That was so great. 

LEAH: Hooray. Thank you. I'm so glad because I spent ages trying to think of like, music's such a difficult thing to write about. I try and flag where possible, like, please go listen to this because nothing stands in for the experience of these pieces. Um, but yeah, describing the music in a way that is accurate and also makes people wanna go listen. Oh, it's hard. ,

KIM: You did a great job.

LEAH: Thank you.

KIM: So aside from Doreen, the other women were pretty much music celebrities in their day, at least part of their lifetimes. Ethel, especially, was a household name in her lifetime. Um, and in Quartet, you talk about though, how not too long after her death her compositions, and eventually the other three women's as well, were mostly forgotten. It's really painful to read about that. Why is that and do you think a resurgence is happening now or are you single handedly...?

LEAH: Not single handedly. And like, I think, you know, part of the reason that I'm able to take this book to Faber and they've gone, "Yes, we want it," is because of the pioneering work that other women have done before me, right? Like performers have been bringing this music out. Feminist musicologists have been doing work that I can build on. And that's so important. And I think, yeah, a resurgence is happening finally. A couple of years ago, Ethel Smyth won a Grammy . That's a big deal. So her final work, The Prison, was recorded. And rightly, my goodness, it's an extraordinary recording. It's an amazing piece. And the job that they do with that recording is so good. The soloist, they have an incredible, ah, girl, listen to it. Um, but it is disappointing that we've kind of needed a resurgence and it was kind of heartbreaking for me having to write Ethel's death because she says in her diaries, The thing I really fear most about death is that my music, when I'm not there to fight for it, it's going to die with me. And the like process of writing her out of music history starts with her obituaries. They're like, "Oh, she was a great personality, rubbish composer."

KIM: Ugh, 

LEAH: Sure enough, everything this woman feared came true like days after she died. Um, and I got really angry. Honestly, I got a lot angrier writing this book than I was when I started it. Um, but I think there are so many factors that kind of pile up that meant that these women's music got sort of pushed to one side. If their music wasn't published, then it's really hard to get performances. How can you know whether you like a piece of music or not if it hasn't been performed or recorded? There are still major works by all of these composers that have not been published. Rebecca Clarke's kind of the exception. Nearly everything of hers now has been Published and Doreen Carwithen's stuff has also been published recently as well, which is fantastic. But so that certainly didn't help in the sort of period after their death. Also in the style that they write in. They were not composers, any of them, who really strongly embraced what would become Modernism in the sort of mid to late 20th century. And so Modernist music is sort of associated with what becomes called atonality, which is music that doesn't have a key. So when you hear sort of historical pieces of music from the 18th, 19th centuries, it sounds like they kind of stay in a familiar place, harmonically. They go somewhere and they come back. Atonal music does not do that. It doesn't have a center, it doesn't have a home key. Um, and then this sort of becomes more complex throughout the century, but none of my composers ever really embraced that. And in the mid to late 20th century, this is the music that's kind of being prioritized by the establishment. And a really key figure is a guy called Benjamin Britten, who is, in the UK, kind of embraced as a kind of bridge between Modernism and, and not Modernism. And he writes Ethel Smyth out of history , frankly, like he says, You know, I am the first opera composer since the 17th century in Britain of any interest at all. And the critics follow this line. They go, Yeah, he is. You know, we haven't had an opera opera composer of any merit. They completely just write her out. Um, and I think because this is the kind of music that's being embraced by the musical establishment in the Uk, there's no kind of momentum behind publishing music that doesn't fit this kind of model. Thankfully, I think part of the reason we're seeing this resurgence now is because we have a much broader idea of, you know, what music we can enjoy, what music can be fun to listen to. And so I think there's now a real audience for this kind of music that there maybe wasn't 40, 50 years ago. So I really, really hope that people will go listen to it and then as I say, you can make your mind up about it if you don't like it, cool. But at least you've heard it.

AMY: Thank you for your explanation of Modernist music, but I am a little disappointed there was not a hard candy that we could liken it to. 

KIM: Associate it with.

AMY: Um,

LEAH: Okay. Alright. It's like a Sherbet Fountain. Fizzy and has a weird aftertaste, you know?

KIM: I love it. I love it. 

AMY: Yes. 

KIM: So let's circle back to, um, Tár, which we mentioned briefly at the beginning. You wrote a really interesting piece for your email newsletter, which I also encourage listeners to sign up for. Um, you talk about how it's a story of an incredibly successful fictional female conductor, and I think you really hit the nail on the head with your assessment of it as I'll quote "a regressive film masquerading as a progressive one." And it had me wondering how you might assess today's classical music industry when it comes to this gender parity issue.

LEAH: Dreadful. 

KIM: She's making a face, listeners. 

LEAH: I am pulling a face. Okay, no, so I think classical music has a lot of catching up to do. And I think this is one of the reasons that I personally found Tár very interesting, partly because it felt like a real opportunity to put a, a sort of horrible abusive woman in this top job role and analyze okay, what kind of world would it take for this to be able to happen? But the gender dynamics just aren't engaged with beyond simply putting a woman in that lead role. And Cate Blanchett, I think said quite tellingly, Oh, I don't think this film could have been made with a man in the lead role because we know so obviously what abuse looks like with a man in the role. I'm like, but it doesn't make it any different just cause it's a woman.

KIM: Yeah, exactly.

LEAH: So, and it, it didn't engage with this rich9 history that results in the horrendous statistics that we see today with like 7.7% of music played worldwide, orchestral music, is written by women. In the year of our good Lord, 2023., 7.7%. Are you kidding me? The statistics are awful, and people like Marin Alsop have talked very eloquently about this. Um, and so I think for me personally, Tár felt like a missed opportunity. But I, you know, I appreciate lots of people came away with different responses. What it has done is opened up this conversation about gender in the industry. And for that I think, you know, great. Um, but some of the conversation I'm a little like, Oh, okay, we're a lot further behind than I thought we were.

KIM: Yeah. That and, and everyone's gonna know the name Lydia Tár but it's like, you don't know these other women's names!

LEAH: And I'm like, you know what? Let's pick up real, incredible women and write about them. Let's have our fictional characters as well, but let's not forget that we have really incredible historical people and contemporary people who we should know about. Let's bring those into the frame as well.

KIM: Hear, hear!. 

AMY: Yeah, there was a line from the end of your book that struck me, Leah, that said, "So long as women remain unusual and exceptional, they cannot be the familiar or the favorite." And I think that applies across many disciplines, right? That really stuck with me. 

KIM: So basically, we have barely scratched this surface of the story of these women. They lived incredibly interesting lives and we encourage you to pick up a copy of Quartet and you'll get the full story from that. But thank you so much for coming on the show, Leah. This was a blast. 

LEAH: Thank you, really, you're like ideal readers. I can't believe you went and listened to all the pieces. Thank you.

KIM: Oh yeah.

AMY: That's the only way to do it because you wind up being so curious when you read the description. You're compelled to go find it. 

LEAH: Well, thank you so much. That means the world. 

AMY: For more information on this episode and past episodes, visit lostladiesof lit.com.

KIM: If you love the show, we would be so thrilled if you could give us a five star review wherever you listen. It helps new listeners find us, and it also just makes us feel really good.

AMY: And if you want to keep the discussion going with us please join us on our new Lost Ladies of Lit Forum.

KIM: Yeah, it's a great opportunity for you to talk with us and we can talk with you and you can, uh, meet other listeners and former guests of our show too. It's a really fun space. People are sharing books, and it's a great conversation. So join in and talk with us.

AMY: Yeah. Come join the fun. Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.