ELLEN PEIRSON-HAGGER, ​The New Statesman Fabulous... Each of Broad's quartet...deserves a book to herself, but together they carry this story through the seismic transformations of their world, society and technology. Quartet is, first and foremost, a social history spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A group biography that interlaces the lives of four pioneering English women composers. Can you tell us a bit more about these women and what drew you to tell their stories? Ifthis sounds like a book for classical music buffs, it isn't. If it sounds rather worthy, again, trust me, it isn't... It's fast-paced, engaging, and an absolute riotat times. I laughed out loud... Quartetis a fascinating and compellingread but, just as importantly, a hugely enjoyableone. BBC Proms, BBC Four, 29 Jul. 2022 (Expert guest for TV broadcast of the 'Sea' Prom featuring Carwithen, Vaughan Williams and Grace Williams) BBC Proms Talks, Aug. 2018 & 2019 (Broadcast pre-concert talks on works by Outi Tarkiainin, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, and Sibelius)

Shaping the Narrative: Music for a Public’, The Routledge Companion to Applied Musicology ed. Christopher Dromey (Routledge), forthcoming You can read interviews with Leah about Quartetin The Times, ​ The London Magazine, The Strad, Feminist Book Cluband Gramophone, or listen on Presto Music, LostLadies of Lit, and ABC Australia.There's an extract of the book available on Unseen Histories, andyou can listen to musical highlights from Quartet here. How Four Women Changed the Musical World is the subtitle of this passionate biography of four notable women composers of late 19th- and 20th-century Britain. The author, Leah Broad, is an academic who’s made it her life’s mission to champion women composers. Ethel was brave and eccentric and had passionate friendships with a number of women during her life, including Emmeline Pankhurst, who she taught to throw stones at targets on her local golf course, and Virginia Woolf. With a different family she might have been sectioned for her boldness and refusal to conform, and my thoughts turn to the women who were, and to those who didn’t have enough fight in them, or who just didn’t succeed against such huge odds, and to all their combined missing music (and art and writing). Marriage too put an end to careers, so it’s unsurprising that only two of Quartet’s four married, and neither until their fifties.

Clear, happy, and naïve: Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Music for As You Like It’, Music & Letters, Vol. 99/3 (2018), 352-385 Book Chapters JESSICA DUCHEN, TheSunday Times Engaging... Broad has a vivid turn of phrase, conjuring up images in a handful of words... Most importantly of all, she describes the daily battles these women had to fight. Ideas: Beethoven’s Scowl on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 22 Sept. 2020 (Guest academic in discussion about Beethoven’s impact one music history) A stellarwork of social and music history sprinkled with emotional dashes of love, sex, and politics... In her first book, a vibrantnarrative, music historian Broad redefines whom musicians could be and what they could do. MIRANDA SEYMOUR The characters are fascinating, the composition is brilliant: a finely developed musical quartet in literary form.

BBC Radio Oxford, 29 Jan. & 1 Aug. 2019 (Introductions to classical music, comparing composers and biscuits) Ethel Smyth (b.1858):Famed for her operas, this trailblazing queer Victorian composer was a larger-than-life socialite, intrepid traveller and committed Suffragette. Music Matters, BBC Radio 3, 4 Mar. 2023 (Live International Women's Day coverage, discussing Quartet) Radio 3 in Concert interval talks, from 2018 (Discussions about music by composers including Sibelius and Nielsen)

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Quartet runs chronologically and begins with Ethel, who was best known for her operas. She was a trailblazing queer Victorian composer, who rebelled against the few roles, like teaching, permitted to musical Victorian women, instead battling her father to study in Leipzig, to have a career and to earn her own living. Women before her had composed, but Ethel was the first to demand equal treatment and for her work not to be judged differently because of her gender. So many. This is a world of opportunity – there are so many women to champion. I’m currently writing book two, so watch this space!

Quartet has been reviewed in the Guardian, New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Telegraph, Financial Times, Sunday Times, ​ The Spectatorand The SpectatorWorld, The New Statesman, Caught by the River, VANMagazineand Country Life. It has received a starred review from Kirkus, was featured in the Sunday Timesand on the QI podcast No such thing as a fish, selected as the London Review Bookshop's Book of the Week, as a book to look out for in 2023 by both the Observerand The Scotsman, and chosen by Kate Mosse as one of her top 15 non-fiction books.How did you approach the research for this book? Primary sources such as letters, diaries and memoirs are rendered in the first person and invite readers into the worlds of Ethel, Rebecca, Dorothy, and Doreen. How conscious were you, as an historian, of presenting these sources in such an absorbing and vivid way? A pioneering book about four pioneering women, and one of its many distinctions is to give each of them a strong individual identity while describing their common purpose and shared difficulties, and in the process magnificently expands the story of classical music. Rebecca Clarke (b.1886): This talented violist and Pre-Raphaelite beauty was one of the first women ever hired by a professional orchestra, later celebrated for her modernist experimentation.

Hidden Women: Silenced Scores' Sunday Feature, BBC Radio 3, 23 Jan. 2022 (Presenting feature on British women and modernism)

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A new kind of music biography, one embellished with intimate detail and nuance not found in the hagiographies of male composers written by men... it makes for captivating reading.