Quartet: How Four Women Changed The Musical World - 'Magnificent' (Kate Mosse)

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Doreen Carwithen (b.1922): One of Britain’s first woman film composers who scored Elizabeth II’s coronation film, her success hid a 20-year affair with her married composition tutor.

British Pianist Nicola Eimer has performed as a soloist and chamber music across Europe, Asia and America and has played at the major UK venues including the Barbican and Wigmore Hall. 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. This article was amended on 10 March 2023 to further clarify it is Leah Broad’s view that Benjamin Britten’s operas “often focused on the working classes”, and that this is an assessment the reviewer contests. In their time, these women were celebrities. They composed some of the century’s most popular music and pioneered creative careers; but today, they are ghostly presences, surviving only as muses and footnotes to male contemporaries like Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Britten – until now.Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?

There are some pieces of music that are so extraordinary you remember exactly where you were the first time you heard them.

Surprising absence

Music Matters, BBC Radio 3, 9 Mar. 2019 (Discussion about representations of women composers in the media and on academic syllabi) Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell, and Doreen Carwithen were all white, English, well-educated, middle-class women, born into a country shaped by empire. All experienced some form of establishment acclaim during their careers, and all, save for Clarke, were staunch Conservatives, with supreme faith in institutions (Smyth in the armed forces and monarchy, Howell in religion, Carwithen in marriage). And yet, in the group’s particular relationship with what Smyth dubbed “the machine”—and the web of counter-networks they spun as a reaction to being shunned by an establishment of Old Boys—their subversive streaks begin to shine through. BBC Radio Oxford, 29 Jan. & 1 Aug. 2019 (Introductions to classical music, comparing composers and biscuits)

BBC Proms, BBC Four, 29 Jul. 2022 (Expert guest for TV broadcast of the 'Sea' Prom featuring Carwithen, Vaughan Williams and Grace Williams) Rebecca Clarke, ‘one of the first female players in a professional orchestra’. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/AlamyClear, happy, and naïve: Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Music for As You Like It’, Music & Letters, Vol. 99/3 (2018), 352-385