Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World

My book is out this week!

If we choose it, music histories could be filled with the notes of surprising, exciting and delightfully difficult women. It’s time their stories were told…

Folks it’s finally happening. After many years of research, interviewing, writing, rewriting, and downing endless coffees, my very first book is published this week!!

Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World tells the stories of four pioneering composers — Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen. Why should we care about them? Because each of them wrote exquisite music that deserves to be heard, and lived an extraordinary life that should be remembered. They show us that music is not and has never been exclusively a man’s world. These women were famous in their day, but have been written out of history.

Take Ethel Smyth, for example. Not only was she the first woman to have an opera staged at the Met in New York (and remained, until 2016, the only woman to do so), but she was also a key figure in the British suffrage movement. She was certainly friends, probably lovers, with Emmeline Pankhurst, who founded the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903. It was Ethel who taught Emmeline to throw stones accurately for the suffragette window-smashing campaigns, using the golf course opposite Ethel’s house for practice. (Emmeline was initially such a poor shot that she nearly hit Ethel’s disgruntled dog, Pan, on several occasions.) The two were later jailed alongside one another after successful window-smashing in 1912. And Ethel gave the WSPU their voice. She composed their anthem, ‘The March of the Women’. All members of the WSPU learned Ethel’s song — it was performed at rallies, in parks, on the steps of the US Capitol, and even in Holloway prison. She was a household name in Britain, an honorary doctor of music three times over, and the first British woman to be given a Damehood for her services to music.

If Ethel and her contemporaries aren’t familiar names now, it’s because of choices that historians, publishers, critics, and performers have made. Rebecca’s entry in the 1920s edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians — still considered an authoritative source — had a biography and list of works. By 1980, it read simply ‘English viola player and composer, wife of James Friskin’. The majority of Dorothy’s major works remain unpublished. Doreen’s concert music disappeared from concert stages in the late twentieth century. Ethel’s obituaries prophesied that she would be remembered as a ‘remarkable character who also made some stir by composing on an ambitious scale for a woman.’ And this is precisely how the musical establishment chose to remember Ethel until the 1990s, when conductor Odaline de la Martínez began championing Ethel’s music.

We can change this. It’s up to us how these women will be remembered and whether their music will be performed. Which is why I wrote this book — I’m so tired of walking into bookshops and seeing biographies of women authors and women artists, and then hitting the music sections which give the impression that classical music was written exclusively by and for men. This couldn’t be further from the truth. New recordings and performances of pieces by these women are showing us just how much incredible music is out there, and how very, very limited our stories have been. Women have been composing for centuries. We can choose to remember them — to tell their stories and to play their music.

So I really hope that you’ll consider buying a copy of Quartet (and maybe also one for your friends…), and that discovering these composers’ stories will make you fall in love with them as much as I have. I’ve created a short playlist of musical highlights from the book to whet your appetite, and if you’re feeling up for a musical marathon then there’s a full playlist of all the pieces in Quartet that are available on Spotify, in the order that they’re mentioned in the book.

As for the book itself, people including Kate Mosse, Andrew Motion, Antonia Fraser, Kate Molleson, Helen Pankhurst, Claire Tomalin, Fiona Maddocks, Alexandra Harris, Miranda Seymour and Debbie Wiseman have all said lovely things about it. If you want an in-depth take, it’s been reviewed so far in The Times, Financial Times, New Statesman, The Spectator and The Spectator World, and VAN Magazine. And Kate Mosse picked it as one of her top non-fiction books written by women, which made my year. You can buy it here, and if you’re in the States, Blackwell’s has excellent US delivery. There will also be further US news later in the year, so stay tuned for that…! And if you’d like to say hi, bag a signed copy and hear music from the book live, I’m doing a number of events throughout the month with some truly wonderful musicians. Details are below, and you can book via my website Events page. I hope to see you there!