Why are women composers still disregarded?

Did you know that throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th it was considered a ‘biological impossibility’ for women to sustain the kind of abstract thought required for serious musical composition? Or that in the 1910s women in London could be compelled to sit separately from men in concert halls, sometimes even denied entry if not in academic dress? How about the fact that the Halle Orchestra summarily dismissed all its female members in 1920? Or that from 1952 to 1962 only eight works by women were performed at the Proms? For a bonus point, can you name the year – the decade, the century, even – in which the first opera by a woman was staged at the Vienna State Opera? (The answer is 2019.)

There’s nothing shouty about Quartet, the musicologist Leah Broad’s compelling group biography of four British female composers. The tone is restrained, but the quietly insistent patter of events, statistics, quotations and facts adds up by the end to a polemical roar.

Broad’s ambitious debut interweaves the lives and careers of Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen into a single chronological narrative – a conscious attempt to avoid the isolating and exceptionalising of female composers that has historically led to their erasure, but also to situate them within a broader sweep of social and political history.

From the birth of Smyth in 1858 through to Carwithen’s death in 2003, we see the women intersect not just with each other but with the touchstones of religion, empire and emancipation, world fairs and world wars. We also follow all the more clearly the cycles of progress and retreat, and ground gained and lost, that underpin it all. This isn’t a history that moves from fringe to centre, exception to norm.