BBC Proms 2015: Gary Carpenter, Anders Hillborg, Ørjan Matre, Alissa Firsova, B Tommy Andersson’, TEMPO, Vol. Despite the fame they enjoyed during their lives, these four brilliant women seem to have been forgotten all too easily. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Ensemble is a group of musicians raising awareness to the statistic that 97% of women aged 18-24 experience sexual harassment in the UK.

In her first book, a vibrantnarrative, music historian Broad redefines whom musicians could be and what they could do.Doreen Carwithen, born in 1922, was the first notable film composer in Britain, and scored dozens of productions including the Pathé documentary about the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. 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. The ensemble champions works by underrepresented composers, with a particular focus on women composers, and hopes to make classical music more inclusive and accessible.

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 . Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today. When Dorothy Howell was crestfallen following the poor reviews of her opera “Koong Shee,” she poured her heart out to one Ethel Smyth, and confided in her close violinist friend Elsie Owen. 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. To mark International Women’s Day, join us for a celebration of the lives, loves, adventures and trailblazing musical careers of four extraordinary women – Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen – the subjects of Leah Broad’s new book Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World.Sure enough, that indomitable personality becomes the driving force in Quartet, the academic Leah Broad’s fabulous study of four groundbreaking British female composers. All four were hugely talented and famous in their day, yet have been all but written out of musical histories which focus on their male contemporaries like Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten; to the extent they are included, they’re reduced to muses and footnotes. What she deems the “aggressive styles” of Elisabeth Lutyens or Elizabeth Maconchy are given brief cameos; radical innovators such as Priaulx Rainier, Ruth Crawford Seeger and many others are totally absent.