Hay Player

Discover the lives, loves, adventures and trailblazing musical careers of four now largely forgotten extraordinary women from Leah Broad, a junior research fellow at Christ Church, Oxford University and author of Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World and Alice Farnham, a conductor who has played concerts with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, and Southbank Sinfonia, author of In Good Hands: The Making of a Modern Conductor. In conversation with cultural historian Gavin Plumley, the pair introduce Ethel Smyth, a queer Victorian composer famed for her operas; Rebecca Clarke, a violist who was one of the first women ever hired by a professional orchestra; Dorothy Howell, a prodigy known as the ‘English Strauss’; and Doreen Carwithen, one of Britain’s first woman film composers who scored Elizabeth II’s coronation film.