Elgar in the Age of the Suffragettes
On the 21 January 1911 at the Royal Albert Hall, Ethel Smyth conducted the first performance of her ‘March of the Women’, the choral piece that would become known as the suffragette anthem. Just three days later she led a small ensemble playing her March at a suffrage event — composer Rebecca Clarke was the violist. This talk explores the connections and friendships between the composers in this afternoon’s concert, and the context that gave rise to their music.
Saturday 30 October @ 1:30 PM
St Martins’, London Road WR5 2ED
Free to attendees of the Corra Sound concert
Leah Broad is a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford. She is currently writing a group biography of four women composers — Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen — which will be published by Faber & Faber. She is regularly on BBC radio as a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, and was winner of the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism in 2015. She has academic writing published in journals including the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and Music & Letters. You can follow her on Twitter @LeahBroad, and find out more about her work at leahbroad.wordpress.com.