How four women revolutionized the music industry

? UNDER THE LAMPLIGHT-

Get to know big female names in classical music: When you think of classical music, the names Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Chopin come to mind, not too many women’s names pop up. Leah Broad’s biography Quartet will rectify that. She spotlights four English women composers, who were each notable during their time but have since become widely overlooked: Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen. Smyth, the oldest of the women featured in the book, was a passionate suffragette and once wrote of the musical establishment’s “temptation to pretend that women are non-existent musically”. The youngest, Carwithen, was a skilled film composer who wrote the music for a documentary about Elizabeth II's coronation that won a BAFTA Certificate of Merit.