Dr Leah Broad

BA Music (First class, Oxford, 2013); MSt Musicology (Distinction, Oxford, 2014); DPhil in Musicology (Oxford, 2018)

I completed my thesis on theatre music at Christ Church, where I was a lecturer from 2016-2019. Research communication forms a large part of my work - I was a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker in 2016, and I won the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism in 2015 for an article on Sibelius, one of the composers whose music I research.

I teach on music history after 1750, music and gender, theatre music, British music, Nordic music, women in music, and music analysis.

I am a music historian working on music in the twentieth century. All my work focuses on unfamiliar histories. I’m fascinated by the people and music who are at the margins of histories about Western Art Music. Currently, my research is focused on women composers in twentieth century Britain. I’m working particularly on four composers — Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell, and Doreen Carwithen. The project establishes their relative significance in their lifetimes, explores how this changes our narratives about British music of this period, and looks at how their music has been received since their death. They are the focus of my first book, Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World, published by Faber and Faber in 2023.

My previous projects have focused on twentieth-century theatre music in the Nordic countries. I am especially interested in the roles that music and sound played in productions, and the way this impacts on how plays were interpreted. I wrote my thesis on theatre productions for which music was written by Jean Sibelius, Ture Rangström, and Wilhelm Stenhammar. Viewing the music as an integral part of the production, I looked at how music was involved in the attempt to build a ‘people’s theatre’ in Sweden.

More information about my work can be found on my website here, or you can follow me on Twitter here. I am always happy to talk to journalists and broadcasters, for anything from light-hearted classical music to in-depth programmes.

Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World (Faber and Faber, 2023)

Journal Articles

'Approaching Incidental Music: "Reflexive Performance" and Meaning in Till Damaskus (III)', Journal of the Royal Musical Association, forthcoming
‘Scaramouche, Scaramouche: Sibelius on Stage’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 145/2 (2020), 417-456
‘Game of Thrones: Music in Complex TV’, Music and the Moving Image 13/1 (2020), 21-42
‘Clear, happy, and naïve: Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Music for As You Like It’, Music & Letters, Vol. 99/3 (2018), 352-385

Book Chapters

'Female “voices” and Feminism’, The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers ed. Susan Wollenberg & Matthew Head (Cambridge University Press), forthcoming
‘Shaping the Narrative: Music for a Public’, The Routledge Companion to Applied Musicology ed. Christopher Dromey (Routledge), forthcoming
'Shakespeare in Sweden: Wilhelm Stenhammar and Modern Theatre Music', The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music ed. Mervyn Cooke & Christopher Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 479-507
‘Composing a Nordic Renaissance: Ture Rangström’s Music for Till Damaskus (III)’, Music’s Nordic Breakthrough: Aesthetics, Modernity, and Cultural Exchange, 1890-1930 ed. Philip Bullock & Daniel M. Grimley (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2021), 151-17

Reviews

‘Karin Hellqvist: Flock (Bauckholt, Smørdal, Strindberg, Bång, Barrett)’, TEMPO 74/293 (2020), 92-94
‘Amanda Maier: Violin Concerto in D Minor, Piano Quartet in E Minor, Swedish Tunes and Dances; Sonata for Violin and Piano, Four Songs; Works for Piano’, 19th-Century Music Review (published online 7 May 2019), 1-5
‘BBC Proms 2015: Gary Carpenter, Anders Hillborg, Ørjan Matre, Alissa Firsova, B Tommy Andersson’, TEMPO, Vol. 70/275 (2016), 84-5
‘Harrison Birtwistle Responses: Sweet disorder and the carefully careless for piano and orchestra, Royal Festival Hall, London’, TEMPO, Vol. 69/272 (2015), 61-2

Selected Media

Music Matters, BBC Radio 3, 4 Mar. 2023 (Live International Women's Day coverage, discussing Quartet)
Record Review, BBC Radio 3, 10 Dec. 2022 (Review of new recordings including works by Laura Netzel, Undine Smith Moore, Dobrinka Tabakova and Jean Sibelius)
BBC South East, 29 Nov. 2022 (Interviewed expert in news segment on Avril Coleridge-Taylor)
Composer of the Week, BBC Radio 3, 21-25 Nov. 2022 (Interviewed expert on Doreen Carwithen)
'An Unconventional Teacher' Sunday Feature, BBC Radio 3, 9 Oct. 2022 (Presenting a feature on women taught by Vaughan Williams)
BBC Proms, BBC Radio 3, 22 Aug. 2022 (Interval discussion about Ethel Smyth's Mass)
BBC Proms, BBC Four, 29 Jul. 2022 (Expert guest for TV broadcast of the 'Sea' Prom featuring Carwithen, Vaughan Williams and Grace Williams)
BBC Proms, BBC Radio 3, 24 Jul. 2022 (Interval discussion about Ethel Smyth's Wreckers)
Music Matters, BBC Radio 3, 23 May 2022 (Interview about Ethel Smyth's Wreckers)
Record Review, BBC Radio 3, 5 Feb. 2022 (Reviewing Paavo Berglund conducting Sibelius's Symphonies)
'Hidden Women: Silenced Scores' Sunday Feature, BBC Radio 3, 23 Jan. 2022 (Presenting feature on British women and modernism)
Record Review, BBC Radio 3, 5 Jun. 2021 (Building a Library on Sibelius's Violin Concerto)
Record Review, BBC Radio 3, 28 Nov. 2020 (Review of new recordings of works by Jean Sibelius, Kalevi Aho, Erkki-Sven Tüür)
Ideas: Beethoven’s Scowl on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 22 Sept. 2020 (Guest academic in discussion about Beethoven’s impact on music history)
Radio 3 Time Travellers, regularly from 2019-2021 (Short segments on music history, mainly about women in music)
Radio 3 in Concert interval talks, from 2018 (Discussions about music by composers including Sibelius and Nielsen)
BBC Proms Talks, Aug. 2018 & 2019 (Broadcast pre-concert talks on works by Outi Tarkiainin, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, and Sibelius)
BBC Radio Oxford, 29 Jan. & 1 Aug. 2019 (Introductions to classical music, comparing composers and biscuits)
Music Matters, BBC Radio 3, 9 Mar. 2019 (Discussion about representations of women composers in the media and on academic syllabi)
BBC Arts, 2017 (Mini documentary on music in Shakespeare)
Free Thinking, BBC Radio 3, 23 Jun. 2016 (Discussion about Edvard Munch)