Leah Broad
I am a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. My research interests are in twentieth century music. My group biography of four women composers - Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell, and Doreen Carwithen - is published by Faber & Faber.
Research communication forms a large part of my work - I was a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker in 2016, and am regularly on BBC radio discussing my research. I won the 2015 Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism for an article on Sibelius, one of the composers whose music I research. I’m also the founder and editor of The Oxford Culture Review, a website dedicated to arts and humanities research. My writing has appeared on platforms such as the Guardian, London Review of Books, BBC Music Magazine, The Huffington Post, The Observer, The Conversation, and Corymbus.
My teaching specialisms include:
Music & gender
Music analysis
Modernism
Aesthetics
Incidental music
Scandinavian music
Music history after 1750
I am on Twitter @LeahBroad, and more of my writing can be found on my website https://www.leahbroad.co.uk/
Research communication forms a large part of my work - I was a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker in 2016, and am regularly on BBC radio discussing my research. I won the 2015 Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism for an article on Sibelius, one of the composers whose music I research. I’m also the founder and editor of The Oxford Culture Review, a website dedicated to arts and humanities research. My writing has appeared on platforms such as the Guardian, London Review of Books, BBC Music Magazine, The Huffington Post, The Observer, The Conversation, and Corymbus.
My teaching specialisms include:
Music & gender
Music analysis
Modernism
Aesthetics
Incidental music
Scandinavian music
Music history after 1750
I am on Twitter @LeahBroad, and more of my writing can be found on my website https://www.leahbroad.co.uk/
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Papers by Leah Broad
This paper presents a reassessment of Clarke’s personality and significance in early twentieth-century Britain. I argue that the positive criticism that Clarke received, the significance of all-women networks in her life, and her supportive relationship with her mother and sister all nuance previous framings of Clarke as under-confident and accepting of the gender-based limitations placed on her by others. I reframe Clarke as a way of opening avenues to discuss the relationship between music, gender, sexuality, pleasure, and desire in a more positive way in writing on women in music. This paper suggests that at least in Clarke’s case, these were not aspects of patriarchal structures of coercion and control, but integral to the ways in which Clarke asserted her own agency and individuality.
Deborah Stein states that ‘Seal Man’ can be read ‘as foreshadowing Clarke’s loss of voice in the late 1920s and 1930s.’ However, I argue that ‘Seal Man’ can be interpreted as an allegory connecting artistic creativity and sexual desire. I analyse Clarke’s use of motif, form, and harmony, as well as genre, intertextual reference, her alterations to John Masefield’s text, and the relationship between pianist and singer. I argue that Clarke continually foregrounds the woman’s experience and emphasises the corporeality of the singer and their voice.
Finally I touch on the topic of écriture féminine, and whether Clarke’s compositional methods support the idea of “essential” difference. I conclude that while there is no essential or necessary difference between men’s and women’s compositional modes, the way women were treated in Clarke’s lifetime and how she subsequently perceived herself did lead to her adopting standpoints and methods that are fundamentally different to those associated with masculine expressions of desire.
This paper will set Scaramouche in the context of a wider turn-of-the-century preoccupation with the body, and with non-linguistic forms of communication. Both ballet and theatre thrived during this period, but alongside Sibelius’s incidental music Scaramouche remains one of his most academically neglected scores. This pantomime is one of many examples of modern stagings involving commedia dell’arte figures, such as Stravinsky’s Pulcinella and Arthur Schnitzler’s Columbine’s Scarf. Using archival material from the 1924 production in Stockholm, I will adopt a psychoanalytic approach to explore Sibelius’s score, placing it at the heart of public debates about gender and aesthetics.
Much of the recent literature on modernism has tended towards the investigation of multimedia projects, such as Daniel Albright’s Untwisting the Serpent and Simon Shaw-Miller’s Visible Deeds of Music. However, the incidental music for modernist theatrical productions remains relatively unexplored, despite its fundamental importance to a period preoccupied with re-evaluating the validity of linguistic communication.
This paper will explore the role of the Swedish composer Ture Rangström’s music in the context of Per Lindberg’s 1926 production of August Strindberg’s play Till Damaskus III, using this as a basis from which to discuss the more general possibilities of the theatre and its sounds in modernist explorations of non-linguistic communication and meaning. As the culmination of Strindberg’s highly influential station-drama trilogy inspired by the author’s own religious crisis, Till Damaskus III openly addresses Strindberg’s grappling with religion, concerns about gender politics, and belief in the limitations of language.
I will reflect upon the significance of this production in a wider modernist discourse: as a director who worked with both Max Reinhardt and later with Ingmar Bergman, Lindberg’s stagings are representative of a vibrant Scandinavian modernism, particularly prominent within the theatre. An increased focus upon productions such as these contributes towards the continuing challenges to established narratives and assumptions about modernism, particularly regarding notions of artistic autonomy, and geographical centrism.