In 1977, 90-year-old Rebecca Clarke was at Alice Tully Hall in Manhattan to hear a performance of her Viola Sonata, written more than half a century earlier. Clarke had been a successful composer, the Sonata her breakthrough work – and yet for most of the audience her music was still an unexpected discovery. “Had she not been a woman composer,” conceded the New York Times, “Miss Clarke might be heard more today.” Soon afterwards, Clarke reflected that there had always been people who could not believe that her muscular, modern, “unfeminine” music was written by a woman: “I take this opportunity,” she wrote wryly, “to emphasise that I do indeed exist.”
Emphasising that female composers did (and do) exist, even though they have often been left out of musical history, is what drives this biography of extraordinary women by Leah Broad. Clarke is one of four composers whose lives she weaves into a chronological account that to some extent doubles as a social history of Britain.
