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The New York Review of Books published a review-essay about Leah Broad’s Quartet in their issue dated October 5, 2023 (published online in mid-September), and while the bulk of the reviewer’s attention went to Dame Ethel Smyth—whose success at eating all the oxygen in any room she’s let into remains unparalleled—a number of statements were made about Rebecca Clarke, virtually all of them untrue, and most of them plainly lifted, not from Dr. Broad’s book, but from Wikipedia.

Well, this wasn’t our first rodeo, so we weren’t particularly surprised, even though the reviewer is Distinguished Professor of Music History and Dean Emeritus at a well-known American university, and probably wouldn’t tolerate such behavior from his students. What stuck in our craw, however, was not the ahistorical and overwhelmingly reductive treatment of Clarke’s output and publishing-history, but the final as-if silver lining—”Fortunately her works are being championed and the unpublished pieces brought into print by the recently formed Rebecca Clarke Society at Brandeis.”—giving credit to a scofflaw outfit that has been the principal impediment to the publication of Clarke’s works for the last two decades.

Clearly, this required a response, so we contacted the Review immediately with the relevant facts. This yielded a slight correction, deleting “and the unpublished pieces brought into print” from the body of the review, and adding a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it line at the end, reading “An earlier version of this article misstated the purpose of the Rebecca Clarke Society at Brandeis.” Well, no, actually—both versions of the article misstated the facts of the matter across the board, so we submitted a formal letter to the editor, and were told that it had gone to the relevant department for consideration. A month of near-silence passed, followed by a month of absolute silence, followed—after one final query on our part, just this morning—by news that space could not be found.

Be that as it may, people are still being misled, so here’s our letter, as submitted on October 19, 2023. We realize that our circulation doesn’t quite equal that of the New York Review, but we do make every effort to keep the public record straight, and to find space for the truth.

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Dr. Leah Broad, of Christ Church, Oxford, whose work promises to mark a real turning-point in—dare we say it?—Clarke Studies, will be available to answer your questions about her current research, via Zoom, on Friday, February 12, 2021, at 10:00 a.m., Greenwich Mean Time (check here for your local equivalent, and lay in masses of caffeine if you’re anywhere in the Western Hemisphere).

You may remember Dr. Broad’s terrific paper on The Seal Man at last year’s conference of the Royal Musical Association, or her recent article about Dame Ethel Smyth in The Guardian, or the announcement of her book Quartet—of which Rebecca Clarke comprises a very exciting and glamorous one-fourth—due from Faber in 2023.

The Q&A on February 12, part of an interdisciplinary graduate seminar entitled The History of the Gendered Body, will focus on new ways of understanding Clarke, not as the victim of legend—a characterization that Clarke herself strenuously rejected—but as a self-willed, self-determined, self-managed professional who set her own course, made her own way, and forged a style all her own. In addition, Dr. Broad will share some of her latest thinking about Clarke’s enthusiasm for things Oriental, from her taste in fabrics to several of her most distinctive compositions.

Anyone may join the session, and admission is free. Sign up here, by clicking the “Mailing list” button near the top of the page.

See you there. We’ll be the bleary-eyed type with the steaming mug of Lavazza Gran Selezione and the relentlessly self-advertising cat, making a determined effort to follow Clarke’s sterling example, as practiced in Molokai, Hawaii, on July 19, 1923, while taking a day off from writing Rhapsody: “Waked at 4 a.m., got into riding togs & motored to the south west end of the island, where the horses met us for a cattle-drive. Rode up across the rough country nearly to the other side, driving an ever-increasing herd of cattle before us. There were 22 of us, counting the cowboys. Had some wonderful gallops, my horse took a ditch, & I chased a truant calf & got it. Very thrilled. After lunch motored to the sea & rested.”

Go ye and do likewise.

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Faber & Faber just announced their acquisition of two books by Leah Broad—the “dazzling young musicologist” at Christ Church, Oxford, whose work you’ve read about in these pages several times before—the first of which is Quartet, a group biography of four “trailblazing” women who “changed British music”: Ethel Smyth, Dorothy Howell, Doreen Carwithen, and (you guessed it) Rebecca Clarke.

Word of the deal broke only day-before-yesterday—you can read The Bookseller’s breathless take on it here—and Quartet won’t be published until sometime in 2023, COVID permitting. Still…

We hasten to bring it to your attention for one very important reason: Quartet will be the first extended publication on Clarke and her music since Daniela Kohnen’s pioneering monograph, first published in 1999 (see our “Learn More” page). Dr. Broad’s book is written for a wider audience, but with equal rigor, and, of course, the range of documentary sources available to scholars—especially contemporaneous journals, trade-magazines, and the all-important concert-advertising—is exponentially larger now than it was twenty years ago. Quartet will set Clarke in the context of the professional world where she actually lived, breathed, worked, and drew her own life’s meaning.

So stick a pin in this, and we’ll keep you posted as things develop. In the meantime, check out Dr. Broad’s article on Ethel Smyth, just published in The Guardian, for a sample of her fair-minded, even-handed, thoroughly lively style, and for evidence that she is refreshingly willing to admit that great icons can be less than they claim to be—or than we might want them to be—and still be fundamentally decent, real people who are interesting and exciting to know.

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Leah Broad, of Christ Church, Oxford, is giving a talk about “expressions of sexual desire in Rebecca Clarke’s fabulous song The Seal Man” at this year’s conference of the Royal Musical Association, which is being held entirely online, and will be open to the general public at no charge. We cannot recommend this event more highly.

Dr. Broad stands at the forefront of a new generation of scholars who are looking at Clarke with fresh eyes and, more to the point, with scrupulous regard for the documents in the case. For The Seal Man, those documents comprise Clarke’s diaries, expository writings, and visual archive, and the complete underlying text by John Masefield, including the parts that Clarke dealt with only by implication. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Dr. Broad’s presentation is her focus on Clarke’s theatrical bent, and the physicality—here, the extreme physicality—of Clarke’s vocal expression. (We’ve seen a draft of the paper, and, trust us, there is no holding back.)

The talk leads off Session 2c, scheduled for Tuesday, September 8, 2020, from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. British Summer Time (check here for your local equivalent). The program booklet is here, and the registration form is here. Anyone may register, but you must do so in advance.

If you want to refresh your memory of one of Clarke’s great signature pieces, this is a good place to start. Masefield’s original story is here.