- Leah Broad, Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World (Faber)
- Roger Nichols, From Berlioz to Boulez (Kahn & Averill)
“As with Ethel, Rebecca’s friendships were the very fabric of her world,” writes the musicologist Leah Broad in Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World. Queer academia’s gleeful dismantling of history’s “just friends” trope has ventured as far as the Gen Z mainstream, with Atlanta TikToker Oublaire’s sage reminder that “History Hates Lovers.” (“Historians will call them / Close friends, bеsties, roommates, colleagues / Anything but lovers / History hates lovers.”) To be fair, Broad actually loves lovers, almost as much as she loves the friendships Quartet recalls. And characters that dance between those two social poles form the backdrop of a music book that puts the social in social history.
