A few months ago, I was honoured when Dr. Leah Broad of Oxford University invited me to join her on a new podcast, Notes On Notes. Leah has written twice for Corymbus, on Shakespeare In Scandinavia and, more provocatively, Music History Minus Beethoven. She’s also a BBC New Generation Thinker, though in all honesty she may now be better known for her viral twitter thread about composers as biscuits.
Notes On Notes has two types of episode. In the first type, Leah interviews people from the music world. The other (mercifully shorter) episodes are co-hosted with me, and feature discussions about music history. For its first year, all the podcasts will focus on women in music.
Our first history episode is already available, and it explores music in the time of Elizabeth I. Our second podcast, which is out this Friday, will look at the 19th-century Swedish composer Amanda Maier, whose very promising career was tragically cut short. Leah has also interviewed Tess Tyler on video game composing, Professor Sarah Hibberd on theatrical melodrama, and conductor Simone Menezes, who founded the Camerata Latino Americana.
You can subscribe to Notes On Notes on iTunes, listen on the website, and follow us on Twitter.
Leah and I are both new to making podcasts so the whole thing is very low-tech – it has production values which I hope could be described as ‘endearingly amateurish’. But so far it’s been a lot of fun to make, and I hope we will increasingly get a feel for it as we go!