Angela Slater

“I always love thinking of solo instruments as a whole palette of colour in themselves — a whole orchestra within themselves. I think it’s great fun to see if you can deliberately enhance that, or subvert it, with the orchestra.”

Angela Slater

Angela Elizabeth Slater is a UK-based composer whose compositional voice focuses on musically mapping aspects of the natural world into the fabric of music. Nominated for an Ivors Classical Award with her viola concerto ‘Through the Fading Hour’, Angela’s compositions have been performed by various prestigious ensembles and festivals including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival, Tanglewood Music Center, Santa Fe Music Festival, and Intimacy of Creativity Festival, among others. Angela was a Royal Philharmonic Society composer of 2021-22, and her work ‘The Louder the Birds Sing’ was selected as the winner of the Gaudeamus Award orchestral category in 2024; she is currently working with librettist Kendra Preston Leonard on her first full-length opera This is Jane. Since 2017, Angela has served as the director of Illuminate Women’s Music, a chamber music concert series designed to celebrate the creativity of women composers and performers.

February 2025 saw the premiere of Angela’s large-scale work ‘Mountains become Oceans’ — a concerto for harp and percussion — conducted by George Jackson with The Amarillo Symphony, featuring soloists Rosanna Moore and Hannah Weaver. Following the premiere of ‘Mountains become Oceans’, we caught up with Angela over Zoom, discussing mapping natural processes, orchestration, Brian Cox, Scottish folklore, and nurturing “personal canons” of women composers…

Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Hi Angela! Hope you’ve been keeping well. We’re chatting following the premiere of your new harp and percussion concerto, ‘Mountains Become Oceans’ — which was recently premiered in Amarillo, Texas…

Yeah — so I now know the way to Amarillo. -laughs- You know that song? No Americans, particularly Texans or Amarillo-ans, seemed to know of the existence of the song at all. I did tell them about it — “just so you’re aware, this is what the cultural reference is for Brits about Amarillo” — and they just looked completely perplexed, and bemused. I showed the Peter Kay version; they had no idea it existed. -laughs-

‘Mountains Become Oceans’ was written for harpist Rosanna Moore, and percussionist Hannah Weaver. Can you tell me about how that collaboration came about?

I think ‘Mountains Become Oceans’ has really always been about collaboration. It started out as this flyaway idea with Rosanna Moore, the harp player, a couple of years ago; she said “would you like to write a harp concerto for me?” and I was like “yeah, of course!”. And then covid happened, so it went on pause for a little bit. In the meantime, she’d obviously been thinking, and plotting, and she comes back to me and says “how do you feel about doing a harp and percussion concerto?” — and I was thinking, oh my god! That’s so cool, but also really difficult, thinking about how to balance it; how the instruments are going to interact with each other, and a symphony orchestra. But I thought “why not” and said yes!

I always like to have concepts with my pieces. I’d been playing around with a few. Around Christmas of ’21, I’d been watching loads of Brian Cox documentaries on the planets and the universe. -laughs- He has this bit about Saturn’s moons — particularly Titan — about how in the future, when the sun expands, doubling the size [and] engulfing Mercury, Venus, and the Earth, these frozen methane water mountains on Titan will melt and become the last oceans of our solar system. The way he said it was something like “so mountains will become oceans” — and I was like, that’s the whole concept for my piece, and that’s the title for my piece!

How did the ideas from the Brian Cox documentaries — the “mountains becoming oceans” — manifest in the structure of the piece?

It’s like a huge transformation of states of matter — these big, grand ice mountains. Trying to imagine oneself really far in the future, in a different chronological space; but it also has deep parallels to things that are currently happening on our own planet. So I took that as the broad idea, and split it into four movements. The first [movement] is called ‘Mountains’; with that one, I [was] trying to explore the idea of looking at the ice crystals — in really granular detail at first, and [then] it gradually zooms out to look at the grandeur, the enormity, of these mountains.

I have two shorter movements in the middle, called ‘Precipice’ and ‘Avalanche’. In ‘Precipice’, it’s this feeling of constantly being on the edge — things are beginning to crack, but nothing’s quite beginning to actually move. This helps me come up with the types of material, the types of music, I’m writing; at first, there’s these sort of chromatic, crawling string lines, and breaks of non-pitched percussion sections with lots of silence to build up the tension. But eventually, it gets passed to the harp player; she gets to do this very similar pattern for a good four minutes — in what Rosie would call the “nosebleed” range of the harp, really high up… -laughs- To the point where you’re thinking “gosh, is it ever going to change? Are we ever going to have this release of tension?” I guess it’s like a drip constantly going, and not released, until the ‘Avalanche’ movement — which then lets Hannah, on percussion, absolutely let rip.

I’m wondering how you managed to balance the soloists. Did you have the harp and percussion change roles from their “traditional” uses in repertoire?

Yes, I also explore the harp as a percussion instrument in that movement. I decided really early on in the composition process that I was going to have the harp amplified. Otherwise, I was worried about compromising — keeping the percussion and the orchestra really held back — and I wanted, particularly for this concept, to be able to really let rip with those things. Rosie’s really able to hold her own on harp. These percussive effects that you can create on the harp — tapping and knocking on the board, doing thunder slaps on the strings — carry much more than they would against a symphony orchestra [unamplified]. They work fine in a really intimate chamber setting, but obviously not quite so much for a large symphony setting… -laughs-

So [the piece] finally comes to ‘Oceans’ — these last oceans of the solar system. They’re both calm, still, and full of turmoil. The piece goes on a really large journey from how it begins to how it ends. How it begins is with a cadenza-type passage between the harp and Hannah; Hannah is on waterphone, and the waterphone doesn’t have any water in it. I got very geeky about all of this, and did lots of research — when you have a waterphone without water in it, you can specify exact pitches. That was really fun; it has a different quality to it, more stable [and] more icy. And then it comes back — there’s a cadenza passage at the end of ‘Oceans’, 38 minutes later — but this time, the waterphone has water in it! It’s evoking the ocean, and really distorts the pitch; it has this warbling effect. I don’t know if you’ve heard a waterphone [before], but it sounds like a whale singing… It’s this grand journey, just to get the waterphone from having no water in it to having water in it. -laughs-

Tell me a bit about your collaborative process — did you manage to have a lot of time working with Rosie and Hannah?

I had lots of collaboration time with the performers during the compositional process. Hannah lives in Omaha, obviously I’m here in the UK, and Rosie was in the States, but now lives and works in Dublin — so we’re quite the international team! But this [past] summer, I went to Aspen Music Festival, and I was there for eight weeks; and Hannah decided to make the “short” trip down to see me in Aspen. The percussion department there let us have what was called “The Robin’s Nest” — which is where they had a lot of percussion instruments — and allowed us to have a good amount of time to go through the piece.

It was good to hear it in reality. You [might] know things like how resonant crotales are going to be — but when you hear them, in the room… I realised I had to add six, seven bars between fragments of crotale lines. -laughs- Or practical things; how much time [Hannah] would need to swap beaters. Until she was feeling it, it was hard for her to know without [physically] trying it out. It’s quite the puzzle, working out what I want where, and how it’s logistically going to work. It was really good to go over that with Hannah in person. That’s the beauty of getting to speak to performers — you realise you can make your music so much more practical.

Much of your work directly relates to the natural world, or natural phenomena or processes. Is this interest something you feel developed instinctively for you as a composer?

I think my interest in the natural world has always been there. I grew up in a village — we were on the edge of this village, and there were woods and farmland behind [us]. I felt a great affinity to it. I was writing emo pop songs when I was a teenager, and they definitely were not about the natural world… -laughs- So [it] hasn’t always been present, necessarily, in my creativity.

I didn’t know people could be composers when I was younger. The interest in natural world, and phenomena, has come a little bit from my science background. When I was doing A-Levels, I did biology, chemistry, physics, and music; and I was going to do a pharmacy degree. In fact, I started a pharmacy degree, and in the first term of that degree, I realised I had absolutely no time to do any music at all. [I] went home one weekend, and started composing something at the piano — which I often would whenever given the chance — and I remember my mum saying “oh, that’s good”. I mean, it probably wasn’t — but [I] had this sort of epiphany; I burst into tears, and I said “mum, I need to do music”. So she helped me figure out how to swap to music, and I started the following year.

I think my interest particularly in biology never left me, and has informed what I’ve been interested in regarding explorations within composition. I think it’s really fascinating; there’s so much to be inspired by on the macro and micro levels. You can find ways of finding relationships, creating rules that form relationships, between structures in the natural world — whether that’s really prescriptive, looking at the scientific side of things, or zooming out and looking at it in a more poetic way. I think I look at things in a less detailed, scientific way these days than I [used to], but I still find it interesting. How you can think about a concept of how something works, and how that could map itself onto different compositional parameters.

Instead of your compositional process feeling simply “inspired” by the natural world, it sounds like you’re really mapping out these natural phenomena in musical terms — how the material itself embodies those characteristics.

Exactly. It’s a way, for me, of not being overwhelmed by the blank canvas. It gives me a concept which tells me what type of material this is going to be — or what type of timbral world, or colour, harmonically, I’m trying to create. It makes it not just the horrible blank page, where anything can be everything; it allows me to hone things down more and more.

Your viola concerto, ‘Through the Fading Hour’, was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award. You’ve mentioned its inspiration from the colours of twilight; how did ideas of twilight get embodied within the conceptual inspiration — was the piece purely about painting a landscape?

I suppose I started from this simultaneous idea of a literal twilight — the sky going through different colours, and gradually the fading of light and the onsetting of darkness — there’s that transformation across the piece. But also, this idea of the “twilight hour” of Earth. It was around the time that the Ukrainian war started; so it all felt “really positive”, just like now. -laughs- I had a sense of [us] always repeating the same mistakes. I feel like there’s a fading of humanity. I’m sure that generations before have always thought this, but I feel as though we’re in the last centuries of humans’ existence on Earth, as well — our own twilight. I think Earth will be alright in the long run without us… -laughs-

So very optimistic. -laughs- Tell me a bit about how you approached the compositional process — how did these themes get represented in the viola writing and the orchestration?

One thing I always do when I’m writing a solo piece, or a concerto, is: if I can get a hold of the instrument, I will. You can see the viola on the wall… -points- I don’t play the viola, but was gifted this by a friend.

It goes through a lot of melodic explorations of colours. I use the orchestra to deliberately enhance the resonance of the colour of the viola. I always love thinking of solo instruments as a whole palette of colour in themselves — a whole orchestra within themselves. I think it’s great fun to see if you can deliberately enhance that, or subvert it, with the orchestra. The piece goes through many cycles of the same material; looping back round, but not in the exactly same way. This is me referring to how humans never quite adjust our behaviour — but it’s also showing the sky, and how the colours are modifying. The orchestrations of it, these repetitions, are evoking those changes. It eventually arrives at this ethereal, crystalline sound world, right at the end. Lots of timbral sounds coming from the strings — they’re doing these harmonic glisses. For me, this represented the last ethers of light, or the last days of our existence on Earth.

One of the other things I was doing in the piece — I’ve done it in other concertos since — was try[ing] to make a “super-instrument”; where you deliberately use the resonance of what’s going on in the solo line, and amplify it by doubling with certain instruments. There’s a really distinctive bit [7:20- 7:30] where the piccolo is doubling the viola — really picking out its harmonics — and the clarinet does the same thing. It plays this trick with the ears, where it somehow all sounds like the viola. It becomes this super-instrument. It’s been a good trick, particularly with instruments that might not “carry”, to do these colourings; you can tell it’s not just the viola, but the main sound is still the viola.

I always find writing orchestral music to be quite daunting, because there’s so many lines. Tell me a bit about your compositional process — how do you tend to start conceptualising these larger-scale works?

When I’m composing, I tend to draw on blank pieces of paper — like a zoomed-out version of that whole journey, what I was describing. And then [I describe] journeys and structures of each movement; I put details of instrumentation, the types of materials, the harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, timbral things. I suppose it’s sort of a graphic score representation of what’s going to happen. Sometimes I’ll even colour it, or paint on it. Say [for example] in a piece, I might deliberately decide to withhold the brass until a particular moment — so I know I need to be disciplined with myself, because it’s very easy as you’re [writing] to go “oh, you know what, I’ll sneak in a bit of trumpet here, that’ll be fun” — no! You said you were going to wait, so you’ll wait. -laughs-

I find these visual representations of what I’m thinking about help me to create. My idea is something in my mind’s ear that is blurry, out of focus — and I’m trying to get it more and more in focus. So writing it out on the page, it’s getting a little more focused; and then when I translate it back from the page to my scribblings at the piano or the computer, it’s getting more in focus. And you work that material more and more. I often find harmonies that I want to use on the piano, with pencil and paper; if it’s got a solo in it, I will go and use that instrument as much as possible. Just hearing the resonance of [the] instrument in the room, rather than just the notes on the piano, really stimulates different ideas. I always think it’s somewhere between the piano and the desk — it all comes together and appears on my computer screen.

You’ve talked about how concepts inform your form and structure. I’m reminded of your piece ‘Dreams’, that you wrote for Maja Horvat and Joseph Havlat, that took its structure from a Mary Oliver poem…

I sometimes will actually write my own poems — which I did for ‘Through the Fading Hour’ — which is another structuring device for myself. But sometimes, it’s nice to look at other peoples’ works. So this was an instance of that: Mary Oliver’s poem called ‘Dreams’. Sometimes, when I’m stuck [as to] what I want a piece to be about, I’ll read through a lot of poetry. I came across her poem because I’d bought it from [a] poetry shop in Boston. It must have been in ’22 — I’d been to Boston for Tanglewood. Certain lines stood out to me; these lines have then become the titles for the piece. The first [movement] is ‘The Dark Bud of Dreams’, it starts:

“All night
the dark buds of dreams
open richly.

In the center of every petal is a letter,
and you imagine

if you could only remember
and string them all together
they would spell the answer.”

So for me, I was trying to evoke this sense of something trying to be remembered. Not being able to quite be seen — it’s dark, it’s hazy, it’s veiled — but somehow also feels grounded, in the roots, the soil of things. That immediately tells me what tessitura it is, what timbres I want to be within [that]. That’s why the movement starts with these low, evocative, dark chords on the piano; and Maja comes in with this slightly sul pont, gritty double-stop chords at the lowest bit of the violin emerging from the piano’s sound. It tries to create this sense of something with lots of potential, but this dark, root-y feeling — that bursts out in different sections.

The same happens in other movements. The next movement is called ‘The Moon Staring’, and I’ll read a few lines of that:

“To sleep beneath you,
the moon staring
with her bone-white eye.

Finally you have spent
all the energy you can
and you drag from the ground
the muddy skirt of your roots.”

With that, it’s all very crystalline and still — as if we’re frozen in a moment in time. I was imagining the moonlight; completely sapped of all energy. It’s this beautiful exploration of lots of harmonics of violin. [I’m] quite poetically interpreting things to inspire the types of material I’m writing. And then the third movement, ‘Leap Awake’ — the line that goes on from “the muddy skirt of your roots” is:

“and leap awake
with two or three syllables
like water in your mouth
and a sense of loss—a memory
not yet of a word,
certainly not yet the answer.”

And again, there’s this sense of things not being quite locked in, or clear. I started almost like a false start — like it’s in the sound world of ‘The Moon Staring’ — but then I very suddenly let the piece to spring into life. It keeps having these bursts and reprise moments, of going back to that other sound — like you’re not quite sure where you are, you haven’t got this certainty of an answer.

And finally, the last movement [is] called ‘Fire Surges’ — which definitely takes some of my rock and metal influences from the past. -laughs- Like you’re rocking out to Dream Theater, or something. This takes the last few lines of the poem:

“When deep in the tree
all the locks click open,
and the fire surges through the wood,
and the blossoms blossom.”

It’s about this explosion of energy, deep within the trunk of a tree — everything’s beginning to click into place. It’s probably the most clear movement regarding its figuration, its materials. It’s meant to feel very fiery, and energetic; but at the very end, opens out to evoke this “blossoming blossom”. It all just dissipates away, as if it was never there. As if it was all a dream.

So it’s not necessarily a “formal” approach to text — it’s more feeling it all out and then putting it forward, rather than a literal one-to-one.

Yeah.

Tell me a bit about working with Maja and Joseph — how much input did they have in the concept and realisation?

Just the fact I was writing it for Maja immediately changed what this piece would be. You can’t not have the personality of the performer — their performance-personality — in your subconscious when you’re writing. It’s going to naturally filter through the lens of your own compositional voice. Maja’s played some of my works over a number of years — mostly string quartets — and she’s always found a great affinity for playing those. And I’ve really loved how she plays them! So [I] said “shall I write you a piece?” and we managed to get some funding for it. I wanted it to be a substantial, 20-minute piece. I’ve pretty much had her in mind [the whole time].

There were some bits where she had some definite input. At the end of ‘The Moon Staring’, I hadn’t quite worked out the ending. Which is very unusual for me — I don’t necessarily write chronologically — sometimes I’ll write the beginning and ending and work out the holes later, but this time I hadn’t got an ending and it unnerved me. I put a note to myself — “perhaps some material from the beginning but now harmonics” — she decided to try that, and she [said] “what would it be like if I went extremely, crazily high”? It creates this fragile, beautiful, ethereal sound; and I loved it. It’s directly down to her virtuosity. That’s something really special and unique; how a performer can make you have the confidence to do something, or think of something, you wouldn’t have had necessarily considered [before].

You’ve also collaborated with librettists before — such as with Kendra Preston Leonard on ‘a tulip, iron’. How does the collaborative process work for you when you’re more explicitly working with another writer’s text?

Working with Kendra on that piece was the first time I’d worked with a writer, outside of myself. It was a good learning curve, for me. I’ve known Kendra for a number of years. I first became aware of her through her multiple contributions to one of my husband’s research projects and books; she’s also contributed to my blog series through Illuminate Women’s Music.

With this piece, I was trying to write a work dealing with past trauma from my school years. I’d felt the anxiety and paranoia flare up, because of being institutional contexts like Tanglewood — nothing bad happened, they were all lovely — but I was feeling these twinges of worry, torturing my own mind and emotions about it. I wanted to reflect on this suppression of myself — the real-life bullying I experienced. I began to write my own poem, because that’s what I tend to do usually; but I found that I couldn’t quite write down what I wanted to [say].

I’d always thought about what it would be like to work with Kendra — so I wrote to her and said “how do you feel about writing a text for me that deals with memory”? Like all collaborations, you have to be open and authentic with the other person; so I opened up to her about my own experiences, and she opened up about her own experiences. That really helped us understand each other, and understand what this piece needed to be. Both stories then allow[ed] it to be universal — it didn’t have to be about my trauma, or hers. It’s about any situation where you’ve been bullied, and you’re so deeply, psychologically impacted by that bullying and gaslighting that you, yourself, are becoming part of your own abuse. So it’s quite a light topic. -laughs-

What was it about Kendra’s text that really appealed to you as a composer?

It was full of this natural imagery and metaphor for the types of things that happened. It wasn’t so direct, but you could understand what’s happening, what’s trying to be said. I realised as I went along, I was wanting to fragment things, change the text around, repeat things — and I would check with her each time, and show her the context. And she was always like “yes, absolutely”.

Since then, I’ve collaborated with her twice more on other projects. One was for the latest Illuminate Women’s Music project, a piece called ‘My Skin: A Selkie’s Tale’ — which, again, is a very light topic. -laughs- Selkies are these creatures in Scottish folklore that are half seal and half human. There’s a traditional story about a fisherman who steals the skin of a female selkie, and holds her hostage; she is held for years and years, and has his children. It’s always either told in the third person, or from the fisherman’s perspective — and I desperately wanted to hear this story from her perspective. So I asked Kendra to essentially write the story from her perspective. It’s a very dark [and] difficult story — but through the lens of this folklore, which somehow allows it to be less brashly in-your-face.

I guess there’s the separation through mythologising, or folklorifying, that means that the audience isn’t implicated or held within it.

Yeah. And then the big project I’m doing with Kendra, that I started this summer, is called ‘This is Jane’ — which we’re going to be turning into a full-length opera! I wrote one scene for Aspen that was premiered [in 2024]. ‘This is Jane’ is about a collective of women that ran an underground abortion service in the 1960s and 70s in Chicago, before Roe v. Wade was initially passed. The scene that I wrote was to do with one woman discovering that not all of the abortions were being done by doctors — some of the doctors were training the Jane Collective to do the abortions themselves, to allow them to reach more people — but it did split the collective. The trouble was, they could only have a certain number of doctors; the doctors working at the time were putting themselves [in] so much danger, because if they were found out, they could be prosecuted. The story culminates in the organisers of the Jane Collective almost being taken to trial, and prosecuted — but their lawyers managed to delay the result just in time for Roe v. Wade.

Kendra’s in the middle of working on the libretto at the moment, and I’m hopefully going to see a draft! Then we’ll do a table reading, and I’ll start work on it later this year. This collaboration with Kendra has really blossomed. We’re in conversations with a couple of production companies, but it’s really an odd time — particularly with the American [premiere]. I wonder how they will feel, with the political situation at the moment… Will people be so confident about doing controversial works?

Alongside composing, you also run Illuminate Women’s Music — an incredible initiative that’s been promoting and celebrating music by women since 2017. Tell me a bit about how the idea for Illuminate came about, and why you chose to set up the organisation?

Illuminate — or Illuminate Women’s Music, as I increasingly call the project — I first thought up in 2017, and then launched in 2018. The idea came up when I was still doing my PhD in Composition. I was really struggling, at the time, to find composers that spoke to me and my interest in mapping the natural world into my music. And I just hadn’t come across any women composers. But then through a lot of researching, I came across composers like Arlene Sierra, Emily Doolittle, Judith Weir, Jennifer Higdon, Charlotte Bray, Helen Grime… just to say a few. I found all of them, and their language, spoke to me.

It was through this self-discovery that I realised that I’d not been introduced to any music by women throughout my whole music education — not in school, not through my ABRSM exams on flute and piano, not through my undergrad. So I crudely began writing a list of women composers and their works — creating my own personal canon of female composers. And I realised [that] every time I went to a composition course, or a conference, I was either the only female composer there, or one of two!

This was all beginning to bother me. I remember in 2017, I saw a call for papers for what was the First International Conference on Women in Music at Bangor University, organised by Rhiannon Mathias. At that conference, I learned about a lot of historical works by female composers that I had previously not been aware of — Morfydd Owen, Rebecca Clarke, Lili Boulanger, Amy Beach, and many more. They feel like obvious names now, but they weren’t at the time. I presented this paper that solidified the underpinning ideology of what was to become Illuminate, which was called ‘Invisible Canons: Towards a Personal Canon of Female Composers’. It was through this paper that I was thinking about how we all have our own personal canons — works we know, and are familiar with — and how these coalesce together to form what we collectively know as the “canon”. Of course, these overlap with pedagogical canons, performers’ repertoire, programmers’ own gatekeeping strategies. And they all inform each other, back and forth. So I was thinking about how this can be disrupted: what do you have to do to get a work in the canon — to have the status of being in the canon?¹

Of course. It can feel monolithic, or like a hyperobject that’s so difficult to move, when trying to make an impact — especially when you’re trying to support marginalised groups.

Someone asked me after this paper “how can we fix it, what are you planning on doing?” — and I just said “I’m going to organise a concert — just a concert — with all works by women, so that women can be the norm for once!” There are so many all-male concerts every day, and no-one labels them as such — no one bats an eyelid! So that was the initial idea — I would do this one concert — but then it got out of hand… -laughs-

I gathered some of the composers [and] performers who I had managed to meet over the years, at different courses and things, and asked if they were interested in doing this with me. It was all done on “I don’t know if I can get you any money, but let’s see if we can do something”. I organised about ten or eleven concerts in that first year, and I did manage to get money to pay everyone apart from myself — yay. -laughs-

Yay for everyone else. -laughs-

That first year really solidified what I wanted Illuminate to be. It was this thing that was going to commission early-career, or emerging, women composers — and give them the opportunity to not just have a world premiere, but a piece that is performed (that particular year) ten times. It’s more like five or six [now], in most seasons. It’s so rare to have that — with the same performers, particularly. Sometimes, the world premiere of a piece can be a disaster, and it doesn’t mean the piece is a disaster — whereas this gave the feeling that the performers must invest in it, because they’re going to do it another six times. That would also allow the composer to understand their piece on a much deeper level.

It was all linked to this idea of getting pieces in the canon — or give them the opportunity to be part of the canon. Works need to be performed multiple times to get anywhere near that status; they need a digital a legacy — a recording — and if the performers have invested the time in learning the works, they might continue to perform the pieces in their own repertoire programmes. These were the ideas that were forming, and continuing to form, for the following years of Illuminate.

And then I would also have these mini-missions within Illuminate. I call them my mini-missions… -laughs- Because I’m from a state school background — I grew up in the East Midlands, which was rated “the worst place to have an education” when I was growing up — I always feel a bit of a chip of my shoulder [in] the music industry, with the amount of people who are from private school educated background. Lots of people with privilege who don’t quite realise they do. I wanted to make sure that the composers I’m commissioning have a good geographical spread — they’re not all from London — and they have a good spread of educational backgrounds, as well. I’m trying to make sure that [it’s not] everyone who happened to go to RAM, and the Purcell School etc.

How are things with Illuminate currently evolving? I understand you’ve recently partnered with Rūta Vitkauskaitė for a series of performances in Scotland…

For many years, I was doing [Illuminate] with Arts Council England funding — which would mean you could only have a certain percentage of your work outside of England. I never went up to Scotland. But this year, I went up to Scotland and partnered with Rūta Vitkauskaitė; we did a tour all across Scotland with Stephanie Lamprea and Jessica Kerr.

The Scotland tour’s done — so me and Rūta are recovering, and doing the Creative Scotland report. And I need to go back to my big list of “people who have asked me [to] be performers” in the past, and composers I’m interested in commissioning in the future. For many years, I ran Illuminate with Blair Boyd, who now lives in Chicago — and Sarah Westwood. With Blair moving back home to the States, and Sarah [having] a full-time job as a lecturer, they didn’t have enough time; but then I’ve collaborated with Rūta this year, and we’ve decided that every couple of years, we’re going to come back up and do something in Scotland.

It’s such a wonderful initiative — and you can tell, especially in today’s landscape, how much of an impact Illuminate has had on celebrating women’s voices in contemporary music. Particularly looking at how your approach has paralleled organisations like Keychange or EMPOWER: Women Changing Music…

I suppose what I’m trying to do is highlight the creativity of women, both as composers and performers — demonstrate that there’s a rich legacy of works written by women. And that’s what I keep trying to do each year.

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Learn more about Angela and her practice at:

• https://www.angelaslatercomposer.co.uk/
• https://www.instagram.com/angelasmusic/
• https://composersedition.com/angelaslater/
• https://musicpatron.com/composer/angela-elizabeth-slater/

Learn more about Angela’s organisation, Illuminate Women’s Music:

• https://www.illuminatewomensmusic.co.uk/

Links:

• Peter Kay featuring Tony Christie – ‘(Is This the Way to) Amarillo’ (2005)
• Mary Oliver, Dream Work (1986)
• Adam Whittaker et al., History as Fantasy in Music, Sound, Image, and Media, Routledge (2024)
• Team Hey Jane, ‘Meet the Jane Collective: the groundbreaking abortion access group’ (2025), Hey Jane

Footnotes:

1. Books with chapters on this topic:
   • The Routledge Handbook of Women’s Work in Music
   Angela Elizabeth Slater, ‘Invisible Canons: A Reflective Commentary on the Formation of my Personal Canon of Women Composers’
   • Voices for Change in the Classical Music Profession
   Angela Elizabeth Slater, ‘Illuminating Women’s Music: Exploring the Canonic Ethos behind the Illuminate Women’s Music Concert Series’ ↩︎