2 Sharing good practice: Illuminate

Illuminate is an all-woman music ensemble founded by composer Angela Slater in 2017 to promote the work of historic and contemporary women composers.

Activity 2

Watch the following interview in which Angela Slater talks about her work with Illuminate.

Transcript (opens in new window)

Then consider the following questions:

  1. What is Angela’s vision for Illuminate?
  2. What is her approach to programming?
  3. How does she ensure the financial sustainability of the project?
  4. How does she approach building new audiences for women’s music?
(A text entry box would appear here, but your browser does not support it.)

Discussion

  1. Angela talks about having lots of different missions within Illuminate:
    • educating audiences, performers and composers about historical and contemporary women composers through their concerts, blog series and recordings
    • repeating performances of works beyond their premier to embed them within the canon
    • providing opportunities to composers from different backgrounds and ensuring that concerts take place in different parts of the UK.
  2. Angela discusses the need to strike a good balance between showcasing historical and contemporary women. She mentions practical considerations: works being written for particular ensembles and score availability. She also talks about adapting programmes depending on the audience, placing unfamiliar works on programmes with familiar ones, ‘sandwiching’ contemporary music between historical works, and maintaining dialogue with the performers.
  3. Angela talks about making regular grant applications and explains that Illuminate have previously received funding from: the Hinrichsen Foundation, GEMMA Classical Music Trust, Vaughan Williams Foundation, Arts Council England, Creative Scotland, and the Marchus Trust.
  4. Angela discusses how she has built new audiences for women’s music through:
    • Illuminate’s blog series where audiences can learn more about the composers
    • working with the concert series, venues and promoters that Illuminate are presenting their concerts with (you will have heard here highlighting her positive experience with BCMG, who you heard from in Week 4).

Angela also talks about her belief that audiences are underestimated and that in her experience audiences are often actually curious to hear new works.

When Angela introduced herself, you will also have heard her talking about how women composers were absent from her entire musical education, as was also the case for Gabriella Di Laccio and Tim Parker-Langston. In her discussion of her approach to programming, she also mentioned the issue of class privilege within classical music. This is an issue which you will hear more about in Week 6.

OpenLearn - Women transforming classical music
ou logoCreative Commons non-commercial share alike icon Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.