2 Sharing good practice: Illuminate

LAURA HAMER

Welcome, Angela. Thank you for joining us today. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and about Illuminate?

ANGELA SLATER

I’ve been working as a freelance composer for about the last 13 years, and I have a large catalogue of works at this point of almost 130 works, ranging from solo, chamber, orchestral works, concertos. And later this year, I will actually be embarking on my first full length opera, which is exciting. And with Illuminate, or what I now call Illuminate Women’s Music more often, it’s a project that I first thought up in 2017 and then launched properly in 2018. This was a time when I was still doing my PhD in composition, and I was really struggling to find composers that really spoke to me in my interest in mapping the natural world into my music. And then I began to come across composers such as Arlene Sierra, Emily Doolittle, Judith Weir, Jennifer Higdon, Charlotte Bray, and others. These composers actually spoke to me. And then it sort of-- it was this self-discovery that I realised that I hadn’t really been introduced to any music by women. And somehow I’d got through to PhD level and not being introduced to any music by women for my whole education. When I look back at school through my ABRSM exams, I hadn’t registered. And through my undergrad years, again, no women composers in any of the modules. So I just quite crudely began to write a list of women composers and their works and creating my own sense of a personal canon of female composers. And I was also realising whenever I was at a composition course or a conference to do with composition, I was either the only female composer there, or perhaps one of two. And so I began to think, this feels very strange. This isn’t right. So I actually went to the first international conference on women’s work in music in Bangor back in 2017, which was run by Rhiannon Mathias, where I learnt about a number of historical works by female composers who, again, I hadn’t been aware of previously, such as Morfydd Owen, Rebecca Clarke, Lili Boulanger, who seemed like-- well, to me now, feel like really obvious names. But at the time, they weren’t. And at that conference, I presented a paper that began to solidify the underpinnings and the ideology that formed Illuminate, called invisible canons towards a personal canon of female composers. So it was after I presented this paper, someone asked me, so how are we going to fix this? And I suddenly just said, well, I’m going to organise a concert of works with all women composers where the women can be the norm for once. So that’s where it all began, that I decided I was going to plan just one concert. I went on to develop Illuminate Women’s Music.

LAURA HAMER

Thank you so much for that, Angela. I think you’ve already answered this a bit. But could you tell us what your vision is now for Illuminate or Illuminate Women’s Music?

ANGELA SLATER

After that, I really solidified what I wanted Illuminate to be. And when I’m not always doing these pre-concert talks about Illuminate, I say it’s a space to highlight the creativity of women, both as composers and performers, and to demonstrate there’s a rich legacy of historical works written by women. And I suppose my Illuminate project, or Illuminate Women’s Music project, has lots of different missions within it. On one hand, it’s to educate both audiences and performers and the composers I commission about the historical composers and for the performers, of course, to educate them also about the living composers as well. And that’s through the concerts, but also through the blog series I run on the website and also through the digital legacy of recordings of the concert works that we have, which has obviously built up over the years. And then, particularly as I am a composer, to provide the composers with not just a world premiere performance. This is such a problem for living composers generally. And so I always would have about five or six concerts per season and obviously with the same performers as well, which is such a sort of unique privilege to be able to hear that work go beyond just that first performance. I’ve had the privilege of several seasons of now not just seeing my own works, but other people’s works go on this wonderful journey. And by the fifth concert or sixth concert, the performers know it at such a deeper level. That also tapped back into my thinking about of how I can get works into the canon. They need to have repeat performances. They need to be really embedded in our performers repertoire so that they would go on after the residence with Illuminate to perform them in their normal concerts surrounded by male composers as well. And that then there would be also a good digital copy of that piece which would allow composers to perhaps gain interest from other performers to go forwards. So really to create as much of a situation as possible for the works to have a legacy going forward in some way. And not just with the commission works, but with any of the historical works that we did as well. And then I suppose something I always called like a mini mission within Illuminate was also providing opportunities to different backgrounds of composers. I myself from a state school educated background from the East Midlands. And I’m always aware that the industry has such a huge problem with class and people don’t recognise their own privilege. I’m also quite conscious to make sure there’s both different educational backgrounds and the composers I commission and geographical reach because there’s such a slant on everyone needs to be in London or has to be from London. And so I try and fight against these other things a little bit within the project and linked to that is, of course, actually having the concerts nicely spread across the country.

LAURA HAMER

Could you tell us a bit about your approach to programming with Illuminate, and particularly how you ensure a good balance between performing historic women composers and promoting living ones?

ANGELA SLATER

So it’s always a balance between showcasing the historical legacy of women's creativity and the ongoing practice of today. And I think both are important. I think it depends on to an extent who the performers are. So I always have to consider practical things, whether there’s actually repertoire that exists for a certain ensemble. And then if there isn’t, how easily is it for me to adapt some existing historical repertoire? Are those works easily accessible regarding the sheet music? And all of these things impact on whether I can actually programme certain historical works. But I’m always slightly adapting the programming depending on the audience we have because I want to ensure that the concerts are accessible to a wide range of audiences. And so if I know it's a kind of audience that’s more used to the canon of classical works, then I might try and programme a few more historical works that though they haven’t heard before, are perhaps a more familiar sound world to them. And I sometimes do like a contemporary music sandwich, essentially where it’s a couple of contemporary works in between two historical works. I try as much as I can have a dialogue with the performers as well. Because at the end of the day, they’ve got to be the ones happy enough to perform it all.

LAURA HAMER

So Illuminate has been going now since 2017. Could you tell us a bit about how you’ve ensured the financial sustainability of the project.

ANGELA SLATER

So it’s still very much on a project by project basis. And so it’s just down to every year, unfortunately, doing a slog of grant applications. How I set it up in the first place is I had a group of people who were willing to do it in kind in a sense. And I said I’ll try to get as much funding as I can. And I remember that year we got money from the Hinrichsen Foundation, Gemma Classical Music Trust. And I think the Vaughan Williams Foundation as well. And it was enough for me to pay everyone apart from myself, basically. But what I wanted to do is prove the model worked so that the following year we went to Arts Council England and then I was able to get much more funding. And so it’s gone on. It was tricky the year after COVID. I didn’t actually bother to apply to Arts Council England. But since then, I’ve managed to garner more funding. Actually, we went up to Scotland this year, so we actually got funding from Creative Scotland, as well as the Marchus Trust and the Vaughan Williams Foundation. And so it’s back to actually being able to fund everyone, including myself and travel and all the rest of it.

LAURA HAMER

Thank you very much for sharing that, Angela. And the final question I’d like to ask you please is, how do you approach building new audiences for women’s music through your work with Illuminate?

ANGELA SLATER

One of the things I do is do a blog series to try and build audiences’ curiosity so they can learn about composers. It’s really working with the concert series and different venues and promoters that we go to. So usually, I’m slotting into some existing concert series that already have an audience, and then they become our audience. Also, I have had other organisations help us promote things. So when I was doing a concert in Birmingham, BCMG were very happy to share our concert information with their audience. And then that really allowed us to have a really strong reach to Birmingham audiences. And I think the other thing which is perhaps not so specifically related but is related is that I always think audiences are underestimated and that they can actually be quite curious about music. And sometimes we don’t have enough faith and trust in audiences that they’re happy to actually hear new music, whether that’s new music that’s actually old music but they’ve not heard it before, or actually new music. And those concert series that actually embrace that I’ve found that their audiences have really loved our concerts. Whereas I have had people say, oh, no, we can’t take a risk on this, and which has been quite frustrating over the years. So, yeah, it’s just this thing of building gradually our mailing list up through the different concert series and universities we’ve gone to. And then I suppose that’s built a trust in the brand.

LAURA HAMER

Thank you very much, Angela, for joining us and for sharing your work with Illuminate.

ANGELA SLATER

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.