My practice, collaboration and new work My skin: A Selkies Tale with perspectives from composer and librettist – Angela Elizabeth Slater and Kendra Preston Leonard

​As a composer, I am deeply passionate about exploring the intricate connections between music and the world around us. My compositional voice focuses on musically mapping aspects of the natural world, science, visual arts, dance, and politics, creating a rich tapestry of sounds and textures that resonate with listeners on multiple levels. By drawing inspiration from these diverse sources, I craft unique and captivating compositions that challenge and inspire.
My creative process is fuelled by an insatiable curiosity for gestures, shapes, and sounds, and how they relate to the world and other art forms. I often engage with extra-musical sources, such as visual art, poetry, and scientific concepts, to stimulate my composition thoughts and structure my work. I find that these sources provide lenses through which I can conceptualize form, colour, and texture in my music, creating a multi-layered and immersive experience for the listener.
Over the last few years I have become increasingly interested in collaboration and influence of different practitioners or artforms, whether this is with individual musicians – such as through the development of my concertos, such as Through the Fading Hour or my piano concerto Tautening skies - or more recently working with texts; existing poems, my own poems, and my collaborations with librettist Kendra Preston Leonard.
My first collaboration with Kendra was on a work called a tulip iron, which was developed at the Creative Dialogues festival in France (2023). I wanted to write a work that grappled with difficult memories and could become something that sat between a song-cycle and an opera scene. I began trying to write my own poetry but was finding myself hitting a brick wall. My own poetry is usually very short, crystalline and perhaps because of the nature of the topic I was lost for words, which is why I speak so often with my music. When I approached Kendra for a unique text to set, I asked her to explore memory as something difficult, questioning why certain things happened the way they happened, questioning yourself and whether things were your own fault. I wanted the text to draw on the deep intense emotions that still bubble under the surface from the bullying and gaslighting I experienced at school.
 
Kendra writes about the work:
a tulip, iron is about the fear and horror created by psychological and emotional abuse, the relief of escape from abuse, and the work required to contend with traumatic memories of it. Using Perle Fine’s work The Early Morning Garden (1957) as a focusing device for this lyric, I work with elements of the natural world as well as my own personal history. The mezzo soprano and tenor serve as protagonist and antagonist, respectfully, and I’ve made it deliberately unclear as to whether their texts and interactions are taking place in the present or are memories. The text is in three loose sections, through which the protagonist moves from fear and intense self-doubt into greater agency, grapples with the causes and extent of her wounds, recognizes how trauma has shaped her, and becomes able to distance herself from it. The antagonist diminishes and humiliates the protagonist, causing her to hesitate and sing in fragments of sentences. He calls her simple and an embarrassment, disparaging her mind and body and abilities, even as she begins to communicate more fully and lyrically and draws on
a wider world for her outlook. Finally, he—or the memory of his words and actions—falls silent, becoming nothing to the protagonist, as she leaves the scene—or memory—with self- determination.
 
I have found this text deeply emotionally powerful to set. Alongside this, I engaged with the visual stimulus of Perle Fine's work ‘The Early Morning Garden’ as this had inspired Kendra’s text and served as a visual stimulus for the emotional canvas of the work. Taken together, these helped me find a soundworld that is a mixture of fragility and strength, whilst exploring the nuances of colours and distinct gestural shapes for both the string players and the vocalists. The piece should be treated as an imagined scene from a larger narrative trajectory, set ambiguously in memory or somewhere real; perhaps it is both.
 
Performance of work at Creative Dialogues:

​In 2024 I was selected for the Aspen Music festival. As part of this there was an option to develop an opera scene that engaged with political themes. I have been increasingly interested in writing for opera and have been trying to find opportunities to prove I can write opera, having had my first taste of this at Creative Dialogues the previous year. I have always wanted to write an opera with a strong feminist story, and so I approached Kendra with a few ideas and then she came back with the suggestion of writing a scene based on the story of The Jane Collective. The Jane Collective were an underground Abortion Counselling Service that supported women before the monumental Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision. Between 1969 and 1973, Jane performed more than 11,000 abortions, without losing a single patient. When faced with the anti-abortion laws of the United States and the enormous inequalities in abortion access, they worked together across racial, class and religious divides to help pregnant people obtain safe abortions. This important story represents a universal struggle of women against the constraints put on them by society, showing how together they can help each other overcome seemingly impossible situations, and fight for a fairer world. It is a story I am honoured to tell through music and setting Kendra’s powerful text. 

Our latest collaboration is on our new work My Skin: A Selkie’s Tale written especially for the Illuminate Women’s Music tour 2024-25 in Scotland. This commission asked the composers to engage with themes of Scottish folklore, landscape and ancient people. As I researched, I came across a story unfamiliar to me about these unusual creatures called Selkies. There was one story that seemed to keep coming up in various guises called ‘The Fisherman’, about a Selkie having their skin stolen and being captured by a fisherman. All these retellings were written from a narrator’s perspective. Many stories across history rarely tell a story from a female protagonist’s point of view, and so I thought it would be great to hear from the female selkie; how does the story feel when it told directly by her? I approached Kendra with this idea in mind and was delighted to find out she knew the story very well already and this idea of exploring this narrative from the perspective of the female Selkie really resonated with her.


​Words on My Skin: A Selkie’s Tale – Kendra Preston Leonard
 
I don’t remember how old I was, or where I lived, when I first read or heard about selkies, but it had to have been early in my obsession with Celtic myths and legends, which began when I was perhaps 6 or 7 and has never really ended. Then, the selkie represented a wondrous way of escaping the difficult and noisy and often overwhelming human world; if only I could change shape and disappear into the water, hearing only my own heartbeat and breath, I would be able to feel calm and safe. The more folklore and stories I read, though, the more it became clear that the story of the selkie is almost always a tragic one. While there are stories about love between humans and selkies (the 2014 film Song of the Sea is one example), many selkie stories focus on what happens when a man steals a selkie’s sealskin in order to trap her in her human form in bondage to him. In those stories, the selkie is desperate to find her skin and return to the sea above all else, often including the well-being of her children. These selkies were often isolated by their abductors as well as by geography.
 
When Angela proposed using the story of the selkie for our piece for Illuminate Scotland, part of the Illuminate Women’s Music project, I was excited to give the selkie’s story a different ending, one that speaks to the power of women working together to help other women escape abusive relationships without diminishing the horror of those relationships, one that speaks to being persistent in seeking freedom, and to being empowered by being one’s true self. The narrator of My Skin is trapped and raped, and her children are mutilated by a man who kills her sister when she comes to rescue her. But the narrator’s clever, attentive, and sneaky daughters find their mother’s skin, and from her sister the narrator crafts them their own seal-coats so that she can take them with her into the sea when she flees. When this work is done, three tough and dedicated friends aid the selkie and her children in their escape and cry with joy to see them restored to the water. 
 
Angela’s setting of the text captures the selkie’s despair and anger and fear as well as her guile and cunning in finding a way to escape and take her children with her. We can hear her love of the ocean and her desire to be reunited with it, and her three friends—the lookout, the driver, and the one with a gun (based on a friend of mine)—get their own characterizations. One day we hope to write an opera that expands this song, an opera about the friendship and bravery of the women and girls introduced here, and about women being there for one another.