Through the fading hour - Viola concerto (2021-22)

Through the fading hour has been written for the London Philharmonic Orchestra Young Composers Programme 2021/22 especially for violists Richard Waters and David Quiggle.

Through the fading hour explores the light qualities and colours that we see during the twilight hours, with the onsetting of darkness and the fading of light. We might also see this moment as the twilight hour of the earth, at least with our presence on it, as the realities of climate change become increasingly evident. The piece emerged from one of my own poems:
Through the fading hour
Whispers morph and mould
A flickering light gives one last breath Before being blown into the ether
c.9 mins
Angela Elizabeth Slater

Viola Concerto Through The Fading Hour

2022-08-13 1100AM CD1

The edge of things

Daybreak of dusk has been written for the 'Piece a day project' project at the Tanglewood Music Festival 2022.

Daybreak of dusk for cello and piano

a tulip, iron for soprano, tenor, violin, viola and cello
by Angela Elizabeth Slater (2023) text by Kendra Preston Leonard
Note from librettist Kendra Preston Leonard:
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.
Note from the composer Angela Elizabeth Slater:
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 over the surface from the bullying and gaslighting. I experienced at school.
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. 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.

Sandrine Schau, soprano
Louis Tiemann, tenor
Lovisa Ehrenkrona, violin
Nicholas Algot Swensen, viola
Tom Pickles, cello

CREATIVE DIALOGUE FRANCE 2023
Concert de clôture, Saint Florent le Vieil 27.8.2023

a tulip, iron for soprano, tenor, violin, viola and cello

Distorted Light for string quartet 2020 (revised 2022 and 2023)

Distorted Light explores the idea of light being distorted through different prisms create spectrums of colour. This is evoked through rhythmic pulsating patterns on harmonics that keep changing the shift of the harmony and emphasis of pitch. A melody of sorts is created across the quartet through the passing of these accented moments.

The cello's entries gradually begin to dissipate these pulsating harmonics with fierce and emotive solo material, that are then punctuated by small glimmers of material related to the opening material. These punctuations gradually transform into less defined material allowing the lines to interweave in a more fluid manner than before. The pulsating harmonic material little by little begins to make its presence known once again before distorting into the strident melody first heard in the cello earlier in the piece, but now almost a memory presented across the ensemble and continous disingtegrating into timbral explorations or harmonic pulsations.

c.8-9 minutes

Angela Elizabeth Slater

Performance Viano quartet on 2nd July 2023 at Hong Kong City Theatre

Distorted Light 2023 Angela E Slater

Punch, echo for alto saxophone and piano (2020)
Punch: to strike with the fist. Echo: a sound or sounds caused by the reflection of sound
waves from a surface back to the listener.
This work draws on the meaning of the words ‘punch’ and ‘echo’, representing these through the lens of Laban’s eight efforts. Laban movement analysis is a method and language for describing, interpreting and documenting human movement. I feel a deep connection between the gestural language of movement and music. Laban categorises movement into eight efforts, descriptively named Float, Punch (Thrust), Glide, Slash, Dab, Wring, Flick, and Press. In this work I explore the effort of ‘punch’ on both macro and micro levels, exploring the musical impact of a ‘punch’ and its subsequent aftermath, the echo effect

Angela Slater - Punch Echo

Shut out the Noise for solo percussionist (2021)

Shut out the Noise is a new solo work for percussion, written especially for Iris van den Bos as part of the
Arts Council England funded projected Connected skies: solo series challenge. In this project, composer
Angela Elizabeth Slater has set out to write six new works for double bass, cello, flute, accordion, percussion and mezzo soprano between October 2020-May 2021.

Shut out the Noise is the fifth piece in the Connected skies collection of solo works. All the pieces are
relective of the difficult times of 2020 and 2021, drawing on a poem authored by the composer, Shut out
the Noise explores the feeling of being overwhelmed by the news, social media and the situation of Covid-19.


When the sky enclosed around me
Shrinking ever smaller
I found woven half dreams
fractured in spaces inbetween
which ache and screams
I tried to shut the noise out
but it echoed right back at me
never to leave or fully be

Performed by percussionist Iris van den Bos

Shut out the Noise for solo percussion

Performed by Rose Hegele

Programme note:
Never to leave is the final work in the Connected skies collection of solo pieces. All the pieces are reflective of the difficult times of 2020 and 2021, drawing on a poem authored by the composer, Never to leave sets this poem that has been the unifying link between all the pieces. It is reflective of our times but also references the previous five works as though completing a song cycle.
​
When the sky enclosed around me
​Shrinking ever smaller
I found woven half dreams
fractured in spaces inbetween
which ache and screams
I tried to shut the noise out
but it echoed right back at me
never to leave or fully be
Total length c. 10 mins

Never to Leave for mezzo soprano

Stormscape (2014 Revision) (Firestorm)- Live Concert Performance - 23rd November 2014

Three Streams in time for solo B flat clarinet – Angela Slater (April 2013)

I. Clear Stream

II. Sky Stream

III. Star Stream

Written for Dean Wood, this piece evokes the imagery of a stream at three different points in the day. The sense of space between the stream itself and the material reflected in it is shown through the use of the full range of the clarinet. This piece also sees elements of microtonality, and has many passages composed without time signatures.

Three Streams In Time For Solo Clarinet (live Performance)

Cloud

Night Airs (for flute, clarinet, piano, violin, cello and percussion) (2014)
Angela Elizabeth Slater

Night Airs is from a series of pieces inspired by the natural world and explores imagery of the night. The piece opens with a stillness that explores different timbral combinations to create unusual tone colours. This stillness is disturbed by energetic bursts of colour that act as pre-echoes to the more melodically and rhythmically agile faster section. The faster section continues to combine the instrumental voices in interesting ways and particularly shows off the agility of the flute and clarinet in duet passages. Dovetailing cascades return the music to the stillness of the opening of the piece as the night draws to a close.


NightAirs- Clip

Dark Refractions was written in 2016 for the VRM Wind Orchestra as part of a collaborative commissioning opportunity from Sound and Music and the DAR residency scheme. The piece explores the colours present in the light spectrum of a natural phenomenon called ‘black rainbows’. This phenomenon, which I have recast as ‘dark refractions’, sees the refracted light spectrum veiled through darkness, distinguishing this from more conventional rainbows.

The piece is inspired by the imagery associated with the colours emerging from black rainbows, leading to each section of the piece having a distinctive colour ‘identity’. These colours are expressed through a range of harmonic, timbral, and rhythmic devices. The distinct characters of each musical section takes you on a voyage through the spectrum of a dark rainbow, with each colour being rendered musically. After each of the colours has been expressed, the piece builds towards an energetic and dramatic combination of the colours forming white light. It is not my intention for the colours to be made explicit in the piece, rather that I wished to create a clear sonic change in each identity.

Dark Refractions for wind orchestra

As the Moon runs Red for solo trumpet (2016) 

As the Moon runs Red was written Sept-Oct 2016 for Simon Desbrulais. The piece is inspired by a Lunar Elipse, a natural phenonmenon where the Earth blocks the Suns light from reaching the moon. As the moon passes behind the Earth the shortest light lengths of colours such as violet and blue are scattered as they go through the Earth's atmosphere, leaving the longer wavelengths such as orange and red. This means the moon appears to go a deep red colour as the only light able to reach it is these longer wavelengths. This piece explores the imagery of a Lunar Elipse and the gradual scattering of each colour before the only red colours the moon. 

Angela Elizabeth Slater

Recording:
Performed by Simon Desbrulais

Engineered by Alex Blythe

As The Moon Runs Red

Eye o da hurricane for string quartet (2017)– Angela Elizabeth Slater Eye o da
hurricane was written for a colloborative workshop with writers and the Gildas
quartet at the St Magnus composition course (2017). The piece takes inspiration
and imagery from Christian Tait’s poem ‘Fae da Journal o a Crofter’s Wife’. The
piece particularly draws on imagery from certain lines within the poem
including:

Sae here I am ida eye o da hurricane

while a aathing crashes an roars an birls

aboot me. Destructive an oot o control.

…

ta read atween da lines, or hoo

my hert vibrates laek fiddle-strings

in tune wi der black despair

…

sood cry my name A’ll hear him

sammas he wis in da nixt room

…

But ivvery mennit o ivvery day

I bargain wi da Mellishon, offerin him

my sowl if he’ll bring dem safely hame

…

Dis is what its laek, aa bi me lane

trapped ida eye o da hurricane

Eye o da hurricane

Twilight Inversions for orchestra (2018)
Twilight Inversions has been written for the London Firebird orchestra after winning their Young Composer of the Year 2018 competition. The inspiration for Twilight Inversions came after seeing a beautiful and mesmerising time-lapse video by photographer Kris Williams of cloud inversions on Snowdonia. In this video the clouds flow like water over the contours of the mountains and the twilight sky shimmers above the clouds. The clouds are, in effect, inverted so they sit below our feet whilst a vibrant colourful twilight sky is seen above. The piece explores the effervescently delicate textures and colours of these time-lapse images, and reflects the dramatic movement and darkening of the clouds across the time-lapse.
An􏰀gela Elizabeth􏰁 Slater

Twilight Inversions

Three Reflections for Piano

Dr. 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 for her work, Through the Fading Hour, her music has been described as ‘intricate...and often ravishingly scored’ and  making ‘deft and vivid use of instrumental colour’.. Slater collaborates with performers, ensembles, and initiatives worldwide to musically explore sounds, colours, and textures.

Slater’s recent creative projects include fellowships at the Modern Music Festival, with performances of Glass dominoes for mixed ensemble and Gathering the tide for orchestra; Hong Kong Intimacy of Creativity Festival, working with the Viano Quartet on Distorted Light; Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, for a commission of Where skies aflame, written for the Flux quartet; and Creative Dialogues Festival, for the world premiere of a tulip, iron. She has previously held Composition Fellowships at Tanglewood Music Center, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Society, Royal Scottish National Orchestra Composers’ Hub, Stockholm Chamber Brass Academy, Impulse Festival, Young Composers Meeting. She is also the receipt of the Mendelssohn Scholarship Award and is an ISCM World Music Days Nominee.

Unravelling the Crimson Sky will be a featured work on the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming album, Sounds New. Additional upcoming collaborations include Arbor Concerto, a consortium for accordion and chamber orchestra led by Sanja Mlinarič, Mountains become oceans, a consortium for percussion and harp led by Rosanna Moore and Hannah Weaver, and an expansion of As the moon runs red into a trumpet concerto with wind ensemble led by Simon Debruslais. Past collaboration highlights include working with Laura Farré Rozada  and the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Symphony Orchestra on piano concerto, Tautening skies and with Richard Waters and the London Philharmonic Orchestra on the world premiere of her viola concerto, Through the fading hour.

​Slater is also the Director of Illuminate Women’s Music, a chamber music concert series designed to celebrate the creativity of women composers and performers, as well as exploring the rich legacy of music written by women historically. Her works are self-published, with select works published by Composers Edition and Babel Scores. Please visit https://www.angelaslatercomposer.co.uk/ for more information.
For more information please visit: https://angelaslatercomposer.co.uk

https://linktr.ee/AngelaElizabethSlatercomposer


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Angela Elizabeth Slater

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