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

Veiling of the Sun for string quartet 2016

The piece explores ideas and imagery associated with a solar eclipse. It explores different representations of light and uses timbral dissonance to represent the blocking out of light. These moments gradually increase as the sun becomes more and more covered by the moon. The last passage represents the final glimpses of light around the edge of the moon before the eclipse reaches totality and darkness truly takes hold.

c. 3-4 mins

Veiling of the sun

Performed by Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble 2017.
Funded by Intrasonus UK/Arts Council England.

You Are Your Memory

Heather Roche (bass clarinet), Richard Dawkins (violin) Valerie Welbanks (cello).

Amphora

Night Mirrors for solo piano (2017)
Night Mirrors for solo piano was written for Késia Decoté for the 2018 Illuminate concert series.This concert series was founded and artistically directed by Angela Elizabeth Slater.The concert series seeks to promote the work of women composers past and present, and women performers.The 2018 Illuminate concert series activities have been supported by the Ambache Charitable Trust, Gemma Classical Music Trust, Hinrichsen Foundation and...
Night Mirrors is based on the imagery of the Salar de Uyuni (or Salar de Tunupa) which is is the world's largest salt flat and largest natural occuring mirror.When darkness falls on a clear night, the night sky is reflected by the salt flat, creating a 360 view of the universe. Night Mirrors takes this idea and explores the shapes and stars of the universe in the night sky and its mirror-image. The piece explores the depths and height of space, the drama and the stillness, using symmetry and reflection throughout the piece in different ways to create a musical mirror.
Angela Elizabeth Slater

TASCAM DR-07MK2

Night Mirrors

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

Illuminate Season I with Ethel Smyth trio at Late Music York on 7th September 2019

Etching Circles by Sarah Westwood (Illuminate commission)

Sarah Westwood (b.1989): Etching Circles (2019) for piano trio
The idea for the piece came after composing for dance collective Eleven Farrer House, on the project Circle of Perpetuating Choirs and is a memory of working with them. The four dancer’s had solos within the dance, and so I decided to make four miniature movements based on each dancer’s energy and movements. The audience was placed in the middle of the space, with the dancer’s moving around them. Each dancer went at a different pace to one another and at times came together.
© Sarah Westwood 2019

Etching Circles by Sarah Westwood

Illuminate Season I with Ethel Smyth trio at Late Music York on 7th September:

Confluere by Laura Shipsey (Illuminate commission)

Laura Shipsey (b.1992): Confluere (2019) for piano trio 
The word ‘confluere’ is the Latin root of the English ‘confluence’ meaning the place where two rivers flow together and become one; a meeting point. My piano trio is a kind of musical confluence drawing together two harmonic worlds and hinting at a third. Register, rhythmic layering and harmonic rotation techniques were all important in the construction of the piece but primarily it is the constantly changing relationship between the three players which provides the form. As with much of my recent work, the sonic world of Confluere focusses on line, flow, and clarity of character.
© Laura Shipsey 2019

Laura Shipsey Confluence For Piano Trio

Illuminate Season I with Ethel Smyth trio at Late Music York on 7th September 2019

Blair Boyd (b.1990): Undercurrent (2019) for piano trio (illuminate commission)

The largely atmospheric opening of Undercurrent comprises of dovetailed expressive lines in the violin and cello underpinned by muddled chords in the piano’s lower register. In the faster central section of the piece, the dense piano chords evolve into secco rhythmic pulsations which provide a mechanical-like current for the dialogue between the violin and cello pair. The final section of the piece is a return to the atmospheric opening as the original piano chords repeat in a pattern at a differing rate in each instrument, which is slowly augmented until the individual streams converge.
© Blair Boyd 2019

Blair Boyd Undercurrent

Prism trio at Hartford Women Composers Festival on 30th March 2019

Morfydd Owen (1891-1918): Piano Trio (1915)
I. Andante: The Cathedral at Liège
II. Allegro: The Cathedral at Rheims
Morfydd Owen was a composer, mezzo-soprano and pianist who left 250 manuscripts at her death aged 26, including orchestral, chamber and choral works, songs to English, Welsh and French texts, and transcriptions and arrangements of Welsh and Russian folk tunes. She wrote two Piano Trios, one premièred at University College, Cardiff, in May 1912 (and since lost) and the other at the Royal Academy of Music in November 1915.
The surviving Trio is Owen’s most significant chamber composition and she reworked it to satisfy entry requirements for the Academy’s Battison Haynes Prize from existing scores including her piano pieces ‘Prelude after the manner of J. S. Bach’ (March 1912), ‘Prelude in the ancient style’ (November 1914) and Little Eric (?1915). She fulfils academic expectation by providing movements in ternary and sonata form and examples of triple invertible counterpoint and fugue, but experiments through juxtaposing unforeseen harmonies and interjecting bars of silence. The opening D minor motif, characterised by minim chords and a Scotch snap, creates a sense of unity by underpinning the Andante and recurring as the D major peroration to the Allegro.
The programmatic subtitles ring rather hollow because so much of the musical material is recycled, but Liège and Rheims remain synonymous with First World War atrocity and evoke the context within which the work was written. Morfydd Owen’s brother Richard, to whom she was especially close, was deployed to France with the Royal Welch Fusiliers as she completed the score. ‘I get fearful spasms for him,’ a contemporary letter confides, ‘and I do wish he could by providential means, come home with a little wound which would incapacitate him, for the time being, but be no permanent injury – Mother worries so much for him, and so do I.’ In the event it was Richard, not Morfydd, who survived the War.
There is no evidence that Morfydd Owen’s second Piano Trio was played during her lifetime, but it was performed by the Salutation Ensemble in Tenby, Llandeilo and Llanelli in 1980; the Saskia Piano Trio at the Lower Machen Festival in 1998, and TableMusic in Brighton in 2018. A transcription for accordion was premièred by Miloš Milivojević with members of the Juritz Quartet at the Machynlleth Festival in 2011.
© Rhian Davies 2019

Blair Boyd Undercurrent

Illuminate Women's Music