Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 December 2019
When Eleanor Knight began researching her libretto for Silk Moth, she had to decide how to frame an opera about honour violence. Meeting women whose lives it had ruptured through the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation, she confronted the usual images that accompany the dozen-or-so honour killings per year in the UK media. Between the ‘old, faded school photos’ that illustrate victimhood and the male perpetrators with ‘blankets over their heads … shoved into waiting police cars’, she saw a gulf of painful complexity. ‘What’, she asks, ‘of the mothers?’.
1 Eleanor Knight, Programme: SILK MOTH Opera, preview, Nour Festival of Arts, 20th Century Theatre, London, 1 November 2015, www.rbkc.gov.uk/pdf/Silkmoth%20programme%20FINAL%20copy.pdf.
2 El-Turk, Bushra, Silk Moth for soprano and ensemble (Composers Edition: Source Music Services, 2015)Google Scholar.
3 Caroline Potter, ‘Grimeborn Festival Stages Daring Triple Bill Featuring El-Turk's “Silk Moth”’, I Care if You Listen, 20 August 2019, www.icareifyoulisten.com/2019/08/grimeborn-festival-triple-bill-el-turk-silk-moth/; Yehuda Shapiro, ‘Silk Moth review at the Arcola Theatre, London – “an eclectic opera trilogy”’ in The Stage, 12 August 2019, www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2019/silk-moth-arcola-theatre-grimeborn-eclectic-trilogy/.
4 Eleanor Knight, personal email correspondence, 19 August 2019.
5 The Cross-Eyed Pianist, ‘Camille Maalawy, mezzo-soprano’ in Meet the Artist Online, 3 August 2019, https://meettheartist.online/2019/08/03/camille-maalawy-mezzo-soprano/.
6 Dan Goren, ‘Kelly Lovelady: On Staging Bushra El-Turk's “Silk Moth” this August for Grimeborn’, in Composers Edition, 26 July 2019, https://whatsnew.composersedition.com/kelly-lovelady-on-staging-bushra-el-turks-silk-moth-in-august-for-grimeborn/.
7 Goren, ‘Kelly Lovelady’.
8 Potter, ‘Grimeborn Festival Stages Daring Triple Bill Featuring El-Turk's “Silk Moth”’.
9 Cassandra Miller, ‘Bel Canto’ (composer's blog post, 2010), https://cassandramiller.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/bel-canto/.
10 Miller, ‘Bel Canto’.
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