Kendra Preston Leonard

words for and about music

I'm a scholar focusing on music and screen history and women and music; and a poet, playwright, lyricist, and librettist.

Sense of Self, my opera with composer Lisa Neher, is now free to watch here on YouTube. This video premiere was created by Opera Elect, a wonderful small company that did a stellar job bringing this work to life during the pandemic. Please consider supporting them and their mission to create more new music.

I’m delighted to be part of CatalystNewMusic‘s inaugural FUSE: Collaborations in Song project. I’m working with baritone Daniel Laverriere and composer Keane Southard on a song about deforestation.

My January includes the premieres of Waters Rising, my new opera with composer Tim Hinck, and Neither Created Nor Destroyed, my new micro-opera with composer Jessica Rudman and the ENA Ensemble, in Philadelphia. Full details here!

Currently in the works: new environmentally-themed pieces with composer Jessi Harvey and visual artist Rachel Watson for a work called Between Hope and Extinction.

“Reparations in Music Scholarship,” American Music 40, no. 4 (August 2022).

“Hearing The Hands of Orlac,” A Teaching Companion to Silent Film, eds. Liz Clarke and Martin Johnson, Rutgers University Press.

“Women’s Compiled Scores in Early Film Music,” Hidden Harmonies: Women and Music in Popular Entertainment, co-edited with Paula Bishop, forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi, 2023.

“Women and Technology in Music for the Silent Cinema,” in Player Pianos in Early 20th-Century Life, ed. Catherine Hennessy Wolter, 2023.