Nanette McGuinness 00:00
We recorded the following interview with multi-talented librettist, musicologist, and musician Kendra Preston Leonard in August 2025. Sadly, she passed away suddenly and much too young on August 19, 2026. We are so grateful to have had the opportunity to speak to her, and we dedicate the following episodes with her to her memory.
Nanette McGuinness 00:31
[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to For Good Measure, an interview series celebrating diverse composers and other creative artists. I'm Nanette McGuinness, Artistic Executive Director of Ensemble for These Times. In this week's episode, we are joined by Kendra Preston Leonard as we continue talking about text. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
Nanette McGuinness 00:54
Thank you so very much for agreeing to join us for the podcast.
Kendra Preston Leonard 00:59
I am delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.
Nanette McGuinness 01:02
Oh, it's a real pleasure. You're a librettist and a poet. Could you talk to us about your creative journey, and more specifically, poetry and music?
Kendra Preston Leonard 01:11
Sure. So I started off as a cellist. I think some people probably already know this, but some people don't. So I started off as a cellist, and I started playing when I was 10, which was really late for a string player.
Nanette McGuinness 01:24
[laughing] Yeah.
Kendra Preston Leonard 01:25
But I caught up pretty quick. And by the time I was in my mid-teens, I had discovered that there was music beyond Mozart and Beethoven, and I had decided to dedicate myself to playing new music.
Nanette McGuinness 01:38
Wow.
Kendra Preston Leonard 01:38
I was really, I really wanted to focus on that. I wanted to be the person who was out there commissioning new pieces for string quartets, new pieces for cello, that sort of thing.
Nanette McGuinness 01:47
Wow, how enlightening!
Kendra Preston Leonard 01:49
So that's what I focused on for, for my career. And of course, I did have to play older things, and I understand the value of older repertoire.
Nanette McGuinness 01:55
[laughs]
Kendra Preston Leonard 01:55
But you know, my focus was on what is new. What can I play right now that is by a living composer? And so that was my focus for my, my performing career. I did my bachelor's degree at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, and then I went to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London for a year. I did a postgraduate certificate there, and then I did a master of music and cello at the University of Miami in Florida.
Nanette McGuinness 02:22
Wow!
Kendra Preston Leonard 02:24
But the whole time I was doing all of this, I was having joint problems with my wrists...
Nanette McGuinness 02:29
Oh.
Kendra Preston Leonard 02:29
...and my elbows and my fingers, and no one quite knew what it was or how to test to figure out what it was. So I went through all sorts of various different kinds of treatment protocols and tried all sorts of things, but by the time I got to the end of my master's degree, it had become very clear to me that I was not going to be able to put in the kind of practice time that I needed in order to play as well as I wanted. It just was not. It was not going to happen. So at that point, I moved into musicology, which I love and still do quite a bit of. I'm working on a new book proposal right now, so I moved into musicology and I started working on women in music. And since I was still interested in new music and loving composers, I started working on women in the 20th century. And I also started working on music and screen media, which interested me a lot. So my first couple of books focused around those topics, and the whole time I was doing that, I kept thinking this is great, and I get to know lots of new music, and I get to write about it from a scholarly angle. But I'm not participating. How do I get to participate in the creation of new music? I thought, well, I guess I could commission pieces, but do I know people who will play them? Since I can't play them, what else could I do? And then finally, it occurred to me, and I'm embarrassed how long it took to occur to me that, duh, Kendra, you do things with words every day. You can write lyrics and libretti, and so I started doing that. And one of the things that sort of pushed me into that was that I had read this article in a magazine or something somewhere that I don't remember anymore about a trip that Marie Curie took with her daughters to the seaside when she was older, and and I started thinking about that, and I thought that that sounds like a tipping off point for a libretto, but I didn't really know what I was doing, and there weren't very many libretto writing programs available then-not not the way there are now-and so I just sort of threw myself into libretti. I read as much as I could, and I listened to a ton of opera, and I tried to figure out how libretti worked with the music in ways that made sense, and how lyrics worked in different ways with different composers setting them and things like that, and became really familiar with with the repertoire. And then I approached Jessica Redman, and I knew Jessica because we had been at some of the same conferences together, and I really liked her music. And she was the first person that I approached about an opera, and that was. Marie Curie learns to swim, which gets its West Coast premiere in three weeks. Cool, very cool. Yeah, I'm very excited about it. It's a brand new production. It will be great, and so that's how that got underway. And with Jessica, I also wrote a number of song cycles. She and I are still collaborating. We have a current opera project that's going on, but I also started reaching out towards other composers to see if they're interested in collaborations, and things have just sort of blossomed from there. I think I'm lucky in a way that both of my parents were readers. I was talking about this with a friend earlier too, and they were there. Were there were no reading restrictions in our house. I could read whatever I wanted from wherever in the library.
Nanette McGuinness 05:46
Sure.
Kendra Preston Leonard 05:47
At any age.
Nanette McGuinness 05:48
Yeah.
Kendra Preston Leonard 05:49
And so I do feel fortunate that we had a lot of poetry in the house. We had Shakespeare in the house, you know. And my dad. I remember my dad handed me Macbeth when I was very young, saying...
Nanette McGuinness 06:01
Wow.
Kendra Preston Leonard 06:01
"You'll like this. It's got witches in it."
Nanette McGuinness 06:05
[laughing] I love it.
Kendra Preston Leonard 06:05
And he was right. I loved it. So that too has, you know, I... I never really... My mother was always hoping that I would become some sort of fiction writer. She always kept saying, "You could make a living writing fantasy, or you know, romance..."
Nanette McGuinness 06:05
Yeah.
Kendra Preston Leonard 06:05
"...and you do this and the other things," and um, and I haven't quite gotten to the, you know, novels.
Nanette McGuinness 06:23
You haven't written any, no bodice rippers yet.
Kendra Preston Leonard 06:31
No bodice rippers yet, but there's, there's always the possibility.
Nanette McGuinness 06:34
[laughs]
Kendra Preston Leonard 06:34
Um, but I I feel like I was just sort of always surrounded by words and language, and I was interested in words and language, and even though I didn't necessarily study it in a very formal way, I studied it in a very self-educating kind of way. And I've done that for a lot of things in my career. I feel like I'm very much an auto...
Nanette McGuinness 06:56
...yeah.
Kendra Preston Leonard 06:57
...teaching myself things.
Nanette McGuinness 06:59
Sounds like it. Yeah.
Kendra Preston Leonard 07:00
Yeah.
Nanette McGuinness 07:00
I call myself a reformed musicologist because that's actually what my doctorate is in. [laughing]
Kendra Preston Leonard 07:05
Right, so you know, you know what that's like.
Nanette McGuinness 07:07
I do, I do. Yeah, and I should have... my apologies. I should have introduced you a little bit better by saying you were a cellist, you know, as well. But it was a short question. Yeah, do you mind my asking what it was that was doing the pain on your joints. Did you ever figure it out?
Kendra Preston Leonard 07:25
Yes. So it took me almost 50 years to get a diagnosis...
Nanette McGuinness 07:30
mmhmm
Kendra Preston Leonard 07:30
...and it's a combination of Lupus, which is an autoimmune disease...
Nanette McGuinness 07:34
mmhmm
Kendra Preston Leonard 07:35
...and something somewhat rare, which is called mixed connective tissue disease, which attacks your joints.
Nanette McGuinness 07:40
Wow. Now...
Kendra Preston Leonard 07:42
And I know you have a question later about the viola da gamba.
Nanette McGuinness 07:45
Okay, I do.
Kendra Preston Leonard 07:47
Yeah, and the reason that I can play the viola da gamba is because it uses a totally different technique than the cello...
Nanette McGuinness 07:53
mmhmm
Kendra Preston Leonard 07:54
That doesn't put as much pressure on my joints.
Nanette McGuinness 07:57
Wow!
Kendra Preston Leonard 07:58
Yeah.
Nanette McGuinness 07:59
So I have not heard of mixed connective tissue disease...
Kendra Preston Leonard 08:02
Tissue disease.
Nanette McGuinness 08:03
I have heard of Ehlers-Danlos.
Kendra Preston Leonard 08:05
Yes.
Nanette McGuinness 08:07
...which I actually have. It's a... I guess related.
Kendra Preston Leonard 08:10
Oh, I'm sorry.
Nanette McGuinness 08:11
No, it's... it's not a big deal.
Kendra Preston Leonard 08:12
It's one of those things.
Nanette McGuinness 08:13
Loose joints. You know, there it is.
Kendra Preston Leonard 08:15
Right.
Nanette McGuinness 08:15
But they must be in the same related family.
Kendra Preston Leonard 08:18
I think they have to be.
Nanette McGuinness 08:19
But the Lupus....
Kendra Preston Leonard 08:21
Yeah.
Nanette McGuinness 08:21
Wow, that I'm sorry about that. Wow.
Kendra Preston Leonard 08:23
Thanks. It's um, I have it under control. I have good doctors. There are excellent maintenance medications these days for it...
Nanette McGuinness 08:32
Good, good.
Kendra Preston Leonard 08:34
...which is very helpful. So I manage it. It would have been sometimes I think, oh, it would have been nice if somebody that I told me this when I was 18.
Nanette McGuinness 08:42
Yeah.
Kendra Preston Leonard 08:43
But then I also think if someone had told me this when I was 18, I wouldn't have gone to a conservatory
Nanette McGuinness 08:47
Ah.
Kendra Preston Leonard 08:47
Right? I wouldn't have majored in cello. Maybe I would have moved away from new music into something else.
Nanette McGuinness 08:54
Yeah.
Kendra Preston Leonard 08:54
And so ultimately, you know, I'm... I'm happy with the choices that I made, you know, and moving into musicology and moving into creative writing after it was clear that I wasn't going to be able to play the way I wanted to has... there's a little bit of bittersweetness to that...
Nanette McGuinness 09:13
mmhmm
Kendra Preston Leonard 09:13
...but the way that I'm contributing to new music now feels, I think, I probably get the same euphoria from it now than I would as if I was commissioning and premiering pieces.
Nanette McGuinness 09:23
Sounds like it. I mean, I certainly loved the libretto that you wrote for us. It was wonderful.
Nanette McGuinness 09:31
[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure, and a special thank you to our guest, Kendra Preston Leonard, for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our podcast by clicking on the subscribe button and support us by sharing it with your friends, posting about it on social media and leaving us a rating and a review. To learn more about E4TT, our concert season online and in the Bay Area, or to make a tax-deductible donation, please visit us at www.E4TT.org. This podcast is made possible by grants from the California Arts Council, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, and generous donors like you. For Good Measure is produced by Nanette McGuinness and Ensemble for These Times, and design by Brennan Stokes, with special thanks to Co-producer and Audio Engineer Stephanie M. Neumann. Remember to keep supporting equity in the arts and tune in next week "for good measure." [OUTRO MUSIC ENDS]
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