For at least half her life, the Belize-born British composer Errollyn Wallen, appointed last year to the title of Master of the King’s Music, has steered herself through a web of invisible rules. Classical composers, dead or alive, were male and white. Their Black and female counterparts were derided or ignored, excised from history. Then, slowly but definitively, things changed, and the institutions that used to give her the cold shoulder started to open up to the music they had dismissed. “People always want to put labels on things, on people,” Wallen says, without rancour. “Let them. You have to hang on to your own worth, see what needs doing. I was written off young, but then found a way through. There’s still so much work to be done.”
Wallen’s musical range is ambitious, eclectic, often immediately appealing and expressive. Her huge catalogue includes works for ballet, brass bands, orchestras, choirs, solo singers, duos, pianists, chamber ensembles; her 22 operas make her almost as prolific as Verdi and nearly twice as productive as Puccini. She was the first Black woman to have music performed in the Proms, in 1998. Now among the most performed of living composers, she can’t quite remember how many world premieres she has in the next few weeks (after a recount, she decides it’s five), including two on the same night in different venues. She also has a new album out later this month: Errollyn Wallen Orchestral Works, played by the BBC Concert Orchestra. By any measure this is an achievement.
Belying the glorious flamboyance of her appearance: pink statement glasses, a long waistcoat studded with felt flowers “from a charity shop”, black satin shirt trimmed with lace, fiery hair streaked with highlights (“thank goodness I’m going to the hairdresser this week”), Wallen’s conversation is quiet, thoughtful, poised. A can-do determination marks her out. The prompt for our conversation, over scrambled eggs and coffee in a grand London club where she greets the staff and they greet her, is her new choral work, Reign. She has been down in London from her home in Orkney, excited to hear the first rehearsals.
For high voices and organ, with her own hymn-like lyrics, it was commissioned by the feminist arts festival Women of the World (WOW), and will be performed on Saturday, International Women’s Day, at the Royal Albert Hall. The singers are 150 women, girls and non-binary people aged between eight and 80 years drawn from three London-based choirs: Mulberry School for Girls, St Boniface School and Lips. Wallen was part of the original WOW team, founded by Jude Kelly in 2010. Is this festival focused on women still vital?
“I think it is,” says Wallen, 66. “The world has always been in turmoil but recently it has taken a step back. Women in all parts of the world have faced a backlash. Girls and young women are still forbidden to have education. Misogyny abounds. If I hadn’t had access to free education, I’d never have had the chance to succeed.”
A child of the Commonwealth, as she considers herself, Wallen grew up in Tottenham, north London. Singing has always been part of her life. She loves the English Hymnal, the definitive book of Anglican church music, and sees it as part of her cultural heritage. A talented pianist, Wallen frequently led her fellow pupils at her all-girls’ boarding school in Sussex in rousing accounts of Jerusalem, one of her favourite hymns. When the BBC commissioned a new version from her, for the Last Night of the Proms 2020 – the year of Covid – she combined a homage to Hubert Parry’s original with a sensitive new creation. The Proms played to an empty Albert Hall, but aired on TV and radio. Afterwards, she received hundreds of messages of abuse, essentially attacking her for daring to tamper with this national icon. Speaking to Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in July last year, she said: “I spent the next day deleting abusive messages thinking, ‘Well, actually, when was the last time somebody really talked about a new piece of music in the national press? So yeah, I’ll take it.’”
Wallen’s own astonishing life reads likes a set of disturbing short stories, set out in her 2023 memoir, Becoming a Composer. Soon after arriving in Britain, when she was two, her parents decided they would rather live in New York. She and her siblings were left with a childless aunt and uncle, Belize-born Arthur and Renee, a white EastEnder. Wallen expected her parents to send for her to join them. They never did, though later the children spent summers in New York. She loved her aunt and uncle, and accepted their hopes and anxieties as her own. Home life offered a culinary mix of pie and mash, jellied eels and, a nod to Belize cuisine, rice with everything.
Later, the young Wallen, who for many years wanted to be a ballerina, put herself on a diet of cake, strictly limited, and became very thin, one of many uneasy incidents that, today, might sound alarm bells. Her ambition to dance was abandoned when she was told there were no Black ballerinas. Uncle Arthur, perceptive as well as authoritarian, was the first to suggest the constant sounds in Wallen’s head might indicate she was a composer. He also helped her see wider horizons, introducing her to poetry, literature and concerts at London’s Wigmore Hall. “I never thought it was strange that we were the only Black people there,” she says. “I felt I could go anywhere. I will always thank Uncle Arthur for that. It must have been very difficult for him at that time.”
Obstacles and educational diversions aside – she ran away from school and, in her late teens, made a suicide attempt nobody talked about – she went to Goldsmiths College to study music. She was steeped in the music of Pierre Boulez, Benjamin Britten, JS Bach and, one of her all-time musical gods, Stevie Wonder. She became a session musician, which included an appearance on Top of the Pops, to her chagrin miming to a pre-recorded backing track with girl group Eternal (but she got to meet Cher, who admired her leopard-print waistcoat). She also set up her own ensemble. Somehow, and it is hard to imagine quite how, Wallen always hung on to an innate sense of worth, even as she was being crushed. “Show me your scores and we can have a good laugh” one influential concert director told her, in the 1980s, when her male contemporaries were securing performances of their works by elite groups such at the London Sinfonietta.
Were her aunt and uncle alive now, or her distant but proud parents, would they countenance her appointment by King Charles? It came as a surprise to Wallen herself. She assumed the call from a palace official was an invitation to a reception. “I heard myself say ‘yes’. I had friends with me who cushioned the shock.” She is beginning to think how to direct her energies to the role – a post in the royal household, not dissimilar to that of poet laureate, whose loosely specified duties include composing music for important royal events. One of her imminent premieres is a work for solo soprano to be sung at the Commonwealth 2025 service in Westminster Abbey next Monday.
Our wide-ranging conversation is over, with many brightly coloured strands left hanging. Later that day, Wallen will return home to solitude, composition, the sea at the bottom of the garden. (She used to live in a lighthouse near Thurso. She has since moved even farther north, close to where one of her predecessors, Master of the Queen’s Music, Peter Maxwell Davies, lived.) She will drive back to the sound, a current obsession, of the Jackson Five’s I Want You Back – “not very modern I know!” – thinking about how their clever bass line could fit with one of her own pieces. The relief of being there is constant, she says.
“I’m a Londoner but I have to be able to go to the piano when I feel like it and bash away late at night. You can’t do that in a London flat.” Before she went there, three Black friends said, ‘Won’t you feel scared, being a in a place with so few Black people?’ Orcadians, she says, are like the people of Belize: gentle, welcoming, accepting. “If I want to go somewhere, nothing’s ever really stopped me. I just go ahead and do it.”
Errollyn Wallen’s Reign has its world premiere at WOW at 15 – an event featuring music and conversation at the Royal Albert Hall, London, on 8 March.
Article by:Source: Fiona Maddocks
