‘The palace called and I heard myself saying yes’: how Errollyn Wallen went from Top of the Pops to Master of the King’s Music

Written off in her youth, the unstoppable Belize-born musician has overcome indifference, mockery and abuse to become one of Britain’s most acclaimed composers. You have to hang onto your own worth, she says

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.

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