Meet the new Master of the King’s Music: ‘I didn’t fit the image of a composer’

The job title may date back 398 years to the reign of Charles I, but the royal summons came by WhatsApp. “I got a message asking me to ring Buckingham Palace,” Errollyn Wallen says. “When I called, one of the King’s private secretaries asked me if I would like to be the next Master of the King’s Music. I didn’t hesitate long. It’s a wonderful opportunity to do what I feel most strongly about: champion music and music-making for everyone.”
The appointment, announced today, won’t entirely surprise the musical world. Wallen, 66, is one of Britain’s busiest composers, with no fewer than 22 operas to her name, as well as a vast catalogue of instrumental and vocal works for professionals and amateurs, and a long track record of campaigning for the place of women and ethnic minorities in classical music. She also has form as a royal composer — she wrote pieces to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s golden and diamond jubilees.
And she is surely the perfect choice for a king who has shown his resolve to be inclusive and diverse in his support of culture. The role is similar to poet laureate; writing music to commemorate royal events, advocating for classical music and advising the King on music. Her predecessor, Judith Weir, was the first woman to be made “Master”. Wallen will be the first black composer in the role.
More than that, she is the living embodiment of multicultural Britain. “Once, when I attended a Buckingham Palace reception for people from the Commonwealth, the Queen [Elizabeth] asked me where I came from,” she recalls. “I think she meant my birthplace, but I replied, ‘Strathy Point.’” Strathy Point is the cape on the storm-tossed north coast of Scotland where Wallen bought a lighthouse to compose in blissful solitude. She has now moved even further north, to Orkney.
Wallen was born in Belize. Her uncles had come to Britain during the Second World War to join the RAF, and when Wallen was two her parents followed them to London. “Then a few years later my father and mother went to live in New York, where we have a huge extended family, while my three siblings and I stayed with my uncle and his wife, who was a white woman of Cockney heritage,” Wallen says. “The idea was always that, at some point, my parents would send for us or we would go back to Belize and live on a farm. But it never happened. We lived in this limbo for years, and as the eldest I had to make sense of it for my siblings.”
There was a compensation: her uncle noticed that she was musical. “I was always making up tunes and getting frustrated because I wanted to get them out somehow,” Wallen recalls. “When I was about nine my uncle said he thought I might be a composer, which was quite perspicacious of him. He then made sure I got music lessons. He even took me to the Wigmore Hall to hear a Chopin piano recital.”
Her uncle’s hunch was right. Wallen went on to study music at Goldsmiths College, King’s College London and Cambridge University (her brother, Byron, is also musical — he’s a jazz trumpeter). But it wasn’t until her late twenties that she thought she might make her living from writing music. “It took quite a lot of courage,” she says, “because I couldn’t see how I fitted the usual image of a composer.”
In 1998 she was the first black woman to have a work performed at the BBC Proms. With the royal appointment she has achieved another notable breakthrough. Do such things matter? “They do and they don’t,” she replies. “It would be terrible to think I had been chosen by the King because of the colour of my skin. What’s more important, I think, is that with my background I have a good understanding of music and culture in many different contexts. I was brought up by a black man and a white woman in Tottenham [north London]. As children we played in the street with kids from all sorts of backgrounds. Then for a while I worked as an education officer in south London, going around starting classes in music and recording for adults. I’ve played in bands and I’ve worked with top orchestras. So I feel I know the music scene from many angles.”
Four years ago she attracted controversy (and, she says, “hundreds of abusive messages” on social media) when, for the Last Night of the Proms, she slightly rearranged William Blake’s Jerusalem. The lyrics were the same except for one additional line, “all the people of the Commonwealth of nations sing with you”, which was slipped in before the final verse but she added dissonance and references to the blues. It was to make the point that the hymn means as much to families such as hers, from former British colonies, as it does to the British.
“That’s exactly right,” she says. “My father sang all the British hymns in a male-voice choir. People in Belize were very proud of their links to the UK and its values. They still want those bonds through the Commonwealth — bonds of kinship, rather than domination by a colonial power.”
Does Wallen feel that colonial guilt, or in some cases the absence of it, is a complicating factor in the culture of modern Britain? “I do feel we have to address the ignorance about colonisation,” she says. “Many people have a drawbridge attitude; they don’t want to know what’s happening in those former colonies. Yet there are so many fascinating stories to be told and so much amazing art coming from those countries. I feel that I personally have a lot to say in my work because of my heritage.”
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The job of Master of the King’s Music is famously undefined. Will Wallen start writing birthday odes for little princesses, as some of her predecessors did? “I think I will write for some royal occasions, yes,” she says, laughing. “But I’m looking forward to having a lovely chat with the King about the specifics. I am so excited, as is Judith [Weir], that we have a monarch who is deeply musical himself and really cares about music. Also it’s exciting that we have a new government that seems to value the arts rather than attacking them.”
Well, let’s wait and see about that. But will Wallen actively campaign for children to get more musical opportunities than they do at present, as Weir and her predecessor, Peter Maxwell Davies, did? “Yes, I really want us to get back to a place where all children can pursue whatever talent they have,” she replies. “I worry that, for someone from my background, musical opportunities are closed off after the age of ten. I have to change that.”
She has always had a mischievous, maverick side to her music-making. When she started her own group, Ensemble X, in 1990, she rewarded audiences at its first concert by distributing Mars bars. “I had always wanted to go to a concert that involved chocolate,” she writes in her entertaining memoir, Becoming a Composer, published last year. She also does a good line in eye-catching titles. A song-cycle about death was enlivened by being called Are You Worried About the Rising Cost of Funerals?
Presumably she’s being appropriately serious about her appointment. “It’s a slightly out-of-body experience so far,” she says. “I’m still plodding around doing my usual day-to-day things, yet I suddenly have this title that goes back four centuries. I think it’s nice for the Wallen family, a lot of whom were very musical but never got the chances I have had. For myself, though? Well, it sounds like a cliché, but the idea of serving music rather than serving yourself is what I would most like to be remembered for. All the composers I really adore felt like that. Music is such a communal thing. It’s the taking part that really matters.”
Should we now address her as “Master”? “Well, when I got my CBE I told my students they had to call me ‘commander’,” she says with a laugh. “I’m quite happy to stick with that.”