Composer, pianist and singer-songwriter Errollyn Wallen is now the first Black woman to be appointed Master of the King’s Music, by King Charles. Wallen, who has composed pieces marking the Golden and Diamond Jubilees of Queen Elizabeth II, succeeds Dame Judith Weir, the first woman to hold the role. Weir was appointed to the 10-year post by Queen Elizabeth II in July 2014.
Masters of the king’s music usually compose pieces for special royal occasions, including royal weddings, jubilees and coronations. The honorary role was created in the reign of King Charles I, and musicians who have added to the musical life of the UK and the Commonwealth are awarded the title, BBC reported.
“I am thrilled to accept this royal appointment,” Wallen said. “I look forward to championing music and music-making for all.”
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Ranked among the top 20 most performed living classical composers, Wallen was born in Belize in 1958 but moved to the UK with her parents when she was two. She was later raised by her uncle and aunt in north London after her parents moved to New York.
Like her father, Wallen loved music growing up. At five years old, she began playing her father’s piano, which he brought home after performing as a singer in Northern clubs. “I would go to bed as a child dreaming of the piano and found it very hard to be separated from it,” she told Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.
After studying music at Goldsmiths College, University of London, before a masters in composition at King’s College, Cambridge, she played in care homes to make some money. Wallen also became a session musician for heavy metal, jazz and reggae bands.
Bent on becoming a composer but not knowing how to break in as the field was dominated by white men, she founded Women in Music, an organization to help address the imbalance. She went on to create the group Ensemble X, which performed some of her repertoire work for the first time in 1990, according to The Guardian.
By this period, she had established a reputation as a classical composer and became the first Black woman to have a work in the BBC Proms in 1998. She further composed Principia and Spirit in Motion for the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Paralympic Games, inspired by the athletes.
Wallen, who is also the first woman to receive an Ivor Novello Award for classical music, was awarded an MBE in 2007 and a CBE in 2021. But after creating a new version of Jerusalem, a hymn played every year at the Proms, she received “very abusive” messages, she told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.
“The work is dedicated to the Windrush generation and also the fact that it’s little understood that in the colonies, de facto, we live with the music of England,” she said. “And so in Belize, all these hymns are our hymns, and so I’ve also put a little, added an extra sentence, mentioned that we Commonwealth people, we sing with you.”
“I hadn’t realized there was a problem, that there’s certain sacred things that no Black person must touch.”
Analysts have said that composers from minority groups are often silenced and not welcomed as part of the classical music family. In 2015, only 6% of commissioned works that were submitted for the British Composer Awards came from black or minority ethnic (BAME) composers.
Wallen believes that if along the way she has helped to dispel the myth that a composer is only white and male, “that can only be a good thing.”
Now living and composing in a Scottish lighthouse, Wallen’s work includes 22 operas, and many orchestral, chamber and vocal compositions, as reported by The Guardian.
