Interview, Errollyn Wallen's Peace on Earth

Belize-born composer Errollyn Wallen may have first come to many people's attention after being commissioned to write a new arrangement of Parry's Jerusalem for the unique setting of the 2020 Last Night of the Proms, following two acclaimed large-scale works for the opening ceremony of the London Paralympic Games in 2012, but her music ranges far wider than this – taking in solo songs, chamber works, operas, concertos and more.

Her newly-released EP Peace on Earth with the Choir of King's College Cambridge under their former Director of Music Stephen Cleobury, who died just over a year ago, perfectly illustrates one particular aspect of Errollyn as a composer, featuring three relatively small choral pieces by her. Errollyn was kind enough to share some of her thoughts on this album – revealing the circumstances that shaped both the recording and the three works that make it up, as well a certain bemusement at suddenly finding her public presence dominated by just one recent composition.

This EP comprises three of your choral works, all of which are either sacred or have some sense of spirituality about them. Can you tell us a little about how this recording came about?

I wanted to record a CD of my organ and choral works – I have composed quite a lot of choral works over the years, so I wanted to collect together the works that I felt were the most important from that genre. There’s a piece called Tiger which I wrote for John Butt, and another called Triptych that was commissioned by Thomas Trotter. I’d spent a year at King’s doing an MPhil and Tiger had been premiered by John Butt there, and I was initially just enquiring about hiring the chapel to record the organ works. But then Ben Sheen at the King’s College record label, and Stephen Cleobury, asked me to let them know some more about what I was planning, and asked me to release it do it on their label. A real honour for me.

One of the works we’d been planning was a forty-part unaccompanied work which wasn’t going to be possible to record during the lockdown, but Ben decided that we should carry on and release the EP of the works we’d already recorded with the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge. It was actually one of the last recordings that Stephen made. Even before the pandemic forced that decision on us, I remember thinking that Peace on Earth could be released as a single.

Peace on Earth is a setting of words you wrote yourself – how different was that process from setting someone else’s text? Did the music and words take shape in parallel, or did one come first?

I was just improvising at the piano, and the music popped out. I then thought about what sort of words would go with it – I dedicated it to Nicholas Riddle at Editions Peters, who loves Christmas music (this was not long after I’d signed with Peters), and I wrote it off my own bat and wanted to include it in the Errollyn Wallen Songbook, which we were putting together at that time.

So it was the music that came first – I like the way that it’s in different layers, like in Bach’s cello suites where you have the different octaves creating different parts. I wanted the vocal line to be something quite easy to sing but with the clashing of the Es and E flats to create that sense of unease. But yes, definitely music first, or certainly that riff, and then the words and the music developed together. I love the freedom of writing my own text and music: you can put things in and take things out.

Your musical language in these three pieces is largely tonally-centred, but in a boldly expanded way that isn’t shy of dissonance. Who would you count as the main influences on your own style?

For me, I would say there’s a continuing and abiding love for Bach and Stravinsky – those two above all. It’s their range of expression; they both can do lots of different things, and work in many different forms, and you can see in the music their own fascination with invention. Looking at their work keeps one fresh. Their infinite enjoyment in making music and trying new things; it’s all right there on the page.

With Stravinsky I think it’s his ear for sonorities that is remarkable. The Symphony of Psalms is a particular example of this – as a fresher I sang in it and I was struck by how modern it sounded and yet at the same time how timeless; it’s economical and also rich. I find it quite instructive to consider the opening bars of Stravinsky’s works, actually – he takes the stage instantly and bang, you’re there. He doesn’t mess around, even when it’s a work that opens quietly like the Firebird: there’s always something happening in his music and he has an unerring theatrical sensibility.

Before deciding to focus on composition, you were initially training to be a dancer. Has that experience carried over into the way you write your music?

I’ve never understood people who say they find it hard to understand dance. I’ve always loved watching shapes in space, so I just love watching dance. I used to sit for hours as a child, just looking at photographs of dancers, and looking at the shapes. It’s a language that I understand, gestures and movement in a space, working with different textures. I think if I hadn’t been a composer, I would have wanted to choreograph – thinking about how you move bodies around and that sort of thing. It’s not that far away from music, and of course music is the force behind dance.

It’s an abstract consideration – the shapes rather than the actual plot of a ballet, or like paintings that are composed of blocks of colour. Both those things inform my work so much. My last work was actually a homage to the late painter Harold Hodgkin. I wasn’t always that interested in the narratives in ballet – I was watching the arc, the line of the bodies. Having studied dance myself I know that you’re taught to create these shapes and you spend a long time learning how to do that.

It’s not always dance in the obvious sense of keeping to a rhythmic pattern. In fact I remember someone saying to me once “you have such good ideas, but why don’t you just continue in that groove – why do you keep changing?”. But the working-out of it in that way is crucial to me, and I’m finally acknowledging how important the training in dance was to me. The interlocking of phrases, for instance; as a dancer you have to decide how to interpret the music, and watching other dancers you see music physically come to life. I feel very fortunate to have had the training I had.

Many people’s first encounter with your music will have been in the form of your reworking of Parry’s Jerusalem (“Jerusalem — our clouded hills”) for the Last Night of the Proms. How did you approach the process of writing your arrangement – what kinds of factors shaped the music?

It’s funny that the Proms should have been the first time people heard my music – I’ve been plugging away as a composer for years! But I realise that some people wouldn’t have heard of me before. I think an even bigger platform than that was when I wrote two works for the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games which was broadcast to a billion people around the world.

I had very little time to do it – only three weeks – so I just had to get on with it. My primary concern was to create a vocal score as soon as possible so that Golda Schultz would have enough time to learn it. Jerusalem was a hymn I grew up with: as a kid I would play the hymns when the teacher wasn’t there, and would even choose them sometimes. The hymn book we played it out of was Songs of Praise, so that was – and still is – very important to me. I still have it with me today! Hymns are an important foundation of my composing language.

I just played Parry’s hymn over and over; that was all I felt I could do, to be saturated in the original. The chords are so fantastic, and it’s part of our singing heritage. That unison line, great harmonies and a great melodic contour to it. The thing that surprises me about the people who got so cross is that there are already so many arrangements of Jerusalem, though I suppose the context of it being the Last Night was troubling for some people. But the idea of a composer rearranging something – going back again to Stravinsky and Bach, there’s nothing a composer loves more than to work with existing material, because you can have a conversation with it.

When I sat down at the piano that opening just came out – I think the guiding principle for me was going back to William Blake’s text. It’s very searching, full of questions, quite dark and quite sardonic in places. It’s a challenging poem. And of course they were in a difficult place then, and we’re in a difficult place now, but particularly at that time the world seemed to be in turmoil and I felt it was a poem for our times.

I’d been at the Last Night the previous year, and this year I realised it was very different, with a much reduced orchestra – and I had to think hard about the instrumentation. I thought I’d use delicate touches so that we can really hear the words and get the sense of their drama. My arrangement almost wrote itself; everything was springing from my own deeper understanding of the words. I’d like to think that I might have done the same even if I’d had a full orchestra and chorus available.

Jerusalem — our clouded hills is really in two parts – in the first half Golda is telling us a story, and I make use of silences and fragmentation there. I also added words to include the people of the Commonwealth and then in the second half it’s much more bombastic, hope-and-glory stuff which obviously would have been fabulous with a massive orchestra and chorus — but I still had the organ! The Last Night is such a communal experience and I was so proud and happy to be a part of it.

Hitherto, your choral music has been less frequently-performed than some of your other compositions; is there something different about these three works that has made it more straightforward to record them?

I’ve realised that I’m not part of the “scene” which is writing music for Anglican services and things like that. My choral music has been in operas and large pieces for choruses and orchestra - Carbon 12 (text by John Binas) was a massive oratorio for hundreds of musicians, and likewise the Paralympic music. There are some shorter choral things, but they’re not service music. So those bigger things have maybe had one or two performances, and then been put aside – and likewise, I haven’t written anything like a Mass that would get regular performances. When the Wet Wind Sings for 40 unaccompanied voices, again, is a concert work and not likely to be done so often because of its size, though it will be performed at next year’s Spitalfields Festival by the Dunedin Consort.

Certainly, many choral works I’ve written are not quite “out there” yet – but I’m just so thrilled about the EP. See that I am God (text by Julian of Norwich) was commissioned by St Paul’s Cathedral, and I’m very pleased to have that recorded by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge. The reverb at St Paul’s is very long, so you get these sustained clashing dissonances and my shifting harmonies got a bit lost. What I loved about working on See that I am God was spending time with Tim Wakerell, who was the organist of St Paul’s at the time, and we chose the best registrations together. Tim is such a great organist, and he was able to advise me about how the organ part would work. I wrote the part, and then we tried it out, and I liked how dramatically it turned out.

PACE, of course, is just unaccompanied. I’d wanted to write something very simple, just setting that one word. Originally the work was intended to be very short, maybe one minute — but it grew. PACE is actually a present dedicated to a dear friend, Ruari Murchison. I find it inspiring to think of a new piece of music as a gift. Again, I’m so pleased to have had PACE recorded; Stephen took such care with it, so that we don’t even hear anybody breathing. I’ve just arranged it (for a BBC Radio 3 broadcast) for the Brass Section of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Martyn Brabbins.