Becoming a Composer

'I am a composer. A composer of classical music. Quite honestly I am not quite sure how that happened to a girl born in Belize and brought up in Tottenham. .It is clear that composing found me. It crept up on me and wouldn't let me out of its grasp.' Now a leading international composer and a singer-songwriter, Errollyn Warren is as much at home in jazz and pop as in the classical world. Part memoir, How to be a composer: A Life in Music offers an intriguing glimpse into the mind and motivation of a composer and covers aspects of Wallen's sometimes troubled childhood, and her experiences of growing up as a black composer in the UK. It includes a collection of observations, diaries following the progress of new works, and essays. Aimed at a wide audience the book seeks to shed light on the way a composer sees and hears the world.

Errollyn Wallen CBE is a multi award-winning Belize-born British composer. Her prolific output includes twenty-two operas and a large catalogue of orchestral, chamber and vocal works, which are performed and broadcast throughout the world. She has composed for the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games 2012, for the Queen's Golden and Diamond Jubilees, a specially commissioned song for COP 26, 2021, and a re-imagining of Jerusalem for the Last Night of the Proms 2020. BBC Radio 3 featured her music across the first week of 2022 for Composer of the Week, and she has made several radio documentaries including Classical Commonwealth, nominated for the Prix Europa. Errollyn collaborated with artist Sonia Boyce on her installation, Feeling Her Way, for the British Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, which won the Golden Lion prize. Errollyn's critically acclaimed opera, Dido's Ghost, was premiered at the Barbican in 2021 and received its US première in San Francisco in November 2023. Recent and forthcoming premieres include a Wigmore Hall debut performance of songs from The Errollyn Wallen Songbook, a violin concerto for Philippe Quint, Dances for Orchestra for Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Swedish Chamber Orchestra and Irish Chamber Orchestra, The Northern Lights for Philharmonie Luxembourg and Night Thoughts, a song cycle for mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly and pianist Joseph Middleton. Errollyn Wallen composes in a Scottish lighthouse and her recordings have travelled 7.84 million kilometers in space, completing 186 orbits around the Earth on NASA's STS-115 mission.