Errollyn Wallen: ‘Singing is not a luxury, it's your identity’

Your new choral commission will premiere at Women of the World’s (WOW) 15^th anniversary event at the Royal Albert Hall in March. What can audiences expect from this new work?

I myself am very excited to hear it performed. It’s on quite an epic scale with hundreds of voices and organ in the huge space of the Royal Albert Hall. I’ve really enjoyed composing it, because I had to stop and think about WOW and about everything the foundation stands for, but also about the situation of women today. There's so much to talk about there, so I have tried to write – in a poetic, but also straightforward way – about how the message is quite simple; until we are all equal, we will not have a peaceful world. That is my sincere belief.

What does it mean to you to create this work for a charity championing the gender equality movement?

I was very thrilled to receive this commission. I consider this a public commission, in that I'm being asked to represent, to speak up and bear witness and I see that as an important part of my responsibility as a composer. There's a point in every composer's life, I think, where you you're called upon to write music in a public way, and it's a great opportunity to actually disappear and just think about the brief. For this piece, I thought about the message I wanted to convey for some time, trying to think about the best way of expressing it, because the music is an undercurrent guiding the listener to the message.

When you receive a commission like this where do you look first for inspiration?

There's always a level of anxiety when you get a big commission like this, where you're saying something super important. But WOW founder Jude Kelly called me up and said, ‘Errollyn, I want you to do what you want to do’. She totally trusted me and encouraged me to be free with my expression. Jules understood that I would do something that was about the message, not myself.

By the time I actually start setting notes down on the page, I take it for granted that I've done enough thinking about the tone of the work that I can just dive in, and that was the case here, the music and the words seemed to unfold over time. It's not that everything came out perfectly – I had to really think about it, chisel my ideas and refine things – but the initial impetus, those first ideas, never changed. WOW’s message is a global one, and that's something I kept in my mind throughout the process. The piece is not just for the audience in the Royal Albert Hall, in London, or in the UK; I was thinking about every country in every part of the world, every village, every street.

You wrote both the music and the words. How does this dual approach work?

I like writing words and music together because there are times that one can chase the other. I started with the organ introduction, and then the first words we hear are: ‘All around the world, may our voices be heard’. And, of course, with those words comes the rhythm. As a composer, there are moments where the music has to do something specific, and because I'm in charge of the words, I can mold them for that purpose. It's very different to setting texts where you have to adapt to the rhythm of the words you’re given.

The piece will be performed by an intergenerational choir made up of 150 women, girls and non-binary people aged between eight and 80. What sort of adaptations did you make to ensure this piece can be performed by a choir incorporating these diverse voice types?

We've got three choirs: Mulberry School for Girls, St Boniface School and Lips Choir. I'm writing for adults and children, and I love that sound. I have composed a lot for classically trained voices but I also really enjoy writing for voices that sound more natural, I find I can hear the words better. With younger voices and older voices, it means that you can have a wonderful variety, and the voices sound more like ordinary people singing.

I did have to pay attention to each group's ranges and requirements, so it wasn't like writing for a professional choir. This is a different sound with its own specialities, so I had to seek advice on that. With any piece I write there is always a level of research, whether it's discovering particular properties of an instrument or attributes of a player. When I finished the first draft of this piece, there were still a few places where one or two notes were too high so I had to just trim that back and write something that was not full of the sort of wide leaps that would better suit a professionally trained opera singer.

My motto is that, as a composer, you want to make the most of your performers. You want them to sound fantastic, so there’s no point giving any musician something that they simply can't do. You have to write for the voice and the person you know in front of you.

In my all my schools, I grew up singing every single day. I hadn't quite realised that not every child does that. That makes me want to cry, because children should be singing every single day as part of the school curriculum.

Life is very, very difficult for so many people at the moment. I remember when I was working in Hull while it was City of Culture and I had a project working with refugees. They had lost everything, but they were all able to sing the songs from where they were born, they carried that with them. Singing is not a luxury, it's your identity, it's your culture, it's the customs you've grown up with. It's your home, really. So to be asked to write a choral piece like this means a lot.