by Mike Telin
In her memoir Becoming a Composer, Errollyn Wallen recalls being nine years old and walking to Ridley Road Market with her uncle to buy fruit and vegetables. “I told Uncle Arthur that I could hear ‘all these sounds in my head’ but I didn’t know what to do with them. Uncle Arthur suggested that perhaps I was a composer.”
Little did that young girl — who was born in Belize and brought up in Tottenham, England — know that she would go on to become one of the world’s top twenty most performed living classical composers.
In 2024, Wallen was appointed Master of the King’s Music by His Majesty The King, and in 2025 she was named BBC Classical Music Magazine’s Personality of the Year. This month Wallen is also ChamberFest Cleveland’s composer-in-residence.
Opening the Zoom link from her home in Orkney, I began our conversation by asking how the ChamberFest invitation came about.