Errollyn Wallen is perfectly suited to the role of Master of the King’s Music

Talented, hardworking and bursting with ideas, Wallen’s history-making appointment is a cause for celebration

Errollyn Wallen’s appointment as Master of the King’s Music is to be lauded. The selection of the first black person for the role – and a black woman at that – is a piece of symbolism which bears out the King’s oft-stated intention to be a more inclusive monarch. But it is far more than symbolic. Wallen is a seriously talented musician, who has all the right qualities to make a success of the post.
To see why, we need to step back and see how that role has changed, over nearly four centuries of existence. The first holder of the post, Nicholas Lanier (appointed in 1625), was expected to work with the Poet Laureate to produce splendid Court Odes at moments of national significance: royal births and marriages, victories won, treaties signed. He was also expected to run the monarch’s own private band.
Over time these duties have dropped away. After 1820 the tradition of composing Court Odes abruptly ended, because the Poet Laureate Robert Southey couldn’t stand writing them, and in 1901 the monarch’s private orchestra was disbanded. The job became more advisory, though Marches for coronations and funerals were still composed. Each new holder of the post used the freedom from any specific job description to put their own stamp on it. 
The big change came with the appointment of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who had a reputation for writing fearsomely difficult modernist music. He used his new-found public profile to campaign for the arts, regularly castigating funding bodies and government ministers for neglecting classical music and music education. He also created the Queen’s Medal for Music to honour outstanding service to music.
When the current, outgoing Master of the King’s Music Judith Weir was appointed in 2004 she seemed an unlikely choice for such a public role, given that she’s an intensely private person. But she has served it with distinction. She’s composed beautifully apt, understated pieces for royal occasions including the funeral of Elizabeth II in 2022, and she’s also spoken up for a musical world faced with never-ending funding cuts, and she’s created pieces for amateur musicians and schoolchildren.
It’s a fair bet that Wallen will continue this new tradition of a more activist, socially concerned Master of the King’s Music. Like Maxwell Davies, she’s angry at the decline of music in education, and is concerned at the government’s seeming indifference to the arts. And given her track record of composing for non-professionals – she’s composed two community operas and music for children’s choirs – it’s likely she will build on Weir’s efforts in that area.
However she’s bound to put her own particular stamp on the role, not least because of her unusual life story. Born (in 1958) in the ex-British colony of Belize, she was brought to Tottenham, London at the age of two by her parents. They left the young Errollyn in the care of her aunt and uncle, while they pursued a new life in New York – a strange setup which Wallen admits she was scarred by.  
Her adoptive parents then scrimped and saved to send her to a private school where her obsession with music was encouraged, and later she studied dance in New York. Eventually music claimed her. She studied music at Goldsmiths and Kings College London, and first earned a living on the pop side of things, running a studio and being a backing singer for pop and rock bands.
Meanwhile she was composing. For years she toiled away in obscurity, constantly rebuffed by a white musical establishment that told her a black woman would never make it in the rarefied world of contemporary classical music. But make it she did. Wallen’s music is now performed worldwide, and she herself seems ubiquitous, co-presenting TV programmes on classical music, curating classical music festivals, being a judge on BBC Young Musician of the Year. She doesn’t need her new role to give her a public profile; she already has one. It’s been a tremendous journey, comparable to the great novelist V.S. Naipaul’s rise from provincial Trinidad to the heights of a knighthood and a Nobel Prize, and that alone will be an inspiration to many.
And then there’s her music. Wallen has never lost touch with pop music, and her endearingly witty songs (which include settings of Philip Larkin), which she performs with her own band Ensemble X, are an important part of her output. But her heart ultimately lies in classical music. Bach is her god, as she admitted when she appeared last month on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs. She’s composed 22 operas, including one based on Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, numerous orchestral pieces, and in 2020 created a very bold arrangement of Parry’s Jerusalem for the Proms which delighted some and infuriated others. Safe she is not.
Finally there’s Wallen the engaging, warm human being, utterly without pomposity, guilelessly open, always eye-catching in her colourful outfits and purple horn-rimmed spectacles. Behind that charm there’s an iron will, an incredible work ethic, and a passionate concern about the threatened state of her beloved chosen art form. Nowadays classical composers here must combine serving an ancient, demanding tradition, with being responsive to the realities of multicultural contemporary Britain. Errollyn Wallen, better than anyone else, shows how that might be possible – which is why she is so exactly right for this prestigious role.