Beyond the Proms: Becoming A Composer by Errollyn Wallen

Beyond the Proms 
Becoming A Composer by Errollyn Wallen
Widnes Library

As well as being the home of the Stone Roses' infamous Spike Island gig, and the train stop where Paul Simon allegedly wrote Homeward Bound, Widnes now carries a third musical claim to fame: the town where I borrowed Becoming A Composer from the library. Apt, in this town so rich in musical history. It must be a very recent print I'm holding, because the appearance of EW's The Elements at the First Night of the Proms 2025, is actually mentioned in the introduction/critical acclaim page.

What follows is not a review of the book. I am sure there are vastly more qualified critics who can offer a verdict on its integrity. Rather, this post is me writing about me; what did I absorb from reading the book? And what do the Master of the King's Music, and a Runcorn factory worker, have in common? An improbable query, but I will put it forward that there are one or two things:

The first, and most obvious, one: we are both composers. EW's interview on the First Night of the Proms 2025 was what piqued my interest in reading the book in the first place (that, and the fact that I spotted a nice edition on sale in the Royal Albert Hall gift shop.) In the televised interview, she spoke about drawing inspiration for compositions from colours, shapes, and the like. In 2021, I set about composing an orchestral pastiche of Eric Clapton and Michael Kamen's 'Orchestra Nights' at the Royal Albert Hall in the early 1990's. That run of concerts proved a triumph for the famous electric guitar player. I was too young to have been in attendance, but the next best thing, as I saw it, was to try and recreate the sound, and experience the thrill of playing along to it with my own Fender Stratocaster. And it was electric.

The point is, I have the music in my head, but the way I get it out of my system is crude by comparison to those who notate and formulate a soundly-structured piece, in line with a formal education in music. I, by contrast, sit in a back bedroom in Wallasey, directing my friend Sean (who has a more 'proper' education in music than I do), and he works his magic on the keys, both piano and qwerty. We toil over the notes on the Cubase software; attempting, wherever practicable, to make the orchestral instruments sound real. (Thank God for MIDI).

The product of our efforts throughout 2021 was Explaudere: a five-track record of fantasised orchestral music, with electric guitar lines threaded (tastefully, I will add) throughout. A chance page-turn in the i newspaper brought me to Susie Dent's Word of the Day which, on this particular day, was 'Explaudere': the Latin expression meaning to drive a performer off stage by clapping. That is, to give them a slow-hand. And there was the title of my record. Bingo!

Astonishingly, when I listened to EW’s Concerto Rosso recently, there is a rhythmic pattern of notes that is eerily similar (though a different tempo) to my very own Faccio Ancora, which is the final track of Explaudere. In actual fact, for this I drew inspiration from Paul Simon’s Can’t Run But, after seeing him perform it with a small ensemble during his Hyde Park show in the summer of 2018 [a second Paul Simon reference for you there]. To me, the instrumental music of Can't Run But sounded like an engine: well-oiled pistons weaving in and out. I wanted to evoke this on one of our own pieces.

Back to comparing myself with proper composers and, otherwise, I learn that Johann Sebastian Bach is a mutual hero of ours. And we both apparently have a penchant for the Baroque.

Something we definitely have in common is our sweet tooth. EW talks about her cake diet. Chocolate is my vice. 

And we both inhabit homes of character: she in a lighthouse in the highlands of Scotland, me in a two-hundred-year-old canal-side cottage. Both, I'm sure, offer their own charm of serenity and inspiration.