Q&A: Errollyn Wallen

How did you get involved with Friday Afternoons?

I had been working with Ann Barkway, the interim CEO of Mahogany Opera, on Snappy Operas, which is an incredible scheme where short operas are written for children to sing. Ann was the previous project manager of Friday Afternoons and she recommended me to Phillipa Reive. It was around March of last year that Phillipa contacted me, and since then I have written 12 songs for the Song Bank. Before that, I had a couple of residencies at Snape Maltings, where I wrote and tried out songs with Leiston Primary School at the Red House, which was a wonderful experience.

What was your experience with Benjamin Britten before the project?

I knew and admired his work as a child so, in writing, I felt very connected to my younger self, singing his music. I had a wonderful music teacher, Margaret Pearse, who encouraged us to sing, including lots of Britten. When I came to write, I suddenly realised that ‘Old Abram Brown’, which I had been singing since I was 13 years old, is from Britten's Friday Afternoons. I even played the piano part for Ceremony of Carols and we sang that as a choir. What Britten did in making composers think about how and why they should contribute to a community has been so important.

Can you tell us about the songs you have composed for the project?

It took a while to decide exactly what tone I wanted to convey but, once I got going, the songs seemed to write themselves. That whole year, I was travelling and small things were providing song material; I was in Crete and a stray dog caught my attention, so I wrote a song about it. There's one about swimming, one about the lighthouse I live in, and even one I composed when I was nine for my sisters and me to sing as we walked to school.

What did you find interesting about writing for children's voices?

I like the freshness of the sound. You're not writing for trained voices, who can do a lot of wide leaps, so it is very different. And I start by considering the sound of the voice. This collection is titled MAP: Songs for children everywhere and I want children to sing these in their own accents, their way. In my collection, I have tried to tell special stories, about my favourite Belizean dish – rice and beans – or my time in Jenin, Palestine, to give children a little flavour of different cultures and customs. There's an element of introducing information by telling stories.

The songs draw on your travel experiences – how have your music and travel informed each other?

Composing can be a very solitary thing but it has brought me more connections than any other job I can think of: different age groups, settings, cultures and so on. I've just come back from a performance of a new work in Lyon. It's not just music-making, it's the ways that concerts are put on, the different attitudes. I continue to learn so much from travelling. You see and hear little things that you would never get if you stayed at home composing. I'm glad it has got me out of the house, far more than I ever thought it could.

What would you like participants to get out of the project?

I can't tell you how much I loved writing these songs, and how much the children I worked with loved them. I want the children to bring their own stories to these songs, and to know that the composer was really writing for them. So even though I will never meet most of these children, I want them to know that I was really imagining them as I wrote these songs.

The resources to learn Errollyn Wallen's MAP: Songs for children everywhere for Snape Maltings’ Friday Afternoons are available at www.fridayafternoonsmusic.co.uk www.errollynwallen.com