It is difficult to categorise Errollyn Wallen’s music in any one genre or style. As she puts it, she prefers to ‘resist being part of any movement or ‘‘ism’’,’ freeing herself to engage with ‘the vast history behind us and the various cultures and ideas swirling around us’. Jazz, blues, spirituals, musicals, pop, and classical music all infuse her work – to say nothing of the inspiration she draws from art and literature. Fittingly, her first book similarly lies outside traditional genre boundaries. Becoming A Composer is partly a memoir, but it’s also part introduction to the practicalities of a compositional career, part springboard to Wallen’s music, and part encouragement to future composers. ‘I hope that by sharing stories of my working life alongside those of my personal life and upbringing’, Wallen writes, ‘I can encourage anyone from anywhere to make music.’

Becoming A Composer takes us on a journey from childhood to the present day through vignettes, diary extracts, poems and programme notes. Born in Belize, Wallen was sent to live with her aunt and uncle in Tottenham while her parents went to New York. She outlines a difficult childhood, where fear sat alongside laughter, and uncertainty and insecurity dominated. ‘I grew up feeling worthless, neglected, intimidated and confused’, she confesses, and details a teenage suicide attempt. Never once, though, does this feel like a sensationalist story. When speaking about her personal life, Wallen balances the tone beautifully between intensely personal, almost confessional writing, and more detached prose that gives a feeling of carefully considered distance. She is disarmingly frank about many of her experiences, but always maintains a sense of dignity and poise.

Credit: Azzurra Primavera

Much of the book is astutely observed and poetically expressed – it will come as no surprise to readers that Wallen has written many of her own song texts and opera libretti. Her love of cake, for example, both gives a fascinating insight into her personality (we learn that she followed a strict cake-only diet for several years and that her Second String Quartet ‘aspired to the condition of fruitcake’), and provides a platform to discuss Britain’s imperial history, using sugar as a pivot from diets to slavery. What ‘Britishness’ is and means is a core concern of both this book and many of Wallen’s compositions, and it provides a useful companion to works like Our English Heart which commemorates the Battle of Trafalgar, When the Wet Wind Sings which tells a history of the Thames, and her arrangement of Parry’s Jerusalem.

It is obvious that Wallen is someone who truly loves what she does. ‘It gives me pleasure to share the joy’. That sheer delight in creating comes across strongly, even when the realities of a compositional career involve long hours and numerous setbacks. Wallen stresses how collaborative one needs to be to make a success of it. Colleagues and friends are the people who will carry you through – who will programme your work, and who will be there to support you through the rougher patches. She counsels that ‘it isn’t enough to spend months or years composing a piece of music; the composer must sometimes bring hundreds of people with them’. Wallen’s sociable account of composition is a welcome corrective to some of the recent narratives around musical personalities – particularly after Todd Field’s movie Tár – that perpetuate an outdated and damaging stereotype equating creative brilliance with abusive behaviour. Wallen says that she wants ‘to demystify the act of composing’ – and while it might be nigh on impossible to explain precisely how a composition takes shape, Wallen gets pretty close. She gives detailed accounts of the genesis of particular works, meaning that the text always leads back to her compositions.

This is a book that’s crying out for an accompanying playlist, and I would recommend listening to the works in question as they appear in the book. Many of Wallen’s comments make more sense when you can hear the music she is speaking about – and learning about the background of pieces is a wonderful route to hearing them afresh. She uses a number of strategies to articulate her creative process and there are some passages which lose momentum, notably the extensive diary entries and programme notes. Overall, though, Wallen manages to give a compelling insight into how she creates. She talks particularly convincingly about the relationship between a work and the performers it was written for. In her account of her cello and piano work Dervish, she explains that ‘the personalities of the musicians will seep into the music’, and that Dervish became a ‘celebration of the rapturous sound’ of cellist Matthew Sharp and pianist Dominic Harlan ‘playing together’.

At 22 operas and counting, Wallen is one of the most prolific opera composers in the world, and she speaks eloquently about the state of contemporary opera. There is much here for opera-lovers to reflect on, especially in her discussion of ‘A Nitro at the Opera’, a collaboration between the Royal Opera House and the Black British theatre company Nitro at which Wallen’s Another America: Earth was one of three operas staged at the Linbury Theatre.

It was a sell-out, attracting high numbers of black attendees and first-time opera-goers. Wallen’s commentary is reserved but damning: ‘When you represent black talent on stage a black audience will come’, she says. ‘Real change is taking too long.’

She notes that 20 years after ‘A Nitro at the Opera’, it remains ‘the first and last time’ that the Royal Opera House ‘did anything on that scale to recognise the contribution black people have made to opera’. It is a timely reminder that lasting change takes sustained effort and collaboration, not one-offs.

Becoming A Composer is a generous, warm-hearted book that all aspiring musicians should read. Her message that very real difficulties can be best faced with kindness, consideration, and collaboration feels important at the present moment, giving a blueprint for an optimistic future for classical music. ‘I am glad that I eventually gave myself the permission to do this thing’, she writes, ‘there is endless treasure if we can but dare to walk the path that opens up for each of us.

Becoming a Composer by Errollyn Wallen is now available on Faber | faber.co.uk