Dec 2, 2024

Errollyn Wallen on improvising for Feeling Her Way

The composer and Master of the King’s Music reflects on entering a new musical realm for Sonia Boyce’s installation at the AGO

By Khadra Ahmed

Sonia Boyce, Feeling Her Way, 2022. Commissioned by the British Council for the British Pavilion for the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2022. © Sonia Boyce (CARCC Ottawa 2024). Installation view, Turner Contemporary, 2023. Photo: Reece Straw

Currently on view at the AGO, Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way features vocal performances from four Black female musicians: Jacqui Dankworth, Poppy Ajudha, Sofia Jernberg, and Tanita Tikaram. The product of pure improvisation, Boyce invited the musicians to collectively experiment with their voices.

Boyce also invited Errollyn Wallen, composer and newly appointed Master of the King’s Music, to provide guidance and prompts for the musicians. Stepping outside industry standards of rehearsing until perfection, Feeling Her Way presents a playful and thought-provoking visual and auditory experience.

During the pandemic, Wallen received a call from Boyce asking her to help guide singers for her new work. As filming for Feeling Her Way coincided with the Scotland-based composer’s trip to London for the premiere of her opera Dido’s Ghost, she agreed to give Boyce her two-hour lunch break.

A photograph of Errollyn Wallen. She is outside, and is wearing yellow glasses, a multicoloured scarf and a blue jacket with her hair down.

Errollyn Wallen. Photo taken by Paul Tucker.

As you enter the exhibition space for Feeling Her Way at the AGO, one of the first things you’ll experience is the product of those two hours Wallen spent in the famed Studio Two at Abbey Road Studio. The central video of the exhibition features Wallen guiding singers Jacqui Dankworth, Poppy Ajudha, and Tanita Tikaram with each woman on an individual screen. As you watch Wallen direct the musicians through different vocal passages, you may be surprised to learn that, like the singers, she was also improvising.

“Sonia’s way of working is to let things happen,” Wallen explained. “I was asking her questions, and it became very clear to me that I had free reign. Everything you see in that video was not premeditated - it was all unfolding in the moment.”

As the video plays, you’ll hear Wallen ask the singers to imagine themselves as a lion or to improvise with the words “run” and “I am queen.” While she was unsure what exercise would come to mind next, Wallen knew she wanted to create space for diverse interpretations and vocal textures, especially since no one knew what the final product would look like.

“I had to really tune in to what was happening in the atmosphere of that room, and I was thinking creatively about the possibility of words and different ways of imparting instructions,” she said. “If I had given really technical instructions like ‘hold a note, take a breath, go high, sing some fast notes, and then come down into the bottom of it,’ it would’ve been too off-putting.”

As the session began, Wallen could sense a shared trepidation throughout the studio. For most of the participants, it was one of the few times they had improvised, let alone with numerous cameras recording. Working in a profession based around highly detailed and notated musical scores, Wallen was working in a different way.

“I was in the middle of rehearsals for quite a demanding opera, so I still had my classical music head on. This was stepping into another world,” she reflected. “As a composer, I usually write music, which is handed over to a conductor who does what I was doing [in Feeling Her Way]. But my composing head meant that I could think of texts and provocative things that might bring out a vocal response. Of course, as a performer of my own music, I always combine improvisation with fixed material.”

As the session progressed, fear evaporated into an energizing atmosphere that made Wallen feel like she and the singers were in their own little cocoon. In a previous interview, Boyce had shared that Feeling Her Way calls on viewers to commit to listening, and that’s what Wallen believes transformed the session.

“When we were all together in Abbey Road making music, everything was about listening – everything” she emphasized. “When you see this exhibition, you are watching people in the active act of listening. We’re seeing listening.”

Sonia Boyce, Feeling Her Way, 2022. Commissioned by the British Council for the British Pavilion for the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2022. © Sonia Boyce (CARCC Ottawa 2024). Installation view, Turner Contemporary, 2023. Photo: Reece Straw

With Feeling Her Way inspired by Boyce’s Devotional Collection, an archive paying homage to Black British woman musicians, Wallen’s participation in the installation seems natural. Wallen, the first Black Master of the King’s Music and one of the world’s top 20 most performed living composers, has made huge strides in the classical music world. She began her career in the 80s and it wasn’t an easy road to her current level of success.

“It has taken a while to get recognized, but I’ve always been working in my own groove, and I would always have been composing whatever happened,” she said. “I’m still concerned for the world I’m in, it’s predominantly white and European, and I wish things could have progressed further. But, given how hard it was for me, I sometimes think somebody else might have not been able to continue so easily.”

It’s artists like Boyce, as Wallen points out, that continue to spotlight the important musical contributions of Black women, including through Feeling Her Way.

“Sonia has this modesty, but she has an incredible knowledge of music and of what artists have been doing way before they get noticed. She has a tremendous archive of [Black British woman] musicians and gives tribute to them. The way Sonia takes risks shows us something that is so important.”

Engage in the act of listening by visiting Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way, currently on view at the AGO on Level 1 in the Edmond G. Odette Family and Robert & Cheryl McEwen Galleries (galleries 128 and 129). This installation is presented at the AGO in partnership with the Toronto Biennial of Art 2024. The Biennial is on now until December 1, 2024, at 11 venues across Toronto – for more information, visit torontobiennial.org or @torontobiennial.

The Canadian presentation of Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way is initiated and organized by the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art. 