Mighty River
Errollyn Wallen (b. 1958)

THE STORY

Belize-born British composer Errollynn Wallen penned Mighty River to celebrate the bicentenary of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in England. She dedicated the work to her own ancestors and to the 19^th-century Abolitionists, honoring “willpower, dignity, energy and joy—and triumph over suffering.” Commissioned by Holy Trinity Church in Clapham, where evangelical Anglicans led by William Wilberforce organized to oppose slavery, the piece premiered in the church sanctuary and was featured in 2017 at the New Music Biennial in Kingston upon Hull, where Wilberforce was born.

Wallen’s prolific output includes 22 operas and a large catalogue of orchestral, chamber, and vocal works. Wallen was the first black woman to have a work featured in the Proms and the first woman to receive an Ivor Novello award for Classical Music for her body of work. She composed for the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games 2012 and for the Queen’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees, arranged a re-imagined “Jerusalem” for BBC’s Last Night of the Proms in 2020, and composed the song “Inherit the World,” commissioned by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, for the 2021 United Nations climate change summit in Glasgow. Wallen is one of the top 20 most-performed living composers of classical music in the world. Her book Becoming a Composer was published in 2023.

LISTEN FOR

• The opening quotation of “Amazing Grace,” the Christian hymn from 1722 written by John Newton—who had been involved in the slave trade but later turned theologian, poet, and abolitionist
• Gentle but steady rhythms in the background, conveying Wallen’s observation that “it is an innate human instinct to be free, just as it is a law of nature that the river should rush headlong to the sea.”

INSTRUMENTATION

Piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, harp, strings