Shirley Thompson: how the brilliant Black composer beat the system that shut her out | Classical music

Wherever Shirley Thompson goes, she always makes sure she has a CD of her own musical compositions with her. “A lot of people have complimented me, or mocked me, for my initiative … I’m the ultimate entrepreneur,” she says.

This habit came in particularly handy when she found herself in conversation with the then Prince Charles at Clarence House in March last year. She was there to celebrate her inclusion on The Powerlist, which lists the UK’s most influential Black people. “We were chatting about music, and he was asking me about the kind of music I wrote,” Thompson recalls. “Then he said that he would love to hear my music one day, and I told him that by chance I had a CD of it in my bag.”

It’s safe to presume that Charles liked what he heard – a year later, Thompson was one of 12 musicians asked to produce a composition for his coronation. Despite having composed music for close to four decades, this was a special moment. “I tried not to get nervous about it, and when I say it was like responding to any other commission, it certainly wasn’t,” she says. “But, in order that I wouldn’t get stage fright, and to make sure my creative juices would flow, I had to be strong, bold and courageous and go for it”. This seems to have been a theme of Thompson’s career, which began far outside the exclusive realms of classical music, and has now reached its upper echelons.

The oldest of four children, Thompson was born in Newham, east London, in 1958, to parents who had emigrated a few years earlier from Jamaica. Her mother worked as a district nurse in intensive care; her father as a forklift driver. “On reflection, I now know we had a really idyllic childhood, going to school during the week and at weekends going to church,” she says.

Despite not working in the sector themselves, her parents were keen for Thompson to be well versed in the arts. She grew up attending dance school, doing tap and ballet. Gospel, ska, and bluebeat filled the house on Sundays. But despite this, Thompson came to music relatively late. She only began playing the violin at the age of 11, after a visiting violin teacher at her school spotted her ability.

Thompson had a range of hobbies as a child, something she regards as a positive. “Music was a part of what I did but I enjoyed lots of different things,” she says. “I remember people used to say: ‘Oh, you’re going to be a jack of all trades and not a master.’ But I thought: ‘Well, I’m really good at all these things.’” In person, she’s gregarious and confident, traits she’s evidently had since childhood.

“A lot of people in my orchestra started at four or five,” she says. “I started so late that I never dreamed I would be studying music because I was always catching up. I didn’t start playing the piano until the age of 14, 15 … I evidently had a huge talent to overcome all of those obstacles.”

Being in a youth orchestra was a huge part of Thompson’s teenage life, something that she chose to do, rather than being pushed by her parents like some of the other children. “That was my life, because three days a week I was there,” she says. “Normality was at school, and orchestra was this funny thing that I did after school. It must have been the enjoyment of it that kept me going.”

It was at the University of Liverpool that Thompson gained more of a grounding in formal musical education, studying composition and musicology. Despite excelling in her subjects, she became disillusioned with the overly white, western, classical emphasis. “I thought I was going to university to study music, so music from Africa, from all over the world,” she says. “I was faced with Beethoven and Mozart and a totally Eurocentric syllabus. So that really grated and I got really depressed about it”.

Thompson’s focus turned to writing her own compositions. It “was a very quaint thing to have been doing at the weekend as a student,” she laughs. “But I’ve now become a composer because of my hobby when everybody else was going to the pub.”

Thompson cites the Black writers James Baldwin and Richard Wright as among her greatest influences. Special mention goes to a campus visit from the singer and poet Gil Scott-Heron, which showed her how music and politics could work together. “At the time he was talking about free Azania, free South Africa, and I thought: ‘Wow, I could do something like this,’” she says. “He was really pivotal in the way I thought I could create music.”

This was evident in the music she created for her master’s thesis at Goldsmiths University of London. “The only thing that could inspire me was incorporating issues that were affecting me at the time into my music,” she says. One of these issues was how young Black men were being disproportionately targeted by the police – “because my brothers and their friends were being stopped and searched every minute. So I wrote a piece about stop and search, which was unheard of. When my tutor heard it, he was shocked.”

After graduating, Thompson seemed to be on the road to success. She was featured on the BBC show Ebony (1982-1990), which focused on Britain’s Black community, and in the Radio Times in 1985, and had her own string quartet. Her composition for the detective series South of the Border, which aired between 1988 and 1990, was selected as a Top 20 BBC TV Theme in 1990. In the BBC’s recording studio, the engineer remarked that she was the first woman that they had had in their studios to have composed and conducted music.

But Thompson soon began to face difficulties when it came to her compositions outside her TV work. When she was able to showcase them through performances, they didn’t get the reception she would have liked. “With me not getting reviewed, everything dried up,” she says. “So I wasn’t getting commissions.”

She believes that her performances were deliberately overlooked by reviewers, perhaps because her compositions were deemed “unconventional” at the time. “It was personal,” she says. “It was such a small circle within the classical music industry … They were probably wanting to wield their power and decide who they wanted to promote. I certainly did not fit into their box.”

Shut out of the classical music world, Thompson pursued a career in television, working full-time as a researcher and director for about 15 years, freelancing across several production companies. During this time, she didn’t stop composing, though. “I was always writing but I wasn’t getting the performances. Then I was approached by a promoter to set up an ensemble, and that was really the trigger,” she says. This included a range of singers, dancers, visual artists and instrumental soloists, and performed at London’s Southbank Centre.

By the 2000s, the composing was beginning to pay off. She was commissioned to write a large-scale work to commemorate the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002: New Nation Rising, A 21st Century Symphony. It made her the first woman in Europe to have composed and conducted a symphony in four decades. The symphony, which was later recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with almost 200 performers, including a rapper and dhol drummers, paid homage to the vast 1,000-year history of London. As well as being well-received at the time, New Nation Rising was reportedly an influence on Danny Boyle’s celebrated opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics. Thompson believes that she received the royal commission because her compositions, which took inspiration from other musical genres such as hip-hop, were unique in comparison to the status quo. “I was writing in a particular way, I wasn’t doing all of that heavily discordant stuff.” But, she says, she remained an outsider within the classical music establishment. “They wouldn’t go anywhere near it. I write music people can relate to, but the whole ethos within contemporary classical is to be totally abstract and impenetrable, and then you’re called a genius. If people can understand what you’re doing, then it can’t be good.”

In 2007, Thompson was invited by a parliamentary committee to compose a major piece for the opening of an exhibition at the Palace of Westminster, London – The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People. “I wanted to reflect the triangular trade of Europe, Africa and the Americas, and that I would choose a woman from each continent,” says Thompson.

The three women she based her composition on were Queen Nanny of the Maroons, who led a guerrilla war between the Jamaican Maroons (free Black people) and the British colonisers during the 18th century, Dido Elizabeth Belle, a mixed-race English gentlewoman who was born into slavery, and The Woman who Refused to Dance, an unknown enslaved woman who was killed on a slave ship in 1792, as a consequence of making a stand. “I created them as actors on stage, with the music conveying their personalities and acting as psychological studies of these women.”

The reaction to the composition was “phenomenal”, Thompson says, and it led to a continuation of the theme in a series titled “Heroines of Opera”. “I’m still feeling the resonance of that because a whole idea about celebrating women of African descent came from that commission,” she says.

The prestige assignments have continued. In 2009, Thompson was commissioned by the South Bank Centre to write a piece of music commemorating 100 days of Barack Obama being in office, which was performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra. Her Heroines of Opera series, inspired by her New Nation Rising: A 21st Century Symphony, is still being performed and developed today.

Given Thompson’s grounding in musical education at school, as well as her current role as head of composition and performance at the University of Westminster, the current state of arts education is a topic she has strong opinions about, especially prime minister Rishi Sunak’s recent comments on wanting to crack down on so-called “low-value” arts degrees. “It’s miseducating people to think that,” she says. “A well-rounded education gives you options. I can’t understand the garbage of how we could have regressed to a thousand years ago and think in this stupid way. Culture is life. You need it.”

For many young people with no interest in classical music, their first encounter with Thompson may have been her appearance last year on Cunk on Earth, the mockumentary show featuring comedian Diane Morgan as Philomena Cunk. In her deadpan tone, Cunk posed questions to Thompson such as “Did Beethoven have an actual full-size horse living inside his face?” and, “Is it true that in the final years of his working life Beethoven was dead?”, which Thompson handled with good humour.

Her appearance on the show certainly raised eyebrows among her peers, “I had one of my professor friends saying to me: ‘What did you do that for?’” she says. “I did it because I thought it was a way of getting classical music out to people. The whole experience was certainly weird.” But doing things unconventionally is something Thompson feels has carried her career to where it is now. “Everything I’ve done [in music] has been quite avant-garde and radical, and out of the box really.”

Despite the high-level commissions and numerous accolades Thompson has received – including an OBE for her services to music in 2019 – her proudest career moment was a fairly simple request her mother made of her.

“She said: ‘Please make an arrangement of Sempliche,’ which was the very first piece of music I composed while I was at school,” Thompson says. “My mother came with me to everything. She was always there, but she never spoke about the music itself; she was just there for the practical side of things.

“It was the very first piece I wrote as a student, while I was doing my A-levels, for flute, piano and violin. I just wrote it for fun one weekend and it took off at the academy. I remember we had a concert and we played it and the reception was phenomenal.” It was around 30 years later, “and my mother remembered that piece. It really touched me.”

Wherever Shirley Thompson goes, she always makes sure she has a CD of her own musical compositions with her. “A lot of people have complimented me, or mocked me, for my initiative … I’m the ultimate entrepreneur,” she says.

This habit came in particularly handy when she found herself in conversation with the then Prince Charles at Clarence House in March last year. She was there to celebrate her inclusion on The Powerlist, which lists the UK’s most influential Black people. “We were chatting about music, and he was asking me about the kind of music I wrote,” Thompson recalls. “Then he said that he would love to hear my music one day, and I told him that by chance I had a CD of it in my bag.”

It’s safe to presume that Charles liked what he heard – a year later, Thompson was one of 12 musicians asked to produce a composition for his coronation. Despite having composed music for close to four decades, this was a special moment. “I tried not to get nervous about it, and when I say it was like responding to any other commission, it certainly wasn’t,” she says. “But, in order that I wouldn’t get stage fright, and to make sure my creative juices would flow, I had to be strong, bold and courageous and go for it”. This seems to have been a theme of Thompson’s career, which began far outside the exclusive realms of classical music, and has now reached its upper echelons.

The oldest of four children, Thompson was born in Newham, east London, in 1958, to parents who had emigrated a few years earlier from Jamaica. Her mother worked as a district nurse in intensive care; her father as a forklift driver. “On reflection, I now know we had a really idyllic childhood, going to school during the week and at weekends going to church,” she says.

Despite not working in the sector themselves, her parents were keen for Thompson to be well versed in the arts. She grew up attending dance school, doing tap and ballet. Gospel, ska, and bluebeat filled the house on Sundays. But despite this, Thompson came to music relatively late. She only began playing the violin at the age of 11, after a visiting violin teacher at her school spotted her ability.

Thompson had a range of hobbies as a child, something she regards as a positive. “Music was a part of what I did but I enjoyed lots of different things,” she says. “I remember people used to say: ‘Oh, you’re going to be a jack of all trades and not a master.’ But I thought: ‘Well, I’m really good at all these things.’” In person, she’s gregarious and confident, traits she’s evidently had since childhood.

“A lot of people in my orchestra started at four or five,” she says. “I started so late that I never dreamed I would be studying music because I was always catching up. I didn’t start playing the piano until the age of 14, 15 … I evidently had a huge talent to overcome all of those obstacles.”

Being in a youth orchestra was a huge part of Thompson’s teenage life, something that she chose to do, rather than being pushed by her parents like some of the other children. “That was my life, because three days a week I was there,” she says. “Normality was at school, and orchestra was this funny thing that I did after school. It must have been the enjoyment of it that kept me going.”

It was at the University of Liverpool that Thompson gained more of a grounding in formal musical education, studying composition and musicology. Despite excelling in her subjects, she became disillusioned with the overly white, western, classical emphasis. “I thought I was going to university to study music, so music from Africa, from all over the world,” she says. “I was faced with Beethoven and Mozart and a totally Eurocentric syllabus. So that really grated and I got really depressed about it”.

Thompson’s focus turned to writing her own compositions. It “was a very quaint thing to have been doing at the weekend as a student,” she laughs. “But I’ve now become a composer because of my hobby when everybody else was going to the pub.”

Thompson cites the Black writers James Baldwin and Richard Wright as among her greatest influences. Special mention goes to a campus visit from the singer and poet Gil Scott-Heron, which showed her how music and politics could work together. “At the time he was talking about free Azania, free South Africa, and I thought: ‘Wow, I could do something like this,’” she says. “He was really pivotal in the way I thought I could create music.”

This was evident in the music she created for her master’s thesis at Goldsmiths University of London. “The only thing that could inspire me was incorporating issues that were affecting me at the time into my music,” she says. One of these issues was how young Black men were being disproportionately targeted by the police – “because my brothers and their friends were being stopped and searched every minute. So I wrote a piece about stop and search, which was unheard of. When my tutor heard it, he was shocked.”

After graduating, Thompson seemed to be on the road to success. She was featured on the BBC show Ebony (1982-1990), which focused on Britain’s Black community, and in the Radio Times in 1985, and had her own string quartet. Her composition for the detective series South of the Border, which aired between 1988 and 1990, was selected as a Top 20 BBC TV Theme in 1990. In the BBC’s recording studio, the engineer remarked that she was the first woman that they had had in their studios to have composed and conducted music.

But Thompson soon began to face difficulties when it came to her compositions outside her TV work. When she was able to showcase them through performances, they didn’t get the reception she would have liked. “With me not getting reviewed, everything dried up,” she says. “So I wasn’t getting commissions.”

She believes that her performances were deliberately overlooked by reviewers, perhaps because her compositions were deemed “unconventional” at the time. “It was personal,” she says. “It was such a small circle within the classical music industry … They were probably wanting to wield their power and decide who they wanted to promote. I certainly did not fit into their box.”

Shut out of the classical music world, Thompson pursued a career in television, working full-time as a researcher and director for about 15 years, freelancing across several production companies. During this time, she didn’t stop composing, though. “I was always writing but I wasn’t getting the performances. Then I was approached by a promoter to set up an ensemble, and that was really the trigger,” she says. This included a range of singers, dancers, visual artists and instrumental soloists, and performed at London’s Southbank Centre.

By the 2000s, the composing was beginning to pay off. She was commissioned to write a large-scale work to commemorate the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002: New Nation Rising, A 21st Century Symphony. It made her the first woman in Europe to have composed and conducted a symphony in four decades. The symphony, which was later recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with almost 200 performers, including a rapper and dhol drummers, paid homage to the vast 1,000-year history of London. As well as being well-received at the time, New Nation Rising was reportedly an influence on Danny Boyle’s celebrated opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics. Thompson believes that she received the royal commission because her compositions, which took inspiration from other musical genres such as hip-hop, were unique in comparison to the status quo. “I was writing in a particular way, I wasn’t doing all of that heavily discordant stuff.” But, she says, she remained an outsider within the classical music establishment. “They wouldn’t go anywhere near it. I write music people can relate to, but the whole ethos within contemporary classical is to be totally abstract and impenetrable, and then you’re called a genius. If people can understand what you’re doing, then it can’t be good.”

In 2007, Thompson was invited by a parliamentary committee to compose a major piece for the opening of an exhibition at the Palace of Westminster, London – The British Slave Trade: Abolition, Parliament and People. “I wanted to reflect the triangular trade of Europe, Africa and the Americas, and that I would choose a woman from each continent,” says Thompson.

The three women she based her composition on were Queen Nanny of the Maroons, who led a guerrilla war between the Jamaican Maroons (free Black people) and the British colonisers during the 18th century, Dido Elizabeth Belle, a mixed-race English gentlewoman who was born into slavery, and The Woman who Refused to Dance, an unknown enslaved woman who was killed on a slave ship in 1792, as a consequence of making a stand. “I created them as actors on stage, with the music conveying their personalities and acting as psychological studies of these women.”

The reaction to the composition was “phenomenal”, Thompson says, and it led to a continuation of the theme in a series titled “Heroines of Opera”. “I’m still feeling the resonance of that because a whole idea about celebrating women of African descent came from that commission,” she says.

The prestige assignments have continued. In 2009, Thompson was commissioned by the South Bank Centre to write a piece of music commemorating 100 days of Barack Obama being in office, which was performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra. Her Heroines of Opera series, inspired by her New Nation Rising: A 21st Century Symphony, is still being performed and developed today.

Given Thompson’s grounding in musical education at school, as well as her current role as head of composition and performance at the University of Westminster, the current state of arts education is a topic she has strong opinions about, especially prime minister Rishi Sunak’s recent comments on wanting to crack down on so-called “low-value” arts degrees. “It’s miseducating people to think that,” she says. “A well-rounded education gives you options. I can’t understand the garbage of how we could have regressed to a thousand years ago and think in this stupid way. Culture is life. You need it.”

For many young people with no interest in classical music, their first encounter with Thompson may have been her appearance last year on Cunk on Earth, the mockumentary show featuring comedian Diane Morgan as Philomena Cunk. In her deadpan tone, Cunk posed questions to Thompson such as “Did Beethoven have an actual full-size horse living inside his face?” and, “Is it true that in the final years of his working life Beethoven was dead?”, which Thompson handled with good humour.

Her appearance on the show certainly raised eyebrows among her peers, “I had one of my professor friends saying to me: ‘What did you do that for?’” she says. “I did it because I thought it was a way of getting classical music out to people. The whole experience was certainly weird.” But doing things unconventionally is something Thompson feels has carried her career to where it is now. “Everything I’ve done [in music] has been quite avant-garde and radical, and out of the box really.”

Despite the high-level commissions and numerous accolades Thompson has received – including an OBE for her services to music in 2019 – her proudest career moment was a fairly simple request her mother made of her.

“She said: ‘Please make an arrangement of Sempliche,’ which was the very first piece of music I composed while I was at school,” Thompson says. “My mother came with me to everything. She was always there, but she never spoke about the music itself; she was just there for the practical side of things.

“It was the very first piece I wrote as a student, while I was doing my A-levels, for flute, piano and violin. I just wrote it for fun one weekend and it took off at the academy. I remember we had a concert and we played it and the reception was phenomenal.” It was around 30 years later, “and my mother remembered that piece. It really touched me.”