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18
Interview
POWERLIST 2010
Classical
tale that
hits the
high notes
Composer Shirley Thompson picked up her fi rst
violin at the age of 11. Now she has many more
Shirley Thompson at her piano
strings to her bow. Angela Foster reports
hirley Thompson can pinpoint the moment she realised she She can still remember the day she brought home her fi rst
S
had truly made her mark. “I was in a taxi in New York and we violin. “I must have made the most dreadful noise, but I was just
were approaching Broadway,” the award-winning composer so excited,” she recalls.
recalls. “I had to pinch myself just to grasp the moment – I “I can remember writing in a careers exercise when I was 14:
had gone from a girl who used to walk down East Ham High Road ‘I want to play the violin and tour the world!’” She played with
hiding my violin under my gabardine mac because I didn’t want to various youth orchestras before going on to study music and
get teased by the other kids at school, to having a ballet that I had modern history at the University of Liverpool. This was followed
co-scored on Broadway,” she says incredulously. by a master’s degree in composition at Goldsmith’s College.
That ballet was PUSH, which had its premiere at Sadler’s Wells She says she never felt that the classical world was not for
in 2008. It has since been performed in 21 countries and at major her, even if she was the only black woman on her course. “I didn’t
venues including the Sydney Opera House and La Scala in Milan. think twice about going into classical music because the people I
For Shirley, who some are calling the female Quincy Jones, it moved around with were all doing what I wanted to do,” she says.
is the latest in a long line of achievements. She is the fi rst British Her breakthrough came when she composed the theme for
woman to have written a symphony for 35 years – and the fi rst BBC drama South of the Border in 1988, so becoming the fi rst
black woman at that. She has composed music for television, woman to write for and conduct an orchestra for the BBC. “I was
fi lm and the theatre and is a hot contender to compose the 2012 just out of university with my masters degree,” she says.
London Olympic theme. The piece won her an award for Top Television Music Theme
The oldest of four children born to Jamaican parents – her in 1990. This was followed by music for the Channel 4 fi lm
mother was a nurse, her father a driver – Shirley grew up in Dreaming Rivers, which won a prize at the 1990 Mannheim Film
east London’s Newham area and says music was always played Festival and an opera, A Child of the Jago, for which she won
around the house. “My parents listened to a lot of classical music the Woman of the Year Award in 1997 for her contribution to
because where they are from in Jamaica that was what was the arts.
played on the radio,” she says. In 1995 she set up her own orchestra, the Shirley J Thompson
She began learning the violin at 11 and the piano at 14. ‘I was a Ensemble, and in 1998 directed her fi rst fi lm, Memories In Mind,
relative latecomer. Most people start at four or fi ve.” which was screened on BBC2 and charts the story of four women
PowerList10_IS02_P018-019.indd 1 07/09/2009 11:07
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