Deborah Mollison: ‘Perseverance is my strongest asset’

In today’s challenging cultural climate, representatives of the classical music sector are fighting an uphill battle to persuade policy makers to value music provision in schools. One success story which might help tip the scales is that of composer Deborah Mollison, best known for her work for the silver screen, having created soundtracks for films including award-winning 1999 comedy-drama East is East. Free music lessons in her local primary school allowed Mollison to begin composing at the age of seven despite humble beginnings and at 13 she began studying composition, pianoforte and flute at the Royal Academy of Music. There, she won the Else Cross prize for Pianoforte before taking up studies at Goldsmiths, UCLA and Middlesex University, where she received her PhD in music

Having endured a heartbreaking period of personal loss, Mollison is now turning her full attention to the concert hall, with her latest orchestral work, The Secret Garden, released today. I met Mollison on a sunny terrace in central London where, over steaming cups of tea, she reflects on a career which has seen her compose for film, documentaries and the concert hall, taken her from London to LA and back again, and accompanied her through marriage, miscarriage, motherhood and loss.

Where do you find inspiration for your music?

I can still remember the first piece I wrote at junior music college in my head. The music just comes into my mind. It's like a film, all the instrumentation comes in in full technicolour. When I'm in the middle of composing, I really can't go anywhere because I'll walk into something or fall off the pavement! Sometimes music comes to me in waves of dreams. When I wrote my violin concert Ocean Witness I'd sit up in bed, write it down, then go back to sleep again.

How did you get into composing for film?

In my 20s I aspired to be a music lecturer and a composer, and I taught composing at Middlesex University for eight and a bit years. Then my husband introduced me to the head of music at CBS who had come over from America and he invited me to do a course at UCLA. I went over there for six months, and I loved it. When I came back, I got two and a half days a week teaching at a prep school in Connaught Square, and against that, I went to the bank and got a loan of £10,000 for my first studio. I was very excited, but I was rejected for projects for two years. I just kept going, perseverance is my strongest asset.

A friend of mine, a lyricist called Pauline Southcombe, told me that when I go in the meetings, I should say, ‘I'm brilliant, you'll never get anyone as good as me.’ We’re English, we don't say we're brilliant, but I tried it when I went for a meeting with an editor on a documentary for NBC. I nearly choked on my words, but I got the job.

My writing for the screen took on a life of its own and my concert compositions were going quite well too, but by the time it got to the mid-2000s I had had multiple miscarriages in a short period of time. My agent in America had lots of work lined up for me, but I wasn't well enough to travel so I packed up my studio in LA and centred in England. Once I did have my daughter Harriet I completely immersed myself in that because it nearly got taken away from me, so while my film and television music never really stopped, I ended up having to drop my classical composition for almost 20 years in the end.

In 2017 and 18, I decided to start composing for myself again. I wrote a bereavement album for my father, a guitar piece called Embryo for my first miscarriage and my latest piece The Secret Garden.

Mollison's latest release is deeply personal, from her inspiration for the work to the album cover, which Mollison created herself using plants grown in her own garden

What was your inspiration for The Secret Garden?

in 2020, I got Covid very badly. I got it six times, got permanent lung damage and became disabled. I'm a really positive person, and that was tough to maintain, but I have a very strong, quiet willpower. The first time I had Covid, I was lying in bed for six weeks and while I wanted to read something, nothing was working. Then I picked up Pope Francis's book, Laudato si' – Care for our Common Home and I loved it. It focuses on the climate, which is a passion of mine, and I loved the way the Pope wrote about the environment, people, mankind, waste and manipulation, he seemed to be able to bring together loads of the global issues that are damaging our world.

I read the book over and over and I imagined the Pope walking around the Vatican Gardens. I looked the gardens up on my phone and thought about how they would smell and feel and, just as I was reading a sentence in the book about the ‘caress of God’, a waft of air came through the room and the tune for that piece came with it. I felt so inspired to compose and I knew I had to write it.

The Secret Garden has since become an educational project – how did this come about?

I looked up the Laudato Si' Centre at Wardley Hall, which is a project by the Bishop of Salford, and I found his email address and sent an email. He replied straight away that he really liked the piece and sent it up the chain. It went through about five bishops and monsignors before it ended up in the Vatican. Prefect José Tolentino, Cardinal de Mondonça, wrote back to me and told me that they had asked Italian critics to listen to the piece and they had a very positive opinion of it. He pointed me in the direction of the Dicastery for Culture and Education to apply for Jesuit funding which I received, but they wanted an educational project. I devised this project focusing on love and caring for your environment, for the planet, for the things close to you. It is designed in a way that you don't need anything fancy; you listen to the music, you read the Pope's words, you talk about it, then do whatever you're inspired to; a prayer, a picture, a poem – whatever you can do to represent that quality that's in the text.

Education is a topic close to your heart, and you have taught alongside the majority of your composing career. How your own experience of conservatoire education influenced your approach to the classroom?

It is absolutely something I keep in mind with the school I'm at now. It's fee-paying school, but I taught a lot at schools that aren't fee-paying and I’m the same wherever I am; I want to support and challenge each child in doing what they can do the best. My key weapon is that I'm very nice, so when I push the students, they don't know they're being pushed.

I remember when I was 16 or 17, I began teaching recorder in a school in Paddington, and there was a little girl who was very poor and nobody was keen to teach her, but when she stood up at the Christmas concert and played a carol on the recorder, it changed the whole school’s outlook on this one girl. It is such a prevalent mindset in schools which you might describe as underprivileged, that lack of challenge, that lack of expectation, the idea of being ‘given up on’. The Secret Garden educational project, hopefully without being patronising to anybody, aims to allow pupils to flower and flourish in a way they've never done before. Even if they don’t fully engage with it, it’s important for them just to have the opportunity to express themselves artistically.

Now more than ever, artists are expected to comment on the issues – from conflict to climate change – that affect them and their audience through both their work and through explicit comment. What are your thoughts on this additional responsibility being placed on the shoulders of artists?

Honestly, I've always done that from the very start. From my first composition at seven, Blowing in The Wind, I've always looked at the world around me, and things like the plight of animal extinction have always weighed on me and come out in my music. Now, given certain amounts of trauma in my life, I see even more clearly that I should allow my music to say what it wants to say and be what it wants to be. This is what I've been doing recently.

Facing adversity has made me stronger; I feel like I'm just emerging again from a place where I haven't been able to express myself, and I'm starting all over again from a much stronger stance. I have ideas for pieces, for things that I want to do. I've got bits of music in my head already for a piece building on the idea that we've got so much devastation happening in the world at the moment, there has to be a little oasis, a ‘flower of love’ that's going to help certain people cope with all of that. That's the piece I want to write, but it’s coming slowly. I feel there's so much to say without lecturing or being judgmental. I'm not perfect, I'm just a person, but I was given this gift so I may as well say what I think in my music, it's much more powerful than my words.

Deborah Mollison's latest work, The Secret Garden, is now available to listen on streaming services including Spotify and Apple Classical.