Three weeks before the Last Night Of The Proms in 2020, the Belize-born musician was commissioned to create a new arrangement of the classic hymn to accommodate the slimmed down orchestra due to pandemic restrictions. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Wallen revealed she wanted to delve into the meaning of the words written by William Blake, and added a line in her version to show the connection of British hymns to Commonwealth people. She said: “The work is dedicated to the Windrush generation and also the fact that it’s little understood that in the colonies, de facto, we live with the music of England.
“And so in Belize, all these hymns are our hymns, and so I’ve also put a little, added an extra sentence, mentioned that we Commonwealth people, we sing with you. “There was nothing controversial, I didn’t think, about what I was doing but certainly it seemed to cause a bit of fury.” Wallen said she was “really shocked” at the backlash it received, recalling: “I spent the next day, Sunday, just going through deleting, deleting, deleting, hundreds and hundreds of messages, very abusive, thinking ‘well, actually, when was the last time somebody really talked about a new piece of music in the national press, so yeah, I’ll take it’.
“I’m proud of that piece of music. All I did was put a introduction that was very delicate and then we move by the end into the rousing, recognisable thing of Jerusalem. “And the other thing is that Jeru.
