'It's all music'
Whether it’s a Beethoven symphony or a Father Brown score, composer Debbie Wiseman wants us to open our ears to joy
Phil Watkins
- Michael Hodges
Reel Music with Debbie Wiseman is on Classic FM on Friday at 9.00am.
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This is where the magic happens, the room in her north London home where Debbie Wiseman, presently celebrating her tenth year as Classic FM’s Composer in Residence, has created acclaimed soundtracks for scores of television programmes and hugely popular orchestral and choral works.
There is a piano, a giant screen where she watches previews of the shows she’s writing music for – “I’ve got Father Brown on at the moment,” she says, “an absolute delight to write” – and, on the wall, a drawing of a particularly moody Ludwig van Beethoven. “Sometimes I think he’s looking down on me disapprovingly,” she says. As she also wrote the scores for Lesbian Vampire Killers and Alan Titchmarsh’s Glorious Gardens here, she may have reason to wonder.
Listeners of Classic FM, however, are in absolutely no doubt and have voted for four of her works to be included in the station’s 2025 Hall of Fame Top 300. “It’s wonderful that people take time and trouble to vote for your music,” she says. “I check each year.”
When I started out I played at weddings in a covers band
One of those Hall of Fame pieces is Wiseman’s score for Wolf Hall, the BBC drama that reached its dramatic apogee in 2024’s The Mirror and The Light when Mark Rylance’s Thomas Cromwell finally met his end on the executioner’s block. How do you score a beheading? “It couldn’t be sentimental in any way,” Wiseman says. “If anything was going in that direction, director Peter Kominsky would slap my wrist and say, ‘No, no, no!’ So, I pulled back and let Mark Rylance [below] do a lot of the heavy lifting, which he does, effortlessly.”
Wiseman now has a new four-part series on Classic FM. In Reel Music, she talks to people connected with programmes or films she has composed for: Stephen Fry (1997’s Wilde), songwriter Don Black (1999’s Tom’s Midnight Garden), Maureen Lipman (Radio 4’s Maureen and Friends) and, first up, Sheila Hancock.
“I wrote the music for a [2017] film she was in called Edie,” Wiseman says. “Sheila was over 80 at the time, and she climbed one of the highest mountains in Scotland for the part, so in Reel Music we’ll talk about never giving up on your dreams.”
That’s something the 62-year-old Wiseman knows about. “Absolutely, there have been tricky moments,” she says. “Nobody has a completely smooth ride through a career, especially not in music, it can be quite brutal at times.” After leaving the Guildhall School of Music she initially struggled to get commissions and, with her now husband Tony, started a covers band that played in pubs and at weddings. “We did Stevie Wonder, George Michael, Frank Sinatra, Elvis. At the end of the evening, we’d play Moon River and everybody would get up on the floor.”
Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light. BBC/Playground Entertainment/Nick Briggs
That early example of the power of melody has served her well; few living composers have such popularity outside contemporary classical music. Wiseman composed music for the late Queen Elizabeth II’s 90th-birthday celebration, for the coronation of King Charles and wrote a choral piece for VE Day 80. Does she ever get nervous? “Of course – the coronation had a worldwide audience of billions! But you can’t think about that when you’re writing, or you’d be completely paralysed with fear.”
Wiseman brushes off any snootiness about Classic FM or its penchant for playing music people will have heard on soundtracks. “There will always be people who don’t value music unless it’s written for the concert hall,” she says. “But whether it’s classical, rock, pop or for television, it’s all music and everybody’s working within the same 12 notes of the scale. It’s just how they’re interpreting it.”
Similarly, she rejects criticism of the station for not featuring enough live music. “Classic FM are absolutely brilliant at it,” she says. “They have two live concerts a year at the Royal Albert Hall – Classic FM Live. They’re packed. There is a fantastically enthusiastic audience for this kind of music.”
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So, on she goes, score after score, commission after commission. “I work at all hours of the day. My husband just tunes it all out now. When I’m writing, it can be incredibly annoying because I’m repeating a phrase over and over again as I’m working it out. It’s not pleasant.” Other listeners may beg to differ.
Authors
Michael Hodges
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