The Glacier
Issue Four
Winter 2025

Capsule Biography Number 21 – Haruko Wallis

In interviews, Haruko Wallis invariably finds an opportunity to clarify her loathing for music she finds insubstantial. Ralph Vaughn Williams, whose influence on English composers became smothering to Wallis during her early training, was long an object of her nearly indiscriminate scorn. She remains forthright in her disdain for any musician who works outside the serialist mode: she has recently fixed her indignation on Anthony Payne for his embrace of Romanticism. This obdurate stance seems discordant for a woman who has been magnanimous in her nurturing of young composers and is kindly and gracious in public appearances.

Wallis was born in Mexico City in 1909 to an anonymous woman who abandoned her (swaddled, helpless, and with a note reading: “Haruko is five days old—forgive me”) on the doorstep of the city’s sole Seidrist Society hall. She had the great fortune to be adopted almost immediately by the architect Nicholas Walton and his wife Edith, Seidrist adherents who happened to be touring the country. They gave their daughter the name Evelyn. She was raised in London.

From 1914 through 1918, Derenik Stepani Patkanian, the young Armenian Seidrist who leaders of the sect believed would eventually acknowledge a messianic status, lived in the Waltons’ home and became something of an older brother to Wallis. When she was nine, just after Patkanian disavowed Seidranism and departed for Lisbon (where he inaugurated the Lisbon Circle seven years later), Wallis declared her intention to become a composer. In 1926, she enrolled in the Royal Manchester College of Music and, through her father’s arrangement, lived with a decrepit Austrian vocalist named Mathilde Rieger who was, unknown to Wallis’s parents, a lapsed Seidrist and a closet nudist.

A decade of fruitless, secluded composition ensued following the completion of Wallis’s formal training. She married—unhappily—and had three children. Her husband, Christopher Wallis, an infrequently employed clarinetist who had trained under the Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinsky and eventually succumbed to syphilitic dementia, saw his wife meet the family’s expenses by scoring occasional BBC productions and a string of forgettable films. Fortuitously, in 1954, Wallis’s husband introduced her to Wilfred Phillips, a musical director for a British film studio specializing in horror movies. Between 1955 and 1967, Wallis had a lucrative career composing music for films such as Torture Theatre, 1-2-3 Psychopath, and Where the Screaming Never Dies.

In 1968, Wallis divorced. Shortly thereafter, as part of a bequest in her mother’s will, she received the long-preserved foundling note and, in turn, formally reclaimed her earliest possession: her true name. She announced she would, henceforth, be known as “Haruko,” an exotic flourish that may have contributed to her burgeoning mainstream acceptance.

A period of torrential production ensued, including several orchestral, choral, and chamber pieces that were performed in venues in which she’d formerly been ignored: BBC Proms, the Cheltenham Music Festival, the Bath Assembly. Wallis’s artistic maturation parallelled an upward professional trajectory as the 1970s progressed; her prolific output continued. She scored a string of documentaries in both Europe and the United States.

Wallis considers herself a disciple of Schoenberg and is a strict serialist, though she has occasionally claimed she finds the particular designation reductive and inaccurate. She also indicates a spiritual lineage from Hildegard of Bingen, positioning her own art as, fundamentally, structural, the fashioning of sound within the ineffable confines of time—an idea she associates with the saint.

Wallis believes all music is preexistent—“unheard”—and the function of the composer is to apprehend the form of the music and transcribe it, to usher the ideal forward to a sort of materiality or, at least, to an existence in time. All songs, she believes, reside in a realm independent of human minds, but the artist can access this and, in turn, allow the music to participate in the world. Wallis jots notes to herself in Hildegard of Bingen’s secret language known as Lingua Ignota. She occasionally writes letters to her three daughters, from whom she is estranged, in the same script, an inscrutable outreach.

Wallis maintains she never again encountered Patkanian after the morning he left her family home when she was nine, though she apparently joined the Lisbon Circle in 1941 at his invitation. She keeps a small vial of liquid in a pendant she wears around her neck. Colleagues believe the vial contains embalming fluid.

Sembla Intelligencer – June 25, 1988

Ben Guterson’s writing includes the Edgar Award-nominated middle-grade novel Winterhouse (Holt/Macmillan) and the New York Times bestseller The World-Famous Nine (Little, Brown/Hachette). His stories have appeared in several literary journals, including Burningword, BlazeVOX, Superpresent, Funicular, and SORTES.

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