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Amazingly composed: Anna Meredith at the Albert Hall. This year’s Proms finale will reach a potential audience of 40 million

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Asked her view on the Last Night of the Proms two years ago, composer Anna Meredith described this bastion of musical tradition as “fantastic but naughty, like spending the last day of Lent in a bath full of piña colada”.

It may unwittingly have been her job application. Next month the striking, willowy 30-year-old Scot, now based in south London, will provide the grand finale of the nine-week season with a brief, tumultuous work for massed choirs and orchestras involving an estimated 800 people.

Groups of musicians inside the Albert Hall will play simultaneously with others in Proms in the Park venues around the country, which will then be relayed back into the hall from Hyde Park (BBC Concert Orchestra), Glasgow (BBC Scottish), Belfast (Ulster Orchestra) and Cardiff (National Chorus and Orchestra of Wales). It will require air-traffic-control dexterity to co-ordinate. “It should be OK,” Meredith says blithely. “As long as I don't ask them to do one short, sharp noise together — like a clap or cymbal crash — which could be a disaster.”

Having written a comparable work for the opening of Glasgow's City Hall — involving swathes of the local community, three nursery schools and, by all accounts, several buckets of water — she sees this BBC commission as fairly manageable in comparison. As far as instrumentation is concerned, she has to rely on what's already on offer that night. “I wanted a huge percussion section, you know, eight bass drums and 16 marimbas. But I'll at least have a snare drum and some toy percussion, whistles and klaxons.”

Since the piece opens the second half of the Last Night, it will also be watched by an audience of about six million on BBC1, with a potential 40 million listening worldwide. Meredith has never been to the Last Night and doesn't feel she's a typical flag-waver “but I like to see people enjoying themselves. It's a one-off, with its own identity”.

Considering she hasn't yet finished the piece, or found a name for it — “I'm waiting for Dad to email me some ideas. He's good at that and has come up with lots of my titles” — she seems remarkably calm. The more so since a fortnight ago she found herself in hospital for major abdominal surgery, not life-threatening but unexpected and debilitating. She looks like healthiness personified but pulls up her shirt to display two raw scars.

“It's all held me up a bit, especially spending 10 days in hospital, but everyone at the BBC has been totally understanding and not pressurised me at all, though it must be pretty nerve-racking for them.” A practical consolation is that the work cannot be fully rehearsed until the day, since the performers will not be in situ, nor will the technical link-ups needed to beam them hundreds of miles into the Albert Hall be ready in advance.

Is she daunted? “Not exactly. I feel quite comfortable writing for orchestras and I'm just going in there, all balls flying.” She composes with impressive speed. “I don't rewrite much. If I get too picky and finicky about what I'm doing I write crap music.”

Her first steps with each composition are noisy and radical. “I draw big graphic shapes to conjure the kind of piece I'm aiming at, with a timeline of what happens where, and arrows and signs for the loud bits. Then I pace around, making cuts and stabs on the score, and stomp and whack the piano and yell. It's all quite tribal.”

Her neighbours must love her. She holds out a rough but neat diagram of the Last Night piece, with chorus marked out in red, BBC Symphony Orchestra in black and the Proms in the Park performers, appropriately, in green. It looks like a geological cross-section of rock strata. When this process is complete, she notates it all via Sibelius software on her computer. “I love using live electronics, often grimy and industrial and glitchy sounding. I'll stumble across a rhythm and obsess and burrow into it.”

One refreshing aspect of Meredith's career is that — at least as she tells it — her early musical life was not especially precocious. The eldest of three children, she grew up in Edinburgh as part of a cultured but unmusical family. Her father has just retired as a university lecturer in journalism, while her mother is a picture restorer.

Meredith took up the clarinet aged 11. “I had a good ear and played in youth orchestras, but I wasn't brilliant and I knew I couldn't make a career out of it.” She began composition only when writing the obligatory coursework pieces for her standard grades (the Scottish equivalents of GCSE and A-level). “The teacher at my local comp seemed to think I was quite good, but it was all still quite tentative.” After school, she did a two-year diploma then a music degree at York. Studies at the Royal College of Music followed, with David Sawer and Tim Salter.

Her first major success was at the Huddersfield Festival, when James MacMillan asked her to write a piece for the BBC Philharmonic, entitled Torque. Two years later in 2004, aged 26, she was appointed composer in association with the BBC Scottish Orchestra.

Alongside this relatively mainstream route, she works with five south-London based friends, the Camberwell Composers Collective. “The Camberwell style is eclectic, from jazz and electronic to, well, haphazard. We all have different tastes — but it's all very ballsy and faff-free.”

The group includes fellow rising star Emily Hall, who was at York with Meredith. She doesn't find it surprising, or particularly interesting, that women composers are at last coming to the fore. “It's never been an issue, or a problem. My music isn't very girly or delicate. It's nasty and raucous and gutsy.”

To support her income, Meredith teaches drum-kit at Lady Margaret School, Parsons Green, and is currently writing a Concerto for Beatboxer, for beatbox wizard Shlomo, whose collaborators include everyone from Damon Albarn and Björk to Bill Bailey and the Mighty Boosh. She's also working on an opera for Aldeburgh Music in 2009, to a libretto by Philip Ridley.

Meredith describes herself as “a hedonist and quite lazy”, which seems doubtful, but if she means merely that she has other interests, credible. She likes to dance, do Pilates and play Nintendo Wii Guitar Hero with her boyfriend, animator Tony Comley. “We spent all afternoon yesterday playing Guns N' Roses.”

Her taste is indefinable, from bands such as Daft Punk, Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie to Louis Andriessen, Gerald Barry, Elliott Carter, late Ravel, Janacek and Varese. “As long as the music is honest, that's all I care about, if that doesn't sound like a self-righteous preacher.”

When does she find time to listen? “All the time. I listen when I dance or cook. I hoover to Stravinsky. It's noisy enough and you can hear the rhythms and the energy above the racket.” She's only half joking. It's a far cry from Pomp and Circumstance. Diehards waving teddy-bears and kiss-me-quick hats may groan. The rest of us will be cheering.

Last Night of the Proms, 13 September, live on BBC Radio 3 and BBC1.

 

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