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Published: Sunday, 10 November 2024 at 09:00 AM
Erland Cooper: the composer who planted a tape and grew a concerto…
Erland Cooper is so much more than a composer. Hailing from the island of Orkney, he’s an artist with a deep connection to the natural world. Mother Nature has long been his muse, and for his recently released violin concerto, Carve The Runes Then Be Content With Silence, he went a step further.
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The recording wasn’t only created by Cooper, violinist Daniel Pioro and a fabulous string ensemble, it was partly created by nature, or more specifically, time and decay. That’s because the tape from which the recording comes was planted in the ground on Orkney in 2021, where it could succumb to the potential ravages of moisture, soil and any living thing that might latch onto or eat away at it. That spool of ¼-inch tape was the only copy, all digital versions were deleted immediately after the recording.
For Cooper, it was a thrilling game of chance… he didn’t tell anyone where it was planted specifically, only providing clues for any would-be treasure hunters. He did all this under the proviso that he would release the recording in whatever state it was found, whether that be in a month, a year or two years… At three years he would have dug it up himself. It was found, though, in 2022 and, true to his word, Cooper has released the recording – he just didn’t know quite what to expect when he played it.
Following a successful run of live dates in the US and Europe, Erland Cooper hits the road in the UK this month for a string of concerts. Joined by a small ensemble he will perform a live version of Carve the Runes… along with other pieces from his catalogue. I caught up with him to chat about going on the road and what it was like to reacquaint himself with the recording he so willingly sequestered in the soil on Orkney.
How has touring been for you? You’ve inferred on Instagram that the stage is not exactly your natural habitat…
No it’s not; despite being told the opposite. I’m always encouraged to get on the stage, but I don’t think these things come easy to anyone. I get the great joy of collaborating with incredible people, like Freya Goldmark on this tour, Daniel Pioro who recorded the piece with me, and just handpick and curate wonderful musicians and wonderful souls. They’re such good people and they deliver night after night; every concert is unique.
We were on tour in Europe and the US, so we end in the UK – this is the last leg, which is lovely. We’ve gone out to Berlin, to Paris, to Belgium and all sorts of places that I can’t pronounce, and the audiences were so open. Some folk travelled hundreds of miles to come to a second show. I was so touched by that, because I thought I would play to a room a ten people. There may have been only 100-200 people there, but it was joyful.
How does Carve The Runes translate to a live setting?
Taking this project, which is essentially a chamber strings piece, you need at least 16 players for it to faithfully reproduce the recording. The recording could’ve been silence, it really could have been a very different output. I sort of thought the minimal amount of players I could play it with (live) was a sextet, including the double bass, but actually I’ve got it down to five, with two cellos. The concerts have been wonderful.
There’s been some audience participation, too, I understand?
Every night I did one experiment where I try to turn 200 voices into 2,000 voices. You know how you go to a show and you’re encouraged ro put your phone away; well I ask everybody to take their phones out and go to this link – which is brilliantly awkward, because they think they’re going to do the whole mobile phone light show thing. But they find an old-fashioned play button, like on a tape machine, and they press play. I preconfigure it to be whatever bird sound I want – for example the sound of blackbirds, or the sound of voices that are slowly vanishing from the landscape, like curlews or gannets. Then all of a sudden one pops up, two and on and on, and it’s this wonderful ice-breaking experiment where we’re celebraring nature and the origins of song and voice screaming out. We sort of create a ‘gannet choir’ or a ‘blackbird choir’, and 100 voices become 1,000, and it’s really touching. We’re not just celebrating music, community, musicianship and composition, we’re celebrating nature in a way that is surprising us.
Do you have a sense of where and how your audiences come to your music?
I often ask folk, when I’m walking with them or if they come up to talk to me at the end of a concert, how my music landed into their heads or hearts; it just baffles me. Somone coming to a concert from Wisconsin, how did that happen? And everyone has a very unique ands personal story. I don’t care how people listen to music as long as they understand where it comes from, dig a little deeper and enjoy that. If you like something, go further. It surprises me and it inspires me. Every night people got to their feet and I found that very moving; in fact normally I would run off stage! It’s a learning experience and I have so much gratitude and respect for the audience, no matter how they’ve come across my music or where they’ve come from to hear it.
What’s your ethos as a composer, for those who are new to your work?
I grew up in Orkney, which is effectively a rock in the North Sea, surrounded by the elements. And I often say that while I didn’t get an education in classical music, I did get an education in the natural world and the elements themselves. I was so fortunate to be surrounded by the sound of the North Sea, the cliffs, the seabirds – from oyster catchers to the curlews themselves. I see that now and the underdog in me that gets up super early and is studying books on counterpoint and is wanting to learn as much from my peers – from Daniel Pioro, from Freya Goldmark, Thomas Adès, all these wonderful people that I listen to and I listen to them verbally as well as musically. I then pat myself on the back, because what an education I did get. It’s a diverse musical background; I flowed into musical projects that touched on folk music and psychedelia, rock; in music you often flow in the direction your collaborators lead you. I’m always drawn back to the natural world and it’s not uncommon for composers to have written, for centuries, on nature; it’s quite a standard muse. I’m just so grateful to tap into the energy of the natural world and feel like I’m ploughing a field and just warming up. I’m inspired less by composers and more by musicians, poets, writers, illustrators, painters. Each of these conversations is a new quartet piece in my head, and so I’m just trying to catch up.
Poetry is at the heart of Carve The Runes…isn’t it? Tell us about the root of that project…
Carve the Runes… celebrates one of the UK’s greatest poets and certainly Orkney’s greatest poet, George Mackay Brown. He would have been 100 in 2021, so it celebrated his centenary and I was trying to find a way to celebrate him, to dig a little deeper into the landscape, to write a piece and to write my first violin concerto for Daniel and then bring in – which I hope would make George Mackay Brown giggle – the aleatoric element, the chance-based element. In fact the late Quincy Jones said something like, ‘when you leave something up to chance, you leave the door open for magic to walk through.’ That’s what I always try to have, that element of the experiemental and the unknown. So deleting every digital file and having one existing copy on a magnetic tape, and then planting it and leaving it up to chance for the composition to evolve – whether it gets erased completely, whether it drops out, whether it’s distorted or whether indeed, as the case has shown, it’s resilient.
What it was like to listen to the tape for the first time after you got it back from Orkney?
My gosh. It was caught on camera; Christian Cargill made a film and I invited him in. I made him wear noise-cancelling headphones, and he was listening to ABBA. The reason I made him listen to ABBA was that one of the executives at Decca said, ‘what if you’ve just planted ABBA’s greatest hits, Erland, and we’re signing a record deal and what comes out of the earth is just silence?’ I’m still trying to underdstand what it means to me; I’m trying to find which part of the process I enjoyed the most, or which comes closest to that feeling of happiness. Was it the writing? Was it going in the room with all these musicians and knowing it was going to be this instant moment where we record it and it gets deleted? Was it the deletion itself? Was it the planting? Was it when it was found? Was it when Freya Goldmark and I revelaed it to 2,000 people at the Barbican – which was a collective leap of faith, because nobody knew, other than me and the musicians, for a month what was on that tape. And I’m still asking myself that. But how did it feel? It felt like I was dancing with the ghosts of memory; it was such a strange, surreal, humourous and moving experience. It was slightly overwhelming, as caught on camera.
There are so many moments that have struck me; one was sitting for two minutes and hearing nothing! In my head I was thinking, ‘how did we write the orchestral articulation for white noise?’ Which we have done in the score, you turn the violin and you take the bow on the rib of the violin and you brush it in a morse-code manner; it makes this wonderful, chugging white noise. I enjoyed writing those little moments… But all of a sudden music appeared! I’d forgotten that the players are mimicking birdsong, I’d forgotten the opening movement, the energy of it; it was sharp, it was thicker… but ultimately it survived, this music. There were a couple of moments in the middle, after the second movement and the beginning of the third where it went completely silent. I sat there thinking, ‘okay, we’ve got two movements, and the rest will be silent for 15 minutes.’ Then after two minutes, all of a sudden I heard the strings begin to grow; I laughed and cried at the same time, because I realised I had written a two-minute silence into the score itself. I’d completely forgotten! So I laughed at myself, the humour of the ideas of what felt like a young man – it’s only three years!
It’s now considered radical to wait three years to release something after it’s recorded. I understand that it’s radical to risk losing it all, but it wasn’t uncommon for people to write over long timelines and wait before you recorded it, all of that sort of thing. But that moment in particular struck me, and I felt like I was able to do what I had intended to do, which was to write across a timeline; time is an area I’m focused on. This project serves as a meditation on value, on patience and composition across the timeline, and I was able to explore that. I don’t think I’ll get that feeling again. There’s something else planned for 100 years, but I won’t be here – I won’t live to 140. But I wanted to find a timeline that felt right, and three years felt good; also I like a trilogy and a triptych.
It sounds like it was almost a dreamlike moment…
I asked myself, ‘when did you right that?!’ I suppose the other thing I was struck by is that there are so many ideas in it. I think I did that because I had no idea what was going to come out; so if only one part came out, at least I knew it would be something full of despair and hope and joy. Quite a lot of what was written into the score I had asked the players to mimic, for example, the wow and flutter of enearthed magnetic tape. I’d asked them to play like they were walking through peaty heather, or play like the sound of a ferry horn bending in the harbour. It’s sort of mimicing art imitating life imitating art; so interpeting what this might sound like when it comes out of the soil. I think the reason I did that was the ‘what if?’ What if nothing survives? What if some survives? What if all of it survives? So all of those ideas are in there and as a listener you don’t quite know, even me at the time of listening, what the soil has done, what the earth has done to this collaboration, to the fabric and decay of the magnetic tape and what was compositionally written in already? I think that ambiguity is sort of the wonder of it for me, really.
And what was the physical state of the tape when it was unearthed? How did that actually impact the music?
You can hear the journey that it has been on. It’s got its own energy, and by the end, funnily enough, as the music becomes more hopeful – after you get through the despair of the second movement – the fidelity of the tape was getting worse, and I think there’s a poignancy in that. If you can imagine the spool of magnetic tape; as you get closer to the centre where it’s finishing, there were plants growing through it! It was really congealed and stuck together. Whenever I’ve listened to it and reflected, there’s always a reminder of what it went through, a slight glitch or drop-out, and I love those moments. I’m often asked, ‘why did you bury it?’ but I always say I ‘planted’ it, because planting, to me, symbolises letting light in, but also letting it grow and grow into new forms of life, collaborations and experiences.
What was it like sharing the tape with others for the first time?
Whether there was music on it or not, the record label has waited for four years not having heard a single note. I invited everyone over to the studio, all the bosses, and I said, ‘would you like to hear the tape?’ And remembering the ABBA story, about their expectations, I secretly put ‘Dancing Queen’ on a cassette tape and really mashed it up, left it out in the rain, and it sounded awful. Then I digitised it and put a really long fade at the start. So I pressed play and it started with this really crunchy distortion, the type of music that Daniel Pioro had hoped would come out – we would’ve done it, and that was the commitment. Anyway they hear this distortion and it slowly fades and then you hear, ‘…having the time of our liiives, ooooh…’ and there wasn’t a dry eye in the room. That first minute everyone was like beard stroking, in awe of the experimental nature of it all.
As cerebral as things can sound and be discussed, ultimately I care about how music can make me feel and make others feel; that’s something I have so much gratitude for in exploring and searching and improving and writing within. And with great pain and great loss, or grief, great humour should always be there. And that, to me, looks like hope. That’s the undercurrent that we should reach towards, and that’s something I’ve learned from this project, and that really does celebrate resilience.
Erland Cooper’s Carve The Runes Then Be Content With Silence is out now on Mercury KX, available to listen to wherever you enjoy your music. He is on tour across the UK from 20 November-5 December.