Erland Cooper: ‘I’m forever trying to write more with less’

From his studio in north London Erland Cooper is demonstrating the lengths in which he went to create the elemental force that’s integral to a new score he has composed to accompany silent film classic The Wind.
Erland Cooper. Picture: Alex KozobolisErland Cooper. Picture: Alex Kozobolis
Erland Cooper. Picture: Alex Kozobolis

While researching the 1928 romantic drama starring Lillian Gish, the Scottish musician and composer says over Zoom he “suddenly realised what was missing” from the music he was writing for the project commissioned by Opera North: “the foley”.

In a bid to emulate the giant propellers film director Victor Sjöström had used to whip up a pretend cyclone in the Texas desert, Cooper, in a moment of “feverish madness”, bought a large fan and “made a wind tunnel” in his studio.

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“I could control the speed of the fan, and in controlling the speed I could control the noise, and I’d point the wind tunnel at the piano,” he says. “Then I would put the foot pedal of the piano down and I wedged it with a drumstick so the sustain at the piano was just absorbing the noise of the propeller and I mic-ed that up. Then I put a speaker in the middle and I had gone up to Leeds to record the Chorus of Opera North to play around with some sketches I had done.

Lillian Gish in the classic silent film The Wind.Lillian Gish in the classic silent film The Wind.
Lillian Gish in the classic silent film The Wind.

“I’d written Letty’s Theme in a nod to Morricone’s Deborah’s Theme (from Once Upon a Time in America) and I’d written other little bits of song and I recorded that there and then took that back and started chopping them up and putting it through this wind tunnel, which would smash the bass of this piano and create this quite intense, feverish, aggressive at times, and also subtle, powerful noise, and I realised that’s the sound of the wind.”

He smiles. “I joke that I call it the Ventor Vox, which sounds like an 80s band,” he says. “Now I’ve got to figure out a way to do that on stage.”

By adding this “sound texture” to scenes where the ranch that Gish is staying at are battered by a storm, it enabled Cooper to “strip out a lot of music” and have “a little bit of sound design” instead.

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Gish, then a huge Hollywood star who was later dubbed “the First Lady of American cinema”, was herself something of a pioneer. An actress, director and screenwriter whose career bridged the Silent Era and talking pictures, she invested a lot to get The Wind made.

“If I read correctly, I think the ending was changed,” Cooper says. “At the end there’s a murder and she walks out into the wind. Off she goes to be swallowed up or away she goes, who knows? It’s quite a dark ending.

“Hollywood producers at the time said ‘No, we cannot do that’, so they changed the ending and turned it into a love theme. But I see it more as a theme of Stockholm Syndrome rather than an act of love.

“For me, it does feel like a requiem to a dying art form,” he adds. “It’s masterful, its use of over-layering white horses in the desert with the thundering power of moving wind. It’s incredibly well put together.

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“I read some reviews from the time which were really laying into it. They were making comments like ‘how are the hats staying on, it’s so windy the hats would blow off’, but they just wanted the talkies, they just wanted colour, they wanted to move on. If you look back now it’s a masterpiece, it’s beautifully well done, it’s one of the best examples of that art form, and with that in mind I’ve tried to approach the score with the kind of undertone of remembrance.

“Even Letty’s Theme, her character has this feeling of application of fear and the torture of loneliness, but also this hopeful searching for what’s next. I’ve tried to nod to this art form that doesn’t know its dying, there’s something melancholic about that.”

Bearing in mind the score will be performed live with three screenings of the film in Gateshead, Manchester and Leeds, Cooper decided to make most of it out of the human voice, manipulating the Chorus to “sound like synthesisers almost”.

Using an old 60s mic, he experimented with putting his own voice through tape, “really pitching it down so you’ve got a male voice to accompany the 18 women of the Chorus of Opera North, but not in a singing way, just in a tonal way”, he says.

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“For me, the voice is so harmonically rich, and knowing that I try to use as much of the human element as possible to create the whole sound world,” he adds. “It would be very easy to reach for a quartet or brass band or a whole ensemble of woodwind, but I’ve tried to make it as much as possible out of just the human voice.

“So when you hear the sounds, they will sound like a Juno synthesiser or a baritone saxophone, but it’s actually the human voice. It’s either their voices from pre-recordings or mine chopped up, and in doing that, in setting that manifesto, giving more restrictions, it almost made it be a little bit more creative, so I’ve now added one woodwind rather than four. All of a sudden, with that one woodwind permitted in, it really works. It was nice to set those really silly rules I didn’t need to set but they help ask the questions of what it is you’re trying to say.”

As a composer, Cooper says he is “forever trying to write more with less”. He says he sees music as “just layers of sound, frequencies of sound”, adding: “You can get the sound of a baritone sax out of an 18-voice female choir...it’s just getting into the same frequency spectrum, making it match.”

The other detail he has noticed about the film, he says is a common trope in pre-war Westerns. “I think it’s really about the fear of the other,” he says. “There’s obviously the fear of the outside and loneliness, but it’s also fear of Native Americans, this idea that the wind represents fear of the unknown, so I’ve tried to capture that in the score as well. I’ve got the choir singing these Mojave chants and in the score it says ‘as if coming from the distance on the wind’. These incredible voices are used to doing Carmen, not chanting, so that’s quite fun. I think they kind of enjoyed that, it’s a little different from what they’re used to.

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“So it’s not an opera score. It’s with Opera North but it really is quite an abstract, modern score that uses mostly the female voice. There’s a few bits of song but there’s a lot of sound design. I got rid of half of the songs.”

The Wind might be a small project for Cooper, but he says he has tackled it with “the same vigorous, almost feverish approach” as he would an album. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a single song or a live score or a record, I approach everything with the same thing,” he says. “It’s ultimately getting under the fingernails of what the narrative is, what’s the story, what’s trying to be said here, and how can my bit part, which is the music, help tell that story or perhaps voice the story in a different way, look at some of the other narratives there, like this requiem for something, it doesn’t know it’s moving on. Like the wind, it’s so quick.”

Erland Cooper’s score for The Wind receives its world premiere at the Sage, Gateshead on Thursday February 24, followed by performances at RNCM Manchester on Friday February 25 and Howard Assembly Room, Leeds on Saturday February 26. operanorth.co.uk

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