Erland Cooper: Love of Life, Fringe by the Sea review: 'epic'
Erland Cooper’s new composition Sula bassana feels like the presiding spirit of this year’s Fringe by the Sea Festival, writes Jim Gilchrist
The Bass Rock gannetry is, to quote David Attenborough, “one of the wildlife wonders of the world”, as the seabirds soar and plummet around the volcanic plug that rears from the sea off North Berwick. Now their sound and spirit have inspired an epic orchestral work by the Orcadian composer Erland Cooper.
Sula Bassana, titled after the Latin name for the northern gannet, was commissioned by North Berwick’s Fringe by the Sea for its Love of Life (Biophilia) programme. Cooper’s music is a “symphonic meditation” in collaboration with artist Naomi McIntosh, whose “Nest” is a maze-like assembly of elegantly looped, jute strung timber forms under a great, stooped sycamore in the festival’s outdoor hub. McIntosh’s harp-like structures look playable in themselves, while Cooper’s music ebbs and flows from speakers rigged in the tree canopy, creating a striking “sonic tapestry”.
Sula Bassana received a full-blast airing during Love of Life’s launch in the nearby Big Top, when Vic Galloway interviewed Cooper, McIntosh and filmmaker Lewis Gourlay – whose spectacularly immersive Love of Life 360° partners the music with images of gannets soaring or plunging into green depths.
As Cooper’s composition, recorded by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, thundered in the Big Top or permeated the sculptural glade of The Nest, in a smaller, ambiently chiming dome nearby a quite literal “connecting with nature” created intriguing sounds of a different sort in Plants Can Sing, producer Brian d’Souza clipping leads to plants and demonstrating how their natural electronic emissions, connected to synthesisers, can be converted into music.
However, as a procession bearing flamboyant gannet puppets wound its way from the harbour to the Big Top, to be greeted by spectacular orchestration and images of the real thing, Sula bassana seemed decidedly the presiding spirit of the festival.
The Fringe by the Sea festival runs until 9 August
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