A blooming brilliant Jubilee... and Scot writes the soundtrack
IT promises to be a kaleidoscope of colour, with a sea of 20 million wild flowers when in full bloom.
Created for the celebrations in June of the Queen’s 70 years on the throne, it is hoped the Tower of London’s Superbloom display will also be a bee and butterfly haven.
And at its heart will be a musical score – called Music For Growing Flowers – written by Scottish composer Erland Cooper.
Now London-based but Orkneybred, the 37-year-old has seven acclaimed albums to his credit and has been described as ‘nature’s songwriter’. He recalled that he was backstage at a festival reflecting on a performance that had not gone as well as hoped when he was approached about the project.
Cooper said he had only begun to take the request seriously when he was asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
After scribbling his promise to keep the project quiet on a producer’s palm, he was told: ‘It’s got to please everybody and it’s got to please the Queen because it’s for her Platinum Jubilee.’
Cooper said as he got to work he was ‘missing intensely’ Stromness, where he spent his childhood.
He sought inspiration for the Platinum Jubilee soundtrack from the Queen’s former Master of Music, the late Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, who also lived on Orkney.
Davies’s Farewell To Stromness was played at two Royal weddings: Charles and Camilla’s in 2005 and William and Kate’s in 2011.
Cooper, whose electronic classical music has served as an accompaniment to stunning landscapes in previous works, said: ‘I like the idea of bringing a little bit of Orkney to the Tower of London.’
Last year, he hit the headlines when he buried the only copy of his album Carve The Runes Then Be Content With Silence, which had never been heard by anyone, at a site in Orkney. Music executives have agreed to release it when it is exhumed in 2024.
Side A of his Music For Growing Flowers will be released on June 1 at the start of the Superbloom event, and side B on August 19.