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 | | |  | | Francis Judd Cooke |
| | | Francis Judd Cooke was born in Honolulu, Hawai’i on December 28,1910 to a family of New England missionaries turned cattle ranchers. “I heard Red-Seal Caruso from the wooden horn of a Victor Talking Machine,” he recalled. “We kids pumped out the New World, Pathétique, and Fifth Symphonies on the Aeolian Orchestrelle—a splendid reed organ that played rolls. Our ranch-house was on the Texas-arid western half of Moloka’i.” From an early age he studied piano, cello, and organ “as good teachers in Honolulu came and went.”
Cooke began composing at an early age; his first serious pieces date from age 14. After receiving a B.A. in music from Yale in 1933, he studied for two years with the composer Charles Martin Loeffler in Medfield, Massachusetts. In 1935 he went to Scotland to study with Donald Francis Tovey at the University of Edinburgh. He received a Mus. Bac. (Bachelor of Music) degree with First Class Honours from Edinburgh in 1938. While studying in Scotland he met and married violist May Ludwig. They settled in Lexington, Massachusetts, where they raised six children, gardened, and played chamber music.
Brought to the New England Conservatory of Music in 1939 by his friend, composer Quincy Porter, who was then the Conservatory’s director, Cooke taught composition, counterpoint, musical form, interpretation, and musical literature there until 1970. His most popular course, Musical Form, attracted as many as 100 students during the GI Bill years. He was particularly known for teaching contemporary music literature and techniques, composition, and 16th-century counterpoint. Among his many talented students during his thirty years at the Conservatory were Sarah Caldwell, Stephen Casale, Halim El-Dabh, David Epstein, Ercolino Ferretti, William Hibbard, Billy Jim Layton, Ruth Lomon, Richard Ronsheim, Albert Tepper, and Luise Vosgerchian.
In teaching composition, Cooke encouraged students to be creative and take risks instead of following a fixed formula for composition. “His criticism and advice about what should happen next in a piece were always very discerning and right on the mark,” said Robert Ceely, a former student of Cooke’s. “He was like a very fine director for an actor.”
Cooke also taught at Yale University in 1959-1960 and at Wellesley College from 1973 to 1979. In 1974 he completed a classroom text titled “Sixteenth-Century Vocal Polyphony.” He was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Music from the New England Conservatory, also in 1974.
Cooke served as organist and choir director at the First Parish Church (Unitarian) in Lexington, Massachusetts from 1955 to 1981; there many of his choral, organ, and chamber compositions were first performed. Over the years he played all the Bach organ preludes and fugues, and at times performed in concerts as a cellist, pianist, and conductor.
After a stroke brought an end to his organ playing and choir directing in 1981, Cooke turned to composing full-time, and in the last fourteen years of his life wrote a great number of pieces: choral and orchestral works as well as chamber works for woodwinds, brass, and strings. Late in 1994 he commissioned the Warsaw recordings, which he did not live to hear; in May 1995, at the age of 84, he died at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he had lived for 51 years |
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