Arnold Cooke was one of the last British musicians to study
with Paul Hindemith at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik in
Berlin before the Nazi rise to power. On his return to
England, he went on to build a national reputation as a
composer and over the 40 years following the Second World
War, when he was at his most prolific, wrote in almost all
forms.

The second of three brothers, Arnold Cooke came from a
comfortable middle-class family at Gomersal, near Leeds, his
father a director of a company manufacturing carpets. Arnold
was influenced by his violin-playing grandfather. His
education was a typical middle-class inter-war one of prep
school, Repton and Cambridge. He went up to Gonville and
Caius College in 1925, at first to read History, but then
moving on to Music, under the influence of Edward J. Dent,
then newly appointed as Professor of Music. From 1929, again
influenced by Dent, he went to Berlin, where he remained for
three years.

In 1932 Arnold Cooke succeeded another British Hindemith
pupil, Walter Leigh, as musical director at the Cambridge
Festival Theatre, writing music for Peer Gynt and The
Merchant of Venice, but soon moving to Manchester as
Professor of Composition and Harmony at the Royal Manchester
College of Music (1933-38). Throughout the Thirties he
enjoyed performances of his latest works, largely of music
for small combinations, although in 1936 Havergal Brian,
writing in Musical Opinion, hailed Cooke's early short
cantata Holderneth as "his finest work" at the time. Cooke
made his first appearance at a Queen's Hall Promenade
Concert on 30 August 1934, when Sir Henry Wood presented his
Concert Overture No 1, which had come third in a competition
run by the Daily Express.

The BBC broadcast Cooke's Three Pieces for Piano in 1936 and
there were other chamber works including a Harp Quintet
which featured the celebrated harpist Maria Korchinska in
December 1934, a String Quartet (there would eventually be
five) played by the Griller Quartet in 1935 and a Violin
Sonata (the first of two) in 1939. In 1937 he produced a
Sonata for Two Pianos commissioned by Adolph Hollis and
Franz Reizenstein, heard at the Wigmore Hall. Cooke had
known Reizenstein in Berlin. He declared his left-wing
politics in 1939, by contributing the wind band
"Introduction" to the first concert of the Festival of Music
for the People at the Royal Albert Hall, organised by Alan
Bush with music by Elisabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy and
Alan Rawsthorne, and performed on 1 April.

Cooke moved to London in 1938 and wrote a piano concerto
which was accepted by the BBC and broadcast by Louis Kentner
on 11 November 1943, by when Cooke was a naval officer. He
was demobbed late in 1945 and survived on various one-off
freelance activities, including music for Louis MacNeice's
radio play Njal's Saga. Other commissions at the time
included a concert overture, Processional, for the 1948
Cambridge Festival, a Concerto in D for string orchestra
commissioned by the BBC Overseas Service, and incidental
music for a film on the Colorado beetle.

In 1947 Cooke was appointed Professor of Harmony and
Composition at Trinity College of Music, a position he held
for over 30 years, finally retiring in 1978. The following
year, he met his companion Billy Morrison, with whom he
lived until Morrison's death in 1988. In 1948, too, he
received his Doctorate from Cambridge University, his
submitted works being a Sonata for Viola and Piano dating
from 1937, the Piano Concerto broadcast in 1943 and his then
recently completed First Symphony, first heard in a
broadcast by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir
Adrian Boult on 26 February 1949.

Cook used the pseudonym "Manounian" when, in 1949, he
proposed Mary Barton as the subject of an opera, submitting
a libretto by W.A. Rathkey after the novel of industrial
exploitation and unrest by Mrs Gaskell, as a candidate for
the Arts Council Festival of Britain opera competition. He
failed to get past the first round, when his synopsis was
rejected. Although he went on with the opera and completed
it in 1954, it has never been produced. A one-act comic
opera, The Invisible Duke, followed in 1975-76.

He was much more successful with his ballet Jabez and the
Devil, commissioned by the Royal Ballet and first seen at
the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1961, a suite from
it also being heard at that year's Promenade Concerts. It
was recorded by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and
Nicholas Braithwaite for Lyrita in 1975, although the
planned CD reissue has never appeared.

Cooke's six symphonies, although warmly received in their
day, have not been heard for many years. Fifteen years after
the first, the Second Symphony was first performed by the
Hallé Orchestra conducted by Lawrence Leonard at the Royal
Festival Hall in London, and was soon followed by the Third
(1967), the only one to have been commercially recorded (in
1975). Cooke's standing at this time is reflected in the
fact that the Fourth was commissioned by the Royal
Philharmonic Society for one of their Festival Hall concerts
in 1975. The following for Cooke's symphonies has diminished
since then, for lack of performances. His Fifth Symphony was
broadcast by the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra in
Manchester conducted by Bernard Keeffe in 1979, but his
Sixth, of 1984, has remained unperformed.

Cooke had five premieres at the post-war Proms: his overture
Processional (1948); the Oboe Concerto, possibly his most
popular orchestral work (1955); the suite from his ballet
Jabez and the Devil (1962); his Variations on a Theme of
Dufay (1969) written to commemorate the Indian scientist and
artist Dr Homi Bhabha, killed in an air crash; and the Cello
Concerto, one of the BBC's 1975 commissions which was played
by Thomas Igloi.

Cooke's symphonies were essentially in the accessible idiom
sometimes called "Cheltenham Symphony", but his contribution
to the Cheltenham Festival in fact started with his first
Clarinet Concerto, played by Gervase de Peyer in 1957.
Cooke's lyrical Violin Concerto soon followed, introduced
byYfrah Neaman at the 1959 Festival. Later came the Second
Piano Sonata played by Rosemary Wright in 1966.

Cooke had many other festival commissions, notably at
Cambridge, for which he wrote many substantial works; also
for the Hovingham, Aldeburgh, Bath, City of London and
Cardiff festivals. For the annual St Cecilia Day service in
London in 1961 he wrote his anthem "O Sing Unto the Lord".
In 1984 his old school, Repton, commissioned a piece for the
opening of their new music school, and Cooke responded with
his orchestral Repton Fantasia which, based on the Repton
School Song, also introduced Parry's hymn tune "Repton" and
the Pilgrim Hymn.

Cooke produced a substantial body of organ music. After a
Prelude, Intermezzo and Finale in 1962, he responded to
church invitations to celebrate the opening or restoration
of their organs, with his Fantasia (1964) and Toccata and
Aria (1966). Later came short pieces and two substantial
sonatas (1971 and 1981). After he had stopped regular
composition, at the age of 84, he was persuaded to write a
suite for organ to celebrate the new organ at his local
Tudeley Parish Church.

He was also a pioneering composer of serious music for the
recorder, first with a full-blown concerto for Philip Rogers
heard in 1957. Cooke wrote 20 works for recorder in a
variety of ensembles. At first he enjoyed the championship
of Carl Dolmetsch and subsequently responded to the
characteristic playing and enthusiasm of John Turner with a
Capriccio for recorder and piano (1985). Turner, also a
Cambridge man, had first contacted Cooke when a student,
asking for recorder music, and, typically, had been sent an
original manuscript. Turner responded with many performances
and introduced Cooke's Five Poems of William Blake in 1988,
and subsequently he and the soprano Tracey Chadwell many
times gave Cooke's Three Flower Songs for soprano and
recorder.

Cooke stopped writing after 1987 and in 1993 he suffered a
stroke, from which, fortunately, he recovered. A brief Blake
setting for voice and recorder, Song of Innocence, was his
memorial for Chadwell after her untimely death in 1996, and
was Cooke's last music.

Lewis Foreman

Arnold Atkinson Cooke, composer: born Gomersal, Yorkshire 4
November 1906; Director, Festival Theatre, Cambridge 1932;
Professor of Harmony, Counterpoint and Composition, Royal
Manchester College of Music 1933-38; Professor of Harmony,
Counterpoint and Composition, Trinity College of Music,
London 1947-77; died Five Oak Green, Kent 13 August 2005.