Cooke was born December 28, 1910, in
Honolulu,
Hawaii, to a family of
New England missionaries turned cattle ranchers. He was the great grandson of
Gerrit P. Judd, the first doctor to reside in Hawaii, and grandson of
Albert Francis Judd, Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court of Hawaii. His mother was Sophie Boyd Judd, and father was George Paul Cooke, grandson of
Amos Starr Cooke and Juliette Montague Cooke, founders of the
Royal School of Hawaii. Cooke began composing at an early age and his first serious pieces date from age 14. He received a B.A. in music from
Yale University in 1933, where he was a member of
Skull and Bones. He then studied for two years with
Charles Martin Loeffler in
Medfield, Massachusetts. In 1935 he went to
Scotland to study with
Donald Francis Tovey at the
University of Edinburgh, receiving a Mus. Bac. (Bachelor of Music) degree with First Class Honours in 1938. While studying in Scotland he met and married
violist May Ludwig. They settled in
Lexington, Massachusetts, where they raised six children. In 1939 Cooke began teaching at the
New England Conservatory of Music, at the request of the Conservatory's then-director,
Quincy Porter. His notable students there included John Bavicchi,
Sarah Caldwell,
Héctor Campos-Parsi, Stephen Casale, Robert Ceely,
Robert Cogan, Lyle Davidson,
Halim El-Dabh, David Epstein, Ercolino Ferretti, William Hibbard, Billy Jim Layton,
Ruth Lomon,
Kenneth Peacock, Richard Ronsheim,
Ernie Stires, Albert Tepper,
Ivana Marburger Themmen, and Luise Vosgerchian. He retired in 1970. He also taught at
Yale University in 1959–1960 and at
Wellesley College from 1973 to 1979. A prolific composer, Cooke wrote a great number of choral and orchestral works, as well as chamber works. One CD of his music, entitled
The Warsaw Recordings (which he did not live to hear), performed by the
Warsaw Philharmonic under Jerzy Swoboda, has been released. In 1974 he completed a music textbook entitled
Sixteenth-Century Vocal Polyphony. In the same year he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Music from the New England Conservatory. Cooke suffered a stroke in 1981, hampering his organ playing and choir directing, and he turned to composing full-time during the last 14 years of his life. On May 18, 1995, at the age of 84, he died in his sleep at his home in
Lexington,
Massachusetts, where he had lived for 51 years. He had completed that morning an arrangement for wind quintet of some music from Hector Berlioz's opera
Les Troyens (titled "Dolce assai" after Berlioz's expressive marking), which was performed at his memorial service the following week at Lexington's First Parish Church (Unitarian), where he had served as organist and choirmaster from 1955 to 1981. Cooke, who greatly enjoyed poetry, used to sum up his own life with a favorite couplet from the Indian poet
Rabindranath Tagore's
Gitanjali: :"It was my part at the feast to play upon my instrument :And I have done all I could ==Rice-Cooke family tree==