Marian Metson & Sandra Stuart - Organ Music of John Cook (1989)

Except for his remaining friends and family, few people know the organ works of John Cook. Not avant garde in any way; his music is "usable" in the manner of Paul Hindemith, whom John admired greatly. Most of it is ideal church service music, though he also composed the concert works Five Studies in the Form of a Sonata and Passacharlia (a pun on the name of his friend, the Toronto organist, Charles Peaker). A masterful improvisor, John was well-grounded in harmony and counterpoint—knowledge that can be attributed to his English schooling.

This recording is made as a tribute to my friend and colleague, who, like the best musicians I know, was so busy making music that he didn't advertise his achievements, most of which remain unknown.

I had known John for at least fifteen years before I "discovered" his organ music. We had both come to Boston in 1962, he as the organist/choirmaster at Church of the Advent and I as a graduate student at Boston University. We slowly came to know and appreciate each other through our mutual friend, Sandra Stuart, who later married him. Sandy and I performed many two-soprano concerts together with John accompanying in the chapels at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I gradually became aware that John was not just another organist but an experienced and talented theater musician.

He encouraged me as a singer and, in 1972, talked me into making my opera "debut" at a bird sanctuary in Belmont, Massachusetts, where I sang Dido in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, outdoors just as Purcell originally had done. About a year later, I participated in a production of Mozart's Magic Flute he produced, staged, and conducted at M. I. T. Both of these performances were just for fun: there was no budget or box office, but fine singers in Boston donated their time because they knew John and his certain ability to assemble a production of professional quality, which he did. The successful performance revealed a side of John's talent and energy of which very few musicians in Boston were ever aware.

Though I knew that John was highly regarded as a composer, had recently composed incidental music for a theater production in Minneapolis and had published organ music, I never got around to asking about what he had composed or to looking at any of his music.

In 1976, I left Boston for Washington, D. C., to marry Graham Metson, a Foreign Service officer. About five years later, I overheard a colleague practicing the organ at my church, Lutheran Church of the Reformation. It sounded like a wonderful improvisation using the Great Trumpet most effectively. I was amazed to discover that the piece was Fanfare by my good friend John Cook in Boston!

I was inspired to leam Fanfare and other pieces, and I programmed the Veni Creator and Alles ist an Gottes Segen at Methuen Memorial Music Hall in 1983. Although John's vision was failing and he was quite frail from his diabetes, he came to a rehearsal and attended the concert.

John had abandoned hope that younger American organists would ever take an interest in his music, but he knew that I was planning to record these works on the newly-installed Bozeman organ at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Brookline. Unfortunately, he never even heard the unedited tape. We recorded the last week in July of 1984 and he died on Sunday, August 12.

At a wonderful memorial concert held at Church of the Advent in October, 1984, John's very close friend and colleague, Barrie Cabena, played Five Studies in Form of a Sonata. It was the first time I had heard this work which John had repeatedly told me was his best composition. I played several pieces and a choir sang Byrd and Cook, including Author of Light, one of the most astonishingly beautiful a capella pieces I have ever heard.

Playing and hearing John's organ works at this concert seemed to demand that I devote a complete recording to his organ works, and to record them at Church of the Advent. Though he had not composed any of these works with that organ in mind, his influence was at work in voicing portions of it to its current state. It seems to be the perfect instrument placed in the best acoustics to hear his music.