Phillip is a British Composer and Academic. He is Professor of Composition at the University of Aberdeen.
Latest Posts
It’s been lovely to hear of performances taking place around the country and further afield this summer, mainly of organ works, but other pieces here and there as well. I was pleased to attend the Belgian premieres of three pieces in Brussles in early August, where Lassenne Vocale and conductor Ivan Yohan performed Missa Sancti Albanus (2017), Ubi Caritas (2022) and Ave Verum Corpus (2008) at the national cathedral. Looking ahead I’ll be in London in October for the London premiere of Canticum Mariae Virginis (2021) by the Marian Consort at King’s Place, and a CD launch from Caritas the day after. There are other recordings being released in the autumn and I’ll be in Blackburn in late October for a recording of my complete organ works.
As summer slowly appears in the North of Scotland there are a variety of performances taking place across the country and further afield. It begins with a Scottish premiere for my recent Recessional on O lux Beata Trinitas (2024) in Glasgow (02/06) before a first performance of my Agnus Dei (2023) in Stockholm from Gary Graden and the St Jacobs’ Kammarkör (13/06, which I am greatly looking forward to attending). That is followed promptly by the English premiere of my Gloria (2020) by the Thomas Tallis Society Choir under Eamonn Dougan (15/06).
I recently branched out into new and uncharted territory by providing the music for a video by world-leading coffee expert and YouTuber James Hoffmann. The short extract of music for string quartet is called Nenia and was performed by Dahlia Music on the video. If you are interested in me and my music, please do have a look around my lovely website, and do get in touch via the contact page should you want to know more. You can find recordings on all the usual places such as Spotify and Apple Music.
As winter begins its retreat (slower in Northeast Scotland than other places…) there are a few premieres and performances to look forward to this spring. It begins with the first performance of the string orchestra version of Three Meditations (2023) given by the Kammer Philharmonie Europe in Aberdeenshire on the 20 April. The Three Meditations gets a first full performance of the organ version as part of the LFCCM on the 17 May, with Christus Resurgens also featuring in the festival on the 18th.
As January gives way to February, there are various performances and premieres taking place in the UK and further afield. It begins with the long-awaited premiere of To the End of the Age (2019) by the Choir of Robinson College, Cambridge, conducted by Will Sims on the 30 January. The choir will give a second performance on the 11 February and will record the work for Prima Facie in March. On the 03 February baritone Robert Rice (who was the initial soloist in Noah’s Fire in 2015!) and pianist Will Vann will give the first performance of Full Moon (2023), a short setting of Walter De La Mare for York Late Music.
It was always going to be difficult to follow such a wonderful and enriching year as 2022, but in many ways it was just as good (albeit more challenging in various places) with lots of exciting musical events. The year began with a mini-tour of Scotland with pianist Duncan Honeybourne promoting Transfiguration: The Piano Music of Phillip Cooke, which was released in April. In fact, recordings seemed to be the emphasis of the year with new releases featuring pieces of mine from the Marian Consort and others.
Compositions
‘The Cooke is remarkable…in the background you get a flickering of candles, a halo of light, in the middle is a male choir adoring the Virgin.’
— BBC Radio 3, Record Review
‘Phillip Cooke’s…Ave Maria, mater Dei is enticingly ethereal thanks to a pair of off-stage trebles intensifying its incantatory allure.’
— BBC Music Magazine
‘Cooke is able to compose distinctive settings of familiar liturgical texts with excellent performances and some beautifully sustained pianissimos.’
— The Gramophone
Recent Compositions
Lumen in Umbra is a sustained, atmospheric piece taking two lines of text relating to light and darkness and creating a slowly changing tableau that centres around a high-pitched drone from tuned wine glasses. The light in the piece changes from moment to moment, sometimes bright and coruscating, sometimes wan and distant.
Dialogue takes the ‘Sanctus’ of my 2017 work Missa Sancti Albanus as the source for a spirited exploration of the material and its possibilities on the organ. It largely follows the shape of the original but expands on each section aiming to realise the inherent potential of the music therein. The main deviation is at the end of the work, where the affirming ending of the Sanctus is replaced with a quiet dissipation of the dialogue between voices and musical material.
Silver is an attempt to write simple, melodic songs that are direct and emotive, but stripped of any unnecessary embellishments or ornaments. The three songs are all poems from Walter De La Mare (1873-1956), one of my favourite poets as a composer and are a return to his work for me after setting it earlier with Two De La Mare Songs (2012) and The Song of Shadows (2016). All three songs relate to moonlight, and all include the word ‘silver’ that gives the set its title.
The Two Recessionals continue the exploration of plainchant in my recent work. The first is a short work based on the St Edmund Antiphon and was written for the Patronal Festival at St Edmundsbury Cathedral. It is in a firm ABA form and progressively builds to a huge climax. The second is a little more subdued and takes the plainchant O lux beata Trinitas as its source material. Again, it exhibits a strong ABA form, but here the B material is taken from my own choral setting of the O lux beata Trinitas text (from 2013) and provides a sonic contrast to the prevailing music.
Although I have written many pieces that utilise different choral groupings and spatial effects, I had until this point never written a piece for a tradition antiphonal double choir. Therefore it was nice to have the opportunity and the double challenge of setting this well known text. Although the ghosts of Vaughan Williams and Leighton were never far away, I hope to have created something new and of worth with these wonderful words.
My setting of the Agnus Dei is in a simple tripartite form, with softer modal writing balanced against more strident homophonic material. This balancing is accentuated by two different harmonic spheres which are in a benign conflict, with one ultimately prevailing over the other. Throughout, the organ acts as both onlooker and participant, providing the necessary detachment to create a meaningful setting of these heartfelt words.
Hodie Christus Natus Est is a homage to that particularly ‘rustic’ element in early medieval church music, where elements of the pre-Christian and Christian rites seemed to coexist in a beguiling symbiosis. The work aims to blend a folksy, communal dance element with more traditional choral writing. It is a light-hearted piece, and the score could be used as a blueprint to a more extreme version of what is composed where the ‘pagan’ aspects of the work could be exaggerated to great effect.
Three Meditations takes three diverse plainchant themes and recolours them in my own harmonic language, each seeking to bring out different aspects of these beautiful, transcendent pieces of music. The suite works as a broad ABA, with the outer meditations being more thoughtful and discursive and the middle piece being a more concise exploration of one phrase from ‘Christus Vincit’.