There's never in Cooke's music anything like those inspired and captivating "visionary tangents" one so frequently comes upon in a Brian Symphony. Workmanlike and always pretty reliably dull is how I myself would describe it. Could Symphony No.6 possibly be any different?
I fear not. All too much earnest and well-meaning sub-Hindemith, I fear - and without Hindemith's sometimes engaging qualities...
The issue of Cooke as a pupil of Hindemith and thereby his music ending up as "sub-Hindemith" has much exercised commentators on Cooke.
The late Malcolm MacDonald in his second volume on the symphonies of Havergal Brian wrote a savage paragraph (pages 136-137) in which he contrasted most of Brian's music with "that peculiarly English genre, the 'Cheltenham Symphony', which he described as "formally correct, harmonically fairly innocuous.......with little to offer more exploratory minds". He cited the symphonies of William Alwyn, Lennox Berkeley, Peter Racine Fricker, Alan Rawsthorne, Edmund Rubbra as examples of what he had in mind.
I know from lengthy discussions I had with Malcolm over the years that he deeply regretted writing that paragraph and would have removed it from any second edition of the volume. He told me that it had been both ill-judged and glib, particularly in lumping together composers whose musical styles were different.
Although he did not include Arnold Cooke in that paragraph he might well have done. In fact however he addressed the Hindemith/Cooke relationship in his notes accompanying the Lyrita cd of the Cooke Symphony No.1, Concerto in D for string orchestra and the Ballet Suite "Jabez and the Devil". It is worth quoting what Malcolm wrote:
"If such a career (Cooke's) suggests a degree of academicism and cosmopolitanism, those terms have to be understood in fairly specialised ways. They meet in the fact of Cooke being a pupil of Hindemith: in effect, the German master's only prominent English pupil. This is perhaps the best-known fact about Cooke, and one that has sometimes led to his music being regarded as mere epigonism. Certainly, Hindemith's own, highly recognisable, style left its imprint on Cooke, whose idiom is rich in harmonic and melodic fourths, ready fugal writing and even features of orchestral spacing and chording that one finds abundantly in Hindemith's mature music from 'Mathis der Maler' on-that is to say, the music which he composed significantly
after Cooke had ceased to study with him. But what Cooke reallly imbibed was a broad framework of technique and a sense of direction: a view of music as a living polyphonic entity and a feeling for individual instruments that goes back to the practice of J.S. Bach. Ultimately, therefore, Cooke is a representative of the continuing flowering of the European Baroque traditions; but to this he brings a specifically English lyricism and lucidity that gives his music a character all his own. (Brian (ie Havergal Brian) saw this in 1936, writing that Cooke "appears to think and breathe contrapuntally....And he has tradition in his bones: his working principles are nearer to the Elizabethans and Bach than to Wagner and Strauss"). Cooke's idiom remained comparatively stable; his output may seem to have little relevance to the strivings of the avant-garde of his day, and neither it did-rather, Cooke was devoted to a view of music that is essentially timeless, and has served civilisation well for several centuries. From this point of view he occupies a position in British music not dissimilar to his near-contemporary, the late Edmund Rubbra: a composer whose art is at once un-sensational yet profound."
I make no extravagent claims for the music of Arnold Cooke but nor am I prepared to simply dismiss it as "sub-Hindemith". It will certainly not appeal to everyone. But both Havergal Brian and Malcolm MacDonald recognised something about Cooke's music which does appeal to at least some of his listeners. It is most certainly not "sensational", there is no surface glitter or any (overblown) drama about the music. But I find that it repays listening, that its clarity is appealing in a similar yet different way to that of the music of Edmund Rubbra. It will never be "popular" and I fully accept that others will find little to interest them in it. Yet I do return to Cooke's music with pleasure and I respect the integrity behind it. "Dull" maybe to some....but not to this listener :)
