7 - The Morning Hymn and Collins’s Ode

Summary

More than any other Cooke projects, those under discussion in this chapter encapsulate the distinctive aims of the Academy, both musical and philosophical. Both display in more advanced form qualities with which, in the course of the previous chapter, we have become accustomed: bold and imaginative orchestration and a highly developed sense of style consciousness. It was due, in part, to such qualities that The Morning Hymn and Collins’s Ode, both of which were published by subscription, came to define Cooke’s career as his most accomplished achievements. Within the context of this study the literary dimension to both makes them especially interesting. In different ways John Milton’s morning hymn of Adam and Eve (from book five of Paradise Lost (lines 153–208)) and William Collins’s ‘The Passions, an Ode for Music’ provided the literary means through which to convey Academy ideas concerning musical universality. In the morning hymn of Adam and Eve Milton’s depiction of a Platonically ordered paradise that would later be jarred by disproportioned sin chimed with Academy thinking on a range of levels. Rather than being an original composition, Cooke’s Morning Hymn was in fact an arrangement of The Hymn of Adam and Eve, a vocal chamber work composed by the founder-academician Johann Ernst Galliard about forty years before. Conceived, in part, as a means to revive the art of a respected composer, Cooke’s Morning Hymn is of interest to us because of (and not despite) its status as an arrangement. Underlying the veritable edifice of orchestration and Baroque textures forged by Cooke, the fundamental essence of Galliard’s learned harmony remained almost entirely intact. It is quite possible that in this simple and learned language academicians perceived a timeless quality that paralleled the ‘unmeditated’ ‘eloquence’ imagined by Milton in the daily orisons sung by Adam and Eve prior to their fall. A similar correlation is discernible in relation to Collins’s ‘The Passions’, where ancient Greek lyric poetry is hailed as an archetypal standard of perfection that surpasses ‘all which charms this laggard age’. In a tour de force of stylistic observation Cooke invokes the archaism of Baroque and Renaissance idioms as a means to represent the ‘just designs’ of ancient Greece.