- John Cooper (composer)
John Cooper (around 1570 - 1626), also known as Giovanni Coprario or Coperario, was an English
composer ,viol player andlute nist.He changed his name in the early 17th century. It is often said he did this after a visit to
Italy , though there is no evidence he had been to the country. From 1622 he served and may have taught thePrince of Wales , for whom he continued to work upon his succession as Charles I. His long time patron was Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, for whom he taughtWilliam Lawes .Among Cooper's works are fantasias,
suite s and other works forviol s andviolin s, and two collections ofsong s, "Funeral Teares" (1606) and "Songs of Mourning: Bewailing the Untimely Death of Prince Henry" (1613). He also penned the treatise on composition, "Rules how to Compose".According to Ernst Meyer [cite book|last=Meyer|first=Ernst Hermann|title=English chamber music; the history of a great art|date=1946|isbn=0-306-70037-9|publisher=Lawrence & Wishart|location=London|pages=149] , Cooper was a Londoner who italianized his name as Italian music and musicians became more fashionable, and spent much of his life as a musician in the royal court. Ninety-six fantasias in between three and six voices, most of them in two Oxford and Royal College of Music collections, were known to exist by Cooper (as of 1946). (Meyer also notes that most of Cooper's five and six part fantasias are mainly transcriptions, or imitations, of his madrigals, but that his fantasias for three or four instrumental parts are, formally especially, independently interesting.)
External links
*WIMA|idx=Coprario|name=John Cooper
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