Charcoal
S. Gibson Cooke
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Browse piano sheets by S. Gibson Cooke on Zen Virtual Piano. Between 1903 and 1910 S. Gibson Cooke composed a handful of pieces, which G. W. Setchell and C. W. Thompson & Co. published in Boston, Massachusetts. A list of his works, arranged in chronological order, contains seven pieces located so far and does not claim to be complete. A composer traced only through printed music leaves a small body of pieces as the main record of his work. Charcoal, from 1903, was published by G. W. Setchell in Boston. A four-bar introduction opens the piece, whose form is AABCBC; the A strain is in F and the BC strains in B flat. The cover of the original sheet music carries a photograph by J. E. Purdy of four African American children, one of whom is smilingly playing a lute. A clear AABCBC layout and a photograph on the cover show a piece designed to be both played and picked up from a music rack. In the recorder quintet adaptation, the bass is granted the rare privilege of carrying the melody in the first A strain, then hands it to the treble. The C strain is marked by an amusing dialogue between the melody and the bass voices. A melody that passes between the bass and the treble suggests that the writing gave each voice something to do. A later addition to the list of his works was Wooden Shoes, from 1910, published by the White-Smith Music Publishing Co. in Boston, brought to attention in December 2025. Charcoal is a bass-heavy cakewalk, and the names S. G. Cook and S. Gibson Cooke have not definitively been shown to refer to the same person. A question about whether two spellings belong to one composer shows how thin the surviving record of a minor composer can be.
Browse piano sheets by S. Gibson Cooke on Zen Virtual Piano.
Between 1903 and 1910 S. Gibson Cooke composed a handful of pieces, which G. W. Setchell and C. W. Thompson & Co. published in Boston, Massachusetts. A list of his works, arranged in chronological order, contains seven pieces located so far and does not claim to be complete. A composer traced only through printed music leaves a small body of pieces as the main record of his work.
Charcoal, from 1903, was published by G. W. Setchell in Boston. A four-bar introduction opens the piece, whose form is AABCBC; the A strain is in F and the BC strains in B flat. The cover of the original sheet music carries a photograph by J. E. Purdy of four African American children, one of whom is smilingly playing a lute. A clear AABCBC layout and a photograph on the cover show a piece designed to be both played and picked up from a music rack.
In the recorder quintet adaptation, the bass is granted the rare privilege of carrying the melody in the first A strain, then hands it to the treble. The C strain is marked by an amusing dialogue between the melody and the bass voices. A melody that passes between the bass and the treble suggests that the writing gave each voice something to do.
A later addition to the list of his works was Wooden Shoes, from 1910, published by the White-Smith Music Publishing Co. in Boston, brought to attention in December 2025. Charcoal is a bass-heavy cakewalk, and the names S. G. Cook and S. Gibson Cooke have not definitively been shown to refer to the same person. A question about whether two spellings belong to one composer shows how thin the surviving record of a minor composer can be.
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S. Gibson Cooke
Common questions
Only what is printed in his published works is known about S. Gibson Cooke, who wrote a handful of pieces between 1903 and 1910, published in Boston.
Charcoal is a 1903 piece published by G. W. Setchell in Boston, with the form AABCBC and a four-bar introduction.
The original sheet music cover carries a photograph by J. E. Purdy of four African American children, one of whom is smilingly playing a lute.
A list of his works contains seven pieces, among them Wooden Shoes from 1910.