Lindsay Cooper Digital Archive
About this collection
This collection of musical scores, sketches, notebooks, correspondence, ephemera, and recordings includes materials related to all of Lindsay Cooper's commercially released projects. The collection was assembled in collaboration with the Lindsay Cooper Trust, Adventure Pictures, and the University of the Arts, London, where the physical materials will be housed.
Historical context
Lindsay Cooper (1951-2013) was a composer and improviser who traversed the worlds of free improvisation, jazz, rock, and contemporary composition. Although she was trained in the classical tradition, winning a coveted scholarship to study bassoon performance at the Royal Academy of Music, Cooper eventually departed that realm for popular music and jazz. "The rock world, or certainly the kind of strange twilight zone of the rock world that I was a part of, . . . was kind of a home for outsiders of all kinds, generally," she told an interviewer many years later. "It felt like there was more room to maneuver, as a woman, and that there was more chance for one’s voice as a woman to be heard." She performed in Comus and Ritual Theatre before joining Henry Cow in 1974; to that radical experiment in collective music making Cooper added strong musicianship skills and an improvisational vocabulary that drew on European modernism. Her colleagues in the band urged her to compose music herself, which she began to do in 1977.
That year, she also co-founded (with Maggie Nicols) the Feminist Improvising Group, which existed until 1982. In the 1980s, she was a regular member of the Marx Brothers, News for Babel, David Thomas and the Pedestrians, and the Mike Westbrook Big Band. As a composer, she wrote soundtracks for several figures in the late 1970s feminist film movement in London, including Sally Potter and Sue Clayton. Her later ensemble compositions include Oh Moscow, Sahara Dust, and An Angel on the Bridge.
Using the collection
For more information about the collection, please contact the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at rareref@cornell.edu.
More information
- Collection steward
- Katherine Reagan, Ernest L. Stern '56 Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts
- Metadata creation
- Ben Piekut, Department of Music, Cornell University
- Funding
- Grant Program for Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences grant, awarded to Ben Piekut in 2015.
- Credits
- This collection overview was last reviewed in 2025
- Collection sources