Ed and Juliet Cooke have both been awarded the King's Service Medal in the 2025 New Year's Honours list Photo: LDR/SUPPLIED
A Greytown couple's lifetime contribution to music has been recognised in the New Year's honours list.
Ed and Juliet Cooke have both been awarded the King's Service Medal (KSM) for their services to music.
The awards came as a complete surprise to the couple, who had no idea they had been nominated.
"We have our suspicions, but nobody's hinted," Juliet said.
"We are honoured to receive the award," Ed said.
"Honoured and amazed," said Juliet.
"We have just quietly been plugging away here," he said.
South Wairarapa mayor Dame Fran Wilde congratulated the Cookes.
"The New Year honours list is important for Aotearoa because it recognises local heroes. We can all be immensely proud of the South Wairarapa recipients who have contributed so much to our community," she said.
The Cookes have a well-thumbed stack of meticulously kept scrapbooks documenting the wide range of musical productions both have been involved with over almost 50 years.
"It's been a full-on musical life," Ed said.
He described how it all started, many years ago when both were living in Wellington as young lawyers.
"Both of us played instruments in Wellington. I was playing violin."
"And I was playing flute," Juliet added.
"You got me into it," she said to Ed.
"I started learning the violin when I was five," he said.
Ed is a life-long violin player, with his love of the stringed instruments extending to making them himself. He has a cabinet in their large music room at home, full of violins he has crafted.
"In about 1983 I joined what is now Orchestra Wellington. That's a part time professional orchestra. I was playing violin and viola. I played in that for about 26 years."
Ed Cooke with the cabinet full of violins he personally made. Photo: LDR/SUPPLIED
The orchestra only rehearsed at night, meaning Ed would sometimes drive over Remutaka Hill multiple times a week when performances were under way.
The Cookes moved to Greytown in 1969 and became involved with local musical productions in about 1972. They formalised their contribution when they founded the Greytown Music Group in 1977.
They had arrived in Greytown shortly after getting married and completing an overland trip driving from London to Calcutta (Kolkata) in India.
Through the Greytown Music Group, the Cookes brought a wide range of musical events to the area, including orchestral, instrumental, choral, small-scale operas and children's concerts at various venues.
Since the 1990s they have also hosted a regular series of chamber music concerts at their Greytown home.
Their house has a large room specially designed for performances, complete with a grand piano, seating space for up to 90 people, and accommodation for visiting musicians.
"We designed this room for concerts, and I built it," Ed said.
"That is the performing area," he said, pointing to an area stacked with musical instruments.
"You'll see that there's a hard floor there, because it gives resonance. Carpet of course sucks up sound."
Since 1994, they have organised between six and eight concerts annually at their home, even continuing through the Covid pandemic, when it was safe to do so.
"Before that (1994) we did them either in St Luke's Hall or we did them in the town hall," Juliet said.
"Then we thought instead of putting them on in great big venues where you need a large audience, if we did them in our own home then it would be easier to organise. We had some in our previous house, but it wasn't very suitable. We'd have people sitting in the living room and in the hall, and partly in the dining room. If it was really full we'd have people sitting on the stairs."
Performers from across the region and internationally had included many local musicians and choirs, professionals from Wellington, and emerging artists and music students.
Well known musicians who have regularly featured include the Amici Ensemble and NZTrio.
The Cookes' efforts meant high-quality performances had been regularly staged for local audiences.
They have organised these on a voluntary basis, putting hundreds of hours into promoting, booking and staging them over almost 50 years. The couple have also given administrative support to the South Wairarapa Singers and St Luke's Church choir, and have themselves performed with the Masterton Amateur Theatre Society.
"At the moment we are busy getting next year's programme under way," Juliet said.
"We are still doing them. The musicians generally contact us about a year in advance because they are busy people and some of them are coming from overseas," Ed said.
"They mostly contact us. We are fairly well known now."
LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
