The United States (and indeed the colonies before it) has always been a home to Freemasonry, an all-male fraternity that began among British stonemasons in the late sixteenth century. For the most part, historians do not know the specifics of its origins, other than the formation of its first Grand Lodge in 1717. In many of its forms, it taught its members their rights and responsibilities to society and secured a connection among each other for mutual benefit and counsel. Millions have become Masons in the United States, peaking in 1959 with 4.1 million members. Today, there are about nine hundred thousand living Masons in the United States.

There are two major systems of American Masonic ritual: one is the American or “York” Rite, and the other is the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite. According to the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Masonry aims to be “a continuous advance, by means of the instruction contained in a series of Degrees, toward the Light, by the elevation of the Celestial, the Spiritual, and the Divine, over the Earthly, Sensual, Material, and Human, in the Nature of Man.” In the United States today, the first three degrees areexclusively worked in the rituals of the York system (with the exception of a few lodges in New Orleans and some foreign-language lodges in a few metropolitan areas). Each degree consists of densely symbolic pageantry, where the candidate symbolically emerges from a state of darkness into one of light. The third degree, or Master Mason, represents a state of enlightenment, self-propelled morality, and an acceptance of the responsibilities and labors of life. Once one is a Master Mason in any recognized rite, he can receive the other twenty-nine degrees of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite.

With these degrees and other ceremonies, members of the fraternity have seen fit to include music. Dozens of printed publications of music for the use of American Freemasons appeared over the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Probably the most remarkable of these is Matthew Cooke's hitherto unexamined 1881 set of ceremonial music for the degrees and ceremonies of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, which this paper examines.