About Thomas and Evon Cooper

Thomas and Evon Cooper
Photo courtesy of Oberlin College

Thomas F. Cooper is a retired partner in the investment firm GMO LLC in Boston. Cooper graduated from Oberlin College in 1978 with a BA in mathematics and went on to the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned an MBA in finance in 1982.

An active and longtime member of the Oberlin community, Cooper served on the Oberlin College Board of Trustees from 2007 to 2017. He and his wife, Evon, have two children, both of whom are musicians. Their son Thomas graduated from Oberlin Conservatory in 2017.

The earliest musical influence on Evon Cooper was her mother Joyce, who would sing to her 10 children almost every day and play recordings of Marian Anderson singing sacred music every Saturday morning.

A native of Kittery, Maine, Evon began piano studies at age 11 with Ruth Price Silva. She went on to study with Rachel Goodwin, artistic director of Ashmont Hill Chamber Music; Stephanie Brown of New York; and Edwin Hymovitz of the New England Conservatory. While living in Santa Monica, California, she began teaching in the studio of Phyllis Metlen.

In 1989, Evon met Dusi Mura, professor emeritus of the Romanian Music Academy, who profoundly changed and reshaped her musical life. “If it were not for Dusi, music would not be as much a part of my life as it is today,” she says. “I continue to search for and study with the elders of the musical world, whose lives and experience can only broaden our own.”

Cooper lives in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and Seal Cove, Maine, with her husband, Tom. They are proud sponsors of the Thomas and Evon Cooper International Competition.

Learn more about Oberlin Conservatory