Ruth Gippsaus modern

Life

The daughter of a British violinist and a Swiss piano teacher was considered a child prodigy. At the age of four, she performed as a junior pianist at London’s Grotrian Hall. She composed her first published piece at the age of eight. At 15, she passed the entrance examination for the Royal College of Music in London, to which she was admitted in January 1937. There she studied composition with Reginald Owen Morris, Gordon Jacob and Ralph Vaughan Williams, oboe with Léon Goossens and piano with Arthur Alexander and later with Tobias Matthay. She continued her studies at the University of Durham and graduated in 1941. Her compositional breakthrough came in 1942 with the orchestral poem Knight in Armour under Sir Henry Wood at the Last Night of the Proms and finally in 1946 with the 2nd Symphony op. 30.

In addition to her career as a composer, she was constantly active as an instrumental soloist – as a pianist, oboist and English horn soloist. In 1944 she became oboist in the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. In the male-dominated music scene, she repeatedly met with reservations, although contemporaries did describe her as an assertive, feisty musician. In addition, as a composer she openly rejected atonality, twelve-tone music and serialism and with this attitude increasingly came into conflict with the post-war modernism that was setting the tone at the time. In February 1948, at the age of just 27, she completed her dissertation at Durham University, became conductor of the City of Birmingham Choir in the same year and landed another public success in 1949 with the premiere of her Piano Concerto op. 34.

Due to wrist problems, she ended her solo career in 1954 and worked exclusively as a composer and conductor from then on. But she was denied a position as leader of a large orchestra. Conducting, she later wrote in her autobiography, still seemed “unthinkable” for women at that time, was considered “almost indecent”. So in 1955 she founded her own London Repertory Orchestra for young musicians and in 1961 the Chanticleer Orchestra, a professional ensemble that regularly performed works by contemporaries and gave debuts to soloists such as Iona Brown and Julian Lloyd Webber. She also taught in London – as a professor at Trinity College of Music from 1959 to 1966 and at the Royal College of Music from 1967 to 1977, and later as a lecturer at Kingston Polytechnic in 1979.

She wrote five symphonies, which she considered her major work, other orchestral works, concertos, chamber, choral, piano music and songs. Her symphonies in particular show influences from Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst, stylistically she is in the tradition of British late and post-Romanticism with sweeping melodies.

Ruth Dorothy Louisa Gipps (* 20 February 1921 in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex; † 23 February 1999 in Eastbourne, same place) was an English pianist, oboist, conductor, teacher and composer.

Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Gipps