Ruth Gipps

Life and career

Gipps was born in Bexhill-on-Sea, England in 1921. She was a child prodigy, winning performance competitions in which she was considerably younger than the rest of the field. After performing her first composition at the age of 8 in one of the numerous music festivals she entered, the work was bought by a publishing house for a guinea and a half. Winning a concerto competition with the Hastings Municipal Orchestra began her performance career in earnest.

In 1937 Gipps entered the Royal College of Music, where she studied theory, composition, piano, and eventually oboe, and where several works of hers were first performed. Continuing her studies at Durham University would lead her to teachers Gordon Jacob and Ralph Vaughan Williams, as well as her future husband, clarinettist Robert Baker.

She was an accomplished all-round musician, as a soloist on both oboe and piano as well as a prolific composer. Her repertoire include works such as Arthur Bliss's Piano Concerto and Constant Lambert's The Rio Grande. When she was 33 a hand injury ended her performance career, and she decided to focus her energies on conducting and composition.

A turning point in Gipps' career was the Symphony No. 2, Op. 30, first performed in 1946, which showed the beginnings of her mature style. Gipps' music is marked by a skilful use of instrumental colour, and often shows the influence of Vaughan Williams, rejecting the trends in avant-garde modern music such as serialism and twelve-tone music. She considered her orchestral works, her five symphonies in particular, as her greatest works. Two substantial piano concertos were also produced.

Her early career was affected strongly by discrimination against women in the male-dominated ranks of music (and particularly composition), by professors and judges as well as the world of music criticism. (For example, she was not even considered for the post of conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra where her longtime associate George Weldon vacated it, because the thought of a woman conductor was "indecent".) Because of it she developed a tough personality that many found off-putting, and a fierce determination to prove herself through her work.

She founded the London Repertoire Orchestra in 1955 as an opportunity for young professional musicians to become exposed to a wide range of music, and the Chanticleer Orchestra in 1961, a professional ensemble which included a work by a living composer in each of its programs, often a premiere performance. Later she would take faculty posts at Trinity College, London (1959 to 1966) and the Royal College of Music (1967 to 1977), and then the Kingston Polytechnic.

She died in 1999, aged 78, after suffering the effects of cancer and a stroke.

Selected works