It is with great pleasure that we share this recording of Ruth Gipps’ chamber music featuring the horn. Having first become acquainted with her music via her Horn Concerto op.58 – a work that struck me as a result of its spellbinding virtuosity, orchestral colour and melodic invention – I was shocked to find a fantastic collection of works that had never been commercially recorded and are seldom heard in the concert hall.
The sheer range of instrumentation, style and time elapsed between the first piece of the disc, The Three Billy Goat’s Gruff, Op.27b and the last, her Sonata for Alto Trombone (or Horn) and Piano, Op.80 means that this project offers a real insight into the life and music of the composer. Indeed it is an intensely personal album, not least because her son Lance Baker, a prolific horn player himself, provided the inspiration for much of the horn writing. Her own experience as an oboist is evident in abundance due to the wonderfully idiomatic way that she writes for the winds with each instrument inhabiting its own distinct character, creating the building blocks to the whole of each work.
Ruth Gipps was born on the 20 February 1921. From the age of four when she began astounding audiences with her exceptional musical ability as a child prodigy, she sustained a varied career that lasted over seventy years. To achieve the combination of longevity paired with prominence, especially as a female musician fighting gender prejudice during the twentieth century, is a testament to her remarkable determination and her deep love for music-making. The seed of this resolve and the normality for Gipps for the female of the family to provide was sown with her mother, Hélène. Due to Hélène’s husband’s, Bryan Gipps, professional instability, she set up her own music school which quickly became the family’s reliable source of income. In middle-class English families during this time, such a situation was extremely rare and the Gipps family were somewhat socially outcast as a result. It was, however, this backdrop to her life that provided Ruth Gipps with the necessary character to overcome many obstacles and prejudice that she would face throughout her career. Her attitude towards the regressive compartmentalisation of female musicians can be seen when she expressed her feelings about going to the Royal Academy of Music, “I had protested that I didn’t want to be turned out a neat little College girl in a white frock”.
Gipps’ musical influences include her teacher Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arthur Bliss, Arnold Bax and Frank Bridge. She felt her music to be very typically “English” and very much of the tradition that played on the pastoral, expressive nature of the British countryside. She vehemently rejected the more progressive musical currents developing around her, namely serialism and the avant-garde, and very much remained in the world of tonality and lush orchestration. In the case of a composer such as Sir Malcolm Arnold, a great personal friend to Ruth Gipps, these views did play a role in the relative lack of public performances and support. Ruth Gipps, however, had to face the same lack of support on top of gender prejudice. Within a relatively short space of time, Gipps experienced many “firsts” as a female musician; she was the first female conductor to conduct at the Royal Festival Hall in 1957 as well as the first woman to conduct a work of her own, a BBC broadcast of her Third Symphony in 1969. She was also one of the youngest Doctors of Music in the country, achieving this at the age of 26 and only the second woman to chair the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain after Elizabeth Maconchy.
Throughout her career, Gipps was a pioneer who challenged, head-on, some of the deep-rooted discrimination that had long barred female musicians from the more visible and important positions within music, and indeed wider, life. Perhaps this feeling can best be described by Gipps herself when she said: “I know I am a real composer, perhaps they will only realise it when I am dead!”
It is therefore with great pleasure and gratitude that we can share this album of her works to ensure that her place in British musical history is better appreciated and understood.
– Ben Goldscheider
