A Gipps Symphony in Seattle: thank you, America!

Some excellent news from America: the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra will give the United States première of Ruth Gipps’ Symphony No. 2 on the 31st March, 2018.  

This news should be music to many ears, including for those for whom Seattle is out of reach by quite some distance.  For Ruth Gipps’ name has been, as the orchestra’s announcement points out, ‘inexplicably ignored in her homeland and abroad’ and this concert is bound to do something to remedy this.   I have written elsewhere (here, here, here and here) about this composer, whose life should be much better known and music far more easily heard.  It might seem remarkable that a work written in 1945 (and performed in Britain shortly afterwards) is only now being heard in the United States, but in fact this second symphony has received rather more attention than most of her music.  There are four other symphonies, all without a modern recording, for instance.  The scarceness of recordings of her work can be told from my attempt at a discography here.

That Ruth Gipps should remain so neglected ‘in her homeland’ is particularly lamentable.  A thoroughly interesting and necessary article by the musicologist Simon Brackenborough has recently provided a chronicle of her life and a review of Jill Halstead’s biography.  In the early part of Gipps’ career she found the wind against her on the grounds of her womanhood.  From the 1960s onwards, however, her career faced a different obstacle: her traditional, tonal idiom (‘a direct follow-on from Vaughan Williams, Bliss and Walton’) was suddenly at odds with the tide of modernism and atonalism.  To this tide she refused to give in for the rest of her life, and her uncompromising position and strong character perhaps did not, in her own lifetime, help her cause.

I sense that Brackenborough puts Ruth Gipps’ neglect down to the former prejudice; that it is as a woman composer that she has suffered most.  This may have been true for the first part of her career, but my impression is that she has paid more heftily for her tonalism and her traditionalism; the anti-traditionalist prejudice, in other words, was the more severe (and she is not the only composer to have been side-lined in this way).  In any case, the main thing for us is to re-invigorate her reputation; there is no excuse now for depriving ourselves of her unsung, unheard, unbroadcast music.

It is very heartening that, from across the Atlantic, America has caught sight of a composer shamefully overlooked in her own country and has, with characteristic gumption, decided to do something about it.  We ought to follow suit, with the help of British orchestras, the BBC and the record companies, and the impetus of some approaching anniversaries.  There is still plenty of time to organise, for example, a proper recording of her other symphonies to mark the twentieth anniversary of her death (2019), and, say, a performance of her piano concerto at the Proms for the centenary of her birth in 2021.